Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

Doing something because all the big companies do it also leads to cargo cult mentality. You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system. “Oh Google used a really annoying captcha on that page, I better do that as Google knows best”.

Have some confidence and don’t assume that other bigger companies are smarter than you are, think about what you can improve. Most of what Google have to offer, they bought from smaller companies that had the confidence to do just this.

One problem we have on our service (genenetwork.org) is stylistic consistency across many different pages and forms. Even one programmer can invent five different ways to close a window or pop-up. Table styles can be annoying diverse.

A style guide is the obvious solution but ……

The article writer is talking about if many companies do it there’s probably a reason for it, with UX and as an example things like email buttons, etc.

A strong but unspoken rule when anyone gives you advice is (and I feel like not everyone knows this anymore so this bears repeating): use your critical thinking skills to decide if the advice is applicable and appropriate for your situation.

There may be a reason for it, but best to understand what that reason is before applying the same approach.

The most obvious change that happens after hiring a graphic designer is that the app/website stops looking like shit, and adopts a pleasing color palette and set of fonts. There is real value in this, and the median graphic designer definitely chooses these better than the median engineer.

But UX is a broader umbrella which encompasses interaction flows at the large end, and single function widgets at the small end. For whatever reason, the median human is very bad at predicting the overall UX of a system. It's rare that you have someone who can look at a spec for a system they've never seen before and accurately predict what will be easy to use vs. hard to use. Graphic designers are not meaningfully better at this vs. engineers either, it's just uncommon.

For that reason, UX is usually developed by copying existing solutions, or using the guess and check method to try out novel things. It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation. Contrast this to backend system design where entire categories of error can be predicted and avoided through basic principles and reasoning.

Where this can go wrong is when you think that you can hire for something which is actually rare in the talent pool. If you have a graphic designer or engineer who has demonstrated an excellent gut feel for UX, then that's incredibly valuable. But you can't wait around to find such a person, or pretend that you will be able to hire someone like that.