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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

422 points by tb8424 2y ago

dave_sid 2y ago
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.
- jbs789 2y ago
  Yeah. I like to think about why something is the way it is. If they are trying to accomplish something similar to me, then copy away. But if their circumstances and objectives are different…
- yapyap 2y ago
  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.
  - dave_sid 2y ago
    There may be a reason for it, but best to understand what that reason is before applying the same approach.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  My favorite cargo cult thing today is that when you’re logged out you can’t find the login link anymore, just “Sign up”.
  - dunham 2y ago
    Yeah this one is really frustrating.
  - Ensorceled 2y ago
    Especially when the signup form almost looks like a login form username and single password field ... then you get an error "An account with this email already exists" and STILL NO LOGIN LINK.
  - blendo 2y ago
    Text entry fields that don’t look like text entry fields.
- mekoka 2y ago
  Understanding exactly why before applying is not bad advice. But it takes time and can quickly become impractical when you're already pressed for it (like say, a small team startup already lacking a designer). In many cases it's better to just copy the closest thing to what you aspire to become, even if you don't quite yet grasp the details of why they originally made those decisions. All that can be figured out later for your own situation.
- danenania 2y ago
  Big companies aren’t usually that good at design (with some notable exceptions like Apple) because they don’t really have to be. They don’t need to impress anyone or prove their credibility, and they almost by definition have a product that people have a strong need or desire for, otherwise they wouldn’t be a big company. When you have that, it probably doesn’t make much difference if you add some extra friction to your sign up flows or your UI is a bit janky. When you’re the new guy who no one has heard of: that’s when you need design. You need to catch people’s attention, win their trust, and make it as easy as possible for them to get to the aha moment, because any minor inconvenience can be an excuse to close the tab of yet another random app and move on. All that to say, startups often lean heavily on design to stand out from the crowd, so if I’m looking for good design and UX to emulate, I look for startups that are still small but gaining in popularity, whether bootstrapped or seed/series A. That’s typically where you find the best practices being implemented to a high bar. Once they get too successful, complacency and other priorities start to kick in and they are no longer the best examples to follow.
- mamcx 2y ago
  > Doing something because all the big companies I learned this after many attempts early in my career to copy what the MS conferences were talking about. The thing is that what a big company do can be good (in fact MS was fine back then!) but are problems for big companies, and have issues that you don't need to copy, worse: copy without knowing. For example, microservices, horizontal scalability, massive telemetry to cover all, etc are problems yo don't want to get. What it works much better, is to copy a small/medium player that is very well regarded. Like for example, think in panic, vlc, etc. Small/medium players that have good reputation need make more effort than big players, and are on top of the good things by necessity.
- asoneth 2y ago
  > You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system. As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions: First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law. Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence. Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?
levlaz 2y ago
This is good practical advice
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  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 ……
  - theendisney 2y ago
    I turn this into a design one time. Everything had a different Color scheme too. It was oddly usable with the colors setting the mindset. It depends a lot who the audience is.
stared 2y ago
I recommend focusing on general design principles and mindset. - Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman - once you understand what makes a good (or bad) door handle, you'll start seeing design patterns everywhere. - Read "The Art of Game Design" by Jesse Schell. It discusses how to create engaging experiences, and games are particularly unforgiving. While people might tolerate an annoying tax app because they have to use it, they'll immediately abandon a game that's even slightly too frustrating, confusing, or boring.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  Be warned: reading "The Design of Everyday Things" will make you incredibly frustrated at hotel doors, light switches in your house, kitchen appliances, and many other daily interactions with objects - once you realize that best practices to make them usable have existed for 40 years and designers still can't be arsed to make a restroom faucet you can understand on the first try.
- tb8424 2y ago
  I echo on the "The Design of Everyday Things" making you perpetually dissatisfied. Thanks for the second rec, I'll give it a go
alphazard 2y ago
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.
- staplers 2y ago
  You just perfectly laid out why it's simultaneously difficult to find a new job in UX while getting paid well once you do find a job (if you're good). Those who understand what good UX is and how it manifests itself, value it highly, while many (even in tech) still consider it pixel-pushing and "pretty colors".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- caseyohara 2y ago
  > It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation. This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. It wasn’t that long ago that the same person designing an interface was also responsible for developing it. Or that design and development were one and the same, part of the same process. These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code. Some even have an allergic response to the very idea of coding. That’s fine, but naturally it means there’s a wide gap in understanding between design and implementation. This leads to the UI equivalent of the dreaded Architecture Astronaut[1]—so disconnected from the reality of how software works and is built that they design absurd interfaces that look great in Figma but fail miserably when put into practice. In my experience, the closer you are to the implementation—and by this I mean the more involved you are in the actual coding—the tighter the feedback loop on the quality of the user experience. It affords the sanding and polishing required for a great UI with a great experience. Some of the very best interfaces that I’ve seen and used, both in terms of quality user experience and visual design, were designed and built by those rare engineers that happen to have outstanding intuition and taste for great design. The worst UIs I’ve used are from designers that don’t code handed over to engineers with no design taste. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut
breadwinner 2y ago
Here's the best tool for finding usability issues: https://aistudio.google.com/live https://aistudio.google.com/live You share the screen with Gemini, and tell it (using your voice) what you are trying to do. Gemini will look at your UI and try to figure out how to accomplish the task, then tell you (using its voice) what to click. If Gemini can't figure it out you have usability issues. Now you know what to fix!
- potatoman22 2y ago
  I'll have to use this, thanks for sharing. Isn't it problematic since Gemini isn't representative of a real user, though?
  - willsmith72 2y ago
    Definitely a huge trap to replace real user insights with anything else. But this looks like a nice level 0 of testing
  - CaffeineLD50 2y ago
    A real user might be worse. A program is less flexible (maybe) and more consistent (definitely) than a meat space CBL. The goal is not realism but a kind of ready made "you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster" threshold. Discovering edge cases with dodgy human users has its value, but that's a different value.
    - gffrd 2y ago
      A real user will be worse … but that’s kinda the point. The most valuable thing you learn in usability/research is not if your experience works, but the way it’ll be misinterpreted, abused, and bent to do things it wasn’t designed to.
      - cpeterso 2y ago
        Enter "Drunk User Testing". Host a happy hour event and give some buzzed users some scenarios to test. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/an-open-bar-for-beta-testers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/an-open-bar-fo... https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/ https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/
dustbunny 2y ago
Where do startups typically get their branding done? I'm assuming the VCs usually refer their cohort to the same group of branding agencies? Who are the quick and dirty ones? Do they ever hire direct freelancers? Possibly to save money?
- perardi 2y ago
  I’m a UX designer and developer at a healthcare fintech startup. We do all our B2C communication design and product UX/UI design in-house with a small team. But for our B2B site…I can’t name names…one of our investors did refer us to a well-established design agency who does small and medium-scale enterprise branding and marketing. And they did great work. So yes, there are a few ringer VC design agencies out there.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  We got our branding guide done through a 99Designs contest. Over the last few years there has been an incredible increase in how many design entries you get per dollar on that platform. It was definitely worth it, and then we redesigned the website, and now the app based on that branding guide. 10/10 would recommend.
osigurdson 2y ago
Tailwind + daisyui can get you pretty far. My thinking is, if your start up takes off a real designer can remove all of the daisyui stuff and re-design with only tailwind.
codr7 2y ago
Can't remember last time I worked with a dedicated designer, someone who actually knew anything worth knowing about UX. Devops seem to be going down the same path, it's like they expect coders to do it while the code is compiling. Next up seems to be coders. And I get it, hiring professionals is very inconvenient.
cryptozeus 2y ago
Great try this and see how far it goes ! None of this matters if u don’t find pmf and u don’t need a designer for this. Totally disagree with this. Article started great but then niched out too small with login flows. No startup is reinventing this.
atomicnature 2y ago
Design must flow from customer demand/desires. And 90% of design is just "correctly assigning priority" to elements and actions. If you know what is important (and what is less important) you use... - white space (more whitespacce = more important) - dimension (larger = more important) - contrast (higher = more distinct) - color (brighter = more important) ... to practically implement the decided priority. How to validate you have implemented priority correctly? Just ask a few people what do they see first, second, third, etc in a page. If you designed it right - their eyes will see things exactly in the order you expected them to. In short - "design is guiding user's senses in the most prioritized manner to the user in achieving their goals" In our startup - we call this the "PNDCC" system (priority, negative space, dimension, contrast, color). There are a few more tricks to make it even more powerful - but as I said - just getting these right puts you in the top 10%
Tepix 2y ago
As a quick alternative, why not use a freelancer?
- conductr 2y ago
  Dribbble is a great resource IME
- tb8424 2y ago
  OP here - A good freelancer gets you a long way. What I found is that during the development process, people hit edge cases and have questions... doing a lot of the discovery and thinking yourself helps you answer those questions faster. Alternatively, if you find a freelancer within your budget that can stick with you until the feature is out of the door is a great win.
hliyan 2y ago
To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If you want to change settings, you open the settings dialog (Tools > Settings), and it as tabs like "General", "Fonts and colors" etc. Most people were a lot less computer literate back then, but they were able to use most applications with little help. If they really needed help, the help system was built into the application. The goal back then was to have the user get the work done as efficiently as possible, in effect, minimizing the time the user pends on the application. Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down.
- 998244353 2y ago
  > This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.
  - hliyan 2y ago
    Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's day (e.g. they have to wade through this table multiple times per hour, while on the phone with a customer), they will immediately realize the feel good factor of white spaces, pastel colours and high contrast icons are very low priority.
jmathai 2y ago
I have a different approach. I look for a theme on Theme Forrest which has most of the layouts and components I think I'll need and I lean on those VERY heavily. And for logos I use icons from Font Awesome or Bootstrap. Most of the time the project doesn't take off and when it does I can hire a designer. Some examples of both a theme based app using an icon as the logo :). [1] https://getpreppy.app https://getpreppy.app [2] https://withlattice.com https://withlattice.com
- jboogie77 1y ago
  As a non designer this is the same approach I take
sebastiennight 2y ago
From experience I will say that you can hire a UX designer even if bootstrapped and low on cash, and that it's a very valuable investment. Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice. Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to flesh out into a clickable prototype, then workshop again, then final prototype, can come out within a $5k-$10k budget. That's 100% worth cutting $5k from your front-end dev budget, and will definitely translate into way more than $5k in user retention gains within the first year. This is what we did before coding the MVP, and we're doing it again now (at Seed stage) before shipping our biggest upgrade to the product.
- jboogie77 1y ago
  Can you share the firm you worked with?
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    Sure. Email is in my profile, shoot me a message and I'll put you in touch
h4ny 2y ago
I like the article because it's very similar to the workflow that I developed while working on my first project after quitting my last job. One thing that I would add to "Be Explicit About Your Goal" is that it should be about both your goal and the user's goal. Otherwise it's very easy to hit blind spots that both you, another person, or AI will miss because of bias. A small related rant is that many large companies with a dedicated team that works on design system don't seem to actually care much about UX. It feels demoralizing because sometimes it feels like many people are just using UX to push some other agenda.
karhuton 2y ago
Here’s some typical reasons why a startup can fail: 1) it failed to communicate and market it’s product 2) it’s product didn’t fit the user’s needs 3) it’s technology strategy made development too expensive 4) it’s product technical quality was too low 5) it’s product did not look appealing to potential new users Developers are responsible for 3 and 4, sales and marketing for 1 and finally designers for 2 and 5. With competent developers you can start a startup and make sure 3 and 4 never come to pass, but lack of good product designer will eventually kill it. Here I use the broader sense of user-centered designer, which includes: - research - testing - prototyping - validation - UI/UX design - visual design - … The first four being the most important for a product market fit. This is especially important for B2B products, because there understanding the needs of the business and their processes is key to making sure the product fits the user’s day-to-day work but the businesses’ future needs as well. It may not be common, but you can and should use extended UCD research methods on the customer business processes itself instead of relying on PMs and sales just asking customer’s what they want. (This is often called Business Design or Service Design around here.)
- noduerme 2y ago
  My most successful client (a company I have ownership in, now) has another slot besides marketing, design and code. That is our point person for filtering, testing and verifying user experience issues. Putting a single point person in charge of that onslaught of emails, who fully understands the software, and having them run a full time bug reporting/feature request channel, I think, is indispensible. They advocate on behalf of users but also know when the requests are silly or something is user error. They know whether an issue is mainly design or mainly code. Having them in place and engaging daily with users means we can filter out 90% of the noise in the signal. But it needs to be coupled with open-mindedness to customer feedback from the earliest iterations. Whatever requests or issues come through that person must be addressed. That person should understand what they can and cannot promise customers, what is crucial vs what is fluff, and how to prioritize those requests. Her official role is "General Manager" but in fact she was promoted from a customer service role and the position was created for her because she was so good at spending extra time off-hours writing detailed, reproducible bug reports on behalf of customers who had experienced some issue. Reproducing and screenshotting the flow and the issues herself. This person is a 10x force multiplier by virtue of being a power-user of the software who also interacts with customers and management daily, although she has no code or design experience.
mediumsmart 2y ago
It takes a designing engineer to startup a touch minefield that User X practically cannot survive without triggering a popup.
kskjfjfkdkska 2y ago
> Common patterns—like password strength indicators—usually exist for good reasons. NIST does not recommend password strength indicators. Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password
- looperhacks 2y ago
  The page does not recommend them directly, but also doesn't discourage them. In fact, it requires "guidance", which IMO might as well be a strength indicator. > Verifiers SHALL offer guidance to the subscriber to assist the user in choosing a strong password
- erinaceousjones 2y ago
  Reading through their guidance they don't really mention anything about password strength indicators being a good or bad idea. Sure, they list out a set of rules to verify passwords by and state no OTHER arbitrary rules should be included. But that doesn't prevent you from calculating password strength based on the rules they specify ie. minimum length and complexity. But I get that "strength" is a poor metric. It shouldn't allow "weak" passwords. It should be binary - pass or fail. The nicest thing about strength indicators - and I reckon this is why they are copied a lot - is that they are usually real-time feedback to the user with a nice red/orange/green invalid/weak/strong indicator that updates as the user types. The best ones even go as far as show you the list of rules your password is failing to meet, again updating as you type. Much much nicer than the server-side validation form submission loop imo. So, remove the middle concept of "weak but allowed" passwords from the strength indicator widget, I think then you get good UX that meets NIST recommendations..?
- Ensorceled 2y ago
  > Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. The number of sites that go out of their way to prevent password managers, well any "paste" mechanisms, is still annoying but are becoming fewer.
  - 2y ago
seanwilson 2y ago
> If every product in your space does something the same way, there’s probably a good reason. If one company does something different, ask yourself: Is this intentional, or just a mistake? To add to this, often you can come up with a lower friction UI idea for your specific use case (e.g. that requires less clicks) if you think hard about it, but if you stray too far from what people are used to seeing and interacting with it creates its own kind of friction, and you'll get feedback like "I found this unintuitive" or "it took me a moment to figure out how to use it". So you need to balance using familiar patterns vs new ideas. E.g. maybe you think you can improve on the Amazon checkout experience for your own site, but by doing something different, you're tossing out the familiarity bonus you get for free. Similarly, by preferring checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and text fields, over custom widgets, you get so much for free like user familiarity in reading the current state, and knowing how to change the state. "Unintuitive" can often mean "I'm not used to this pattern" even if it might be a good pattern once people get used to it.
ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
If you're not hiring a designer, someone else ends up doing their job instead. Someone, whose pay is probably 5-10x higher. You don't even need them on the team permanently, commission a design or a review of the existing one. Perhaps I'm biased. Graphic designers are dirt cheap. From our perspective, UX crowd is full of underqualified people looking for easy tech money. I can see how it can make hiring far more complicated.
- nextts 2y ago
  5-10x? Are you sure?
  - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
    I might be exaggerating, but I know how much I and my coder friends earn. Western companies hire much more engineers and adjacents than designers. Consequently, for designers, the income is much closer to a local median. As my perspective is one of a person currently living outside the US or western Europe, I see a huge disparity between pay grades.
    - nextts 2y ago
      For example I reckon in my country say I'm on 150k TC as a senior eng and a senior designer may be on 75k. Using USD conversion. So 2x may be normal. 10x would make me probably in the top 100 highest paid devs in the country except those who got lucky with share comp or own a chunk of the biz.
      - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
        Don't want to be overly specific, but consider difference between 10-25 and 30-130. Remotely hired UXers get more competitive compensation, so my original estimation is wrong. But, there's far less of them than SWEs so they don't tend to raise the local pay mean as much.
dmje 2y ago
Like... sorry to be That Guy, but maybe just employ / have a team with the right people from the start? If a designer had a tech startup with no engineers, we'd all be (rightly) sniffy about it. Imagine this post the other way round: "Hey, designers, here's everything you need to know about engineering and devops and coding in ONE PAGE!". Think about the HN response to this - it'd go down like a ton of hot shit. And rightly so. I used to work at an educational tech company and they would - without even breaking into a sweat - take one of their engineering team and put them in charge of marketing. Same rule applies - imagine it the other way round, a marketing person with no knowledge of engineering setting the strategy for engineering. (And yes, I know it happens, but when it does we all moan on about it, no...?!) Long and short: a startup / product without a UX person or designer in it right from the start is likely to be a clusterfuck.
- nextts 2y ago
  An early startup starts with jack of all trades. If you needed the full team that even a $10m company would have you are probably not a typical early startup. The reality is marketing is a skill most people can fudge because they have done it. They have gotten jobs, dates and haggled for a free beer before. Programming is only something freaks do so the average marketer won't code. And if they do the average coding marketer won't make resilient 99% uptime code without subtle bugs. Hate to circlejerk but man .... programming to produce robust, correct, reliable systems that do something useful is hard. Despite what the AI bros are hot taking on X these days. Have you ever noticed that some tradespeople do their own books but bookkeepers won't come and fix your AC unit. Anyway rant over :)
devops000 2y ago
Practical UI from Tailwind is a very good guide for this.
MikeBenemorhbc 2y ago
[dead]
darkstarsys 2y ago
Or, just hire a good UX designer. Seriously, nobody would think about "practical coding for startups surviving without a programmer." () Well, with AI coding... who knows...
- rchaud 2y ago
  ...or designers could just learn some HTML/CSS/JS instead of using half-measures like Figma that need a FE developer handoff step. See how that works?
CharlieDigital 2y ago
That was a lot of words to say "Jakob's Law"[0] "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." "1. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar." "2. By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models." "3. When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time." [0] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/ https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/
- rchaud 2y ago
  There's an enormous difference between HCI and UX. HCI relates to computer usability for general use cases. A CAD program is there to help you get tasks done, not waste your time, so must follow general HCI principles. UX is watered down HCI that takes business considerations into account. Think about how Microsoft jams a Copilot button into everything, all the way down to the blinking cursor. That doesn't help users (and it is not removable), but it helps Microsoft claim it added 100+ million Copilot users. The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. HCI considerations would posit that going back to the algo-free, chronological version would help users "get what they want" faster. But helping users complete tasks faster hurts how much FB can charge advertisers for your attention.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    > The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. This is not really relevant to the discussion of the content of the post: "do what others are doing, do what your users are already used to doing" Whether Facebook's content is good or bad is not really relevant; the UX of FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost every other social media app is remarkably similar in layout and function.
    - rchaud 2y ago
rchaud 2y ago
We need a part 2 for this, the stage after you've picked up a bag of VC money: 1) Add an AI chatbot to every screen, add "AI-powered" to the homepage headline 2) On the pricing page, title the top tier as "Call our Sales Team" 3) Make buttons with undesirable actions hard to see and click ("Cancel Plan")
ChicagoDave 2y ago
My startup is a non-standard domain targeting the iPad. Our need for a designer with functional knowledge and creativity is very high. I’ve muddled through with iterative designs of my own, but this challenge has delayed our beta. Designers don’t work for equity where nearly every other kind of talent will. This is a real blocker for startups.
- rojcyk 2y ago
  [dead]
whartung 2y ago
I’m hardly a UI, well, anything. But I want to point out the application that is used at the Quest Diagnostics lab. The one they use to enter your demographic, lab info, etc. The daily driver for their legion of phlebotomists, at least here in So Cal. One word. It’s fast. Oh man is it fast. Bunches of fields, bunches of dialog boxes, looks like a Windows back office application. Prints all of the vial tracking labels. These people are trained and know what is coming when. But, it seems to be in a web browser tab. Perhaps they’re running a RDP tab to a nearby server running some Windows based desktop app, but, again, this app flies. I’ve not seen modern app this fast. I’d love to know how they are pulling it off.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
eh. For who want's to get deeper/broader view, there's a "bible" on UX.. called "Usability engineering" by Jakob Nielsen ~1993 [0]. IMO The first 2 (two) chapters are, like, mandatory - the what and the why. The rest, is mostly details - how. (but it has even how to organise random-street-user-tests and what to look for in those, etc) Although, looking at recent 10 years of (software-or-car) UXs, i feel noone reads these anymore :/ Sadly. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Usability-Engineering-Interactive-Technologies-Nielsen/dp/0125184069/ http://www.amazon.com/Usability-Engineering-Interactive-Tech... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_Engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_Engineering
nbzso 2y ago
AI is not designing good? How? The tech bros hate artistic minded people. They hate design because it is the engine of growth and change. Tech bros like sameness and libraries. They love "design patterns". But change is inevitable and design is not in the colors, fonts, whitespace. Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional. And for this there is no Tailwind, React, AI solution, or design patterns template. PS: I am a designer and frontend engineer with 20+ years practice with my own company and plethora of delivered solutions for my clients. The divide between engineers and designers is the most persistent thing that I have seen in my life. It is beyond my understanding.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional Having worked around design and UX people for a long time, I'd say there are plenty of design people who are practical and don't talk about emotional tasks.
  - nbzso 2y ago
    So they are missing a lot. And this is the core of the problem. Emotions are practical. They are a part of human experience. You cannot approach design process as a framework documentation or recipe. Moving with current trends of double diamonds or whatever tools are fashionable. You have to be a generalist first and tap not only to the tech stack or quantitive approach, but also into a psychology and culture. >Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. https://shorturl.at/EKhRu https://shorturl.at/EKhRu
StevenNunez 2y ago
Were em-dashes this popular before LLMs?
majoe 2y ago
1qq
cytocync 2y ago
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cmgriffing 2y ago
> Use AI to spot blind spots > Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s a quick sanity check—not perfect, but better than guessing. > Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than guessing. Some prompts to try: Was this an intentional joke?
rglover 2y ago
Highly recommend Ryan Singer's (original Basecamp designer) work. His blog [1] is filled with great stuff. In particular this [2] post has given me over a decade of value re: designing UI and UX flows. [1] https://ryansinger.co https://ryansinger.co [2] https://www.ryansinger.co/thinking-of-interfaces-as-sets-of-jobs/ https://www.ryansinger.co/thinking-of-interfaces-as-sets-of-...
presentation 2y ago
Surviving without a designer? More life thriving without one. Honestly I think many startups at an early stage don’t need designers at all and they just want to look trendy (which admittedly is critical for consumer-focused companies that live and die on becoming trendy, but that’s not what I do). The best designer for an early stage startup these days is someone with not awful visual/UX taste (no need for a specialist or a visual prodigy; most teams I’ve met have at least somebody who isn’t hopeless in this respect); but with a strong understanding of their target users and what they’re familiar with, so you can just copy prior art as is relevant. Much better than taking a designer who knows nothing about the space and needing to transfer your learned experience into their brain somehow. Most startups aren’t doing anything truly novel from a UI standpoint so why reinvent the wheel? Designers become more useful when you stop having strong communication and trust in your team since it just got too big for that.
artur_makly 2y ago
And If you want to automatically audit track changes in your Competitor website’s UI/UX and page architecture - checkout: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com
LIzzyytujghf 2y ago
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422 points by tb8424 2y ago

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.

jbs789 2y ago
Yeah. I like to think about why something is the way it is. If they are trying to accomplish something similar to me, then copy away. But if their circumstances and objectives are different…
yapyap 2y ago
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.
- dave_sid 2y ago
  There may be a reason for it, but best to understand what that reason is before applying the same approach.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
nsxwolf 2y ago
My favorite cargo cult thing today is that when you’re logged out you can’t find the login link anymore, just “Sign up”.
- dunham 2y ago
  Yeah this one is really frustrating.
- Ensorceled 2y ago
  Especially when the signup form almost looks like a login form username and single password field ... then you get an error "An account with this email already exists" and STILL NO LOGIN LINK.
- blendo 2y ago
  Text entry fields that don’t look like text entry fields.
mekoka 2y ago
Understanding exactly why before applying is not bad advice. But it takes time and can quickly become impractical when you're already pressed for it (like say, a small team startup already lacking a designer). In many cases it's better to just copy the closest thing to what you aspire to become, even if you don't quite yet grasp the details of why they originally made those decisions. All that can be figured out later for your own situation.
danenania 2y ago
Big companies aren’t usually that good at design (with some notable exceptions like Apple) because they don’t really have to be. They don’t need to impress anyone or prove their credibility, and they almost by definition have a product that people have a strong need or desire for, otherwise they wouldn’t be a big company. When you have that, it probably doesn’t make much difference if you add some extra friction to your sign up flows or your UI is a bit janky. When you’re the new guy who no one has heard of: that’s when you need design. You need to catch people’s attention, win their trust, and make it as easy as possible for them to get to the aha moment, because any minor inconvenience can be an excuse to close the tab of yet another random app and move on. All that to say, startups often lean heavily on design to stand out from the crowd, so if I’m looking for good design and UX to emulate, I look for startups that are still small but gaining in popularity, whether bootstrapped or seed/series A. That’s typically where you find the best practices being implemented to a high bar. Once they get too successful, complacency and other priorities start to kick in and they are no longer the best examples to follow.
mamcx 2y ago
> Doing something because all the big companies I learned this after many attempts early in my career to copy what the MS conferences were talking about. The thing is that what a big company do can be good (in fact MS was fine back then!) but are problems for big companies, and have issues that you don't need to copy, worse: copy without knowing. For example, microservices, horizontal scalability, massive telemetry to cover all, etc are problems yo don't want to get. What it works much better, is to copy a small/medium player that is very well regarded. Like for example, think in panic, vlc, etc. Small/medium players that have good reputation need make more effort than big players, and are on top of the good things by necessity.
asoneth 2y ago
> You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system. As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions: First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law. Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence. Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?

levlaz 2y ago

This is good practical advice

robwwilliams 2y ago
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 ……
- theendisney 2y ago
  I turn this into a design one time. Everything had a different Color scheme too. It was oddly usable with the colors setting the mindset. It depends a lot who the audience is.

stared 2y ago

I recommend focusing on general design principles and mindset. - Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman - once you understand what makes a good (or bad) door handle, you'll start seeing design patterns everywhere. - Read "The Art of Game Design" by Jesse Schell. It discusses how to create engaging experiences, and games are particularly unforgiving. While people might tolerate an annoying tax app because they have to use it, they'll immediately abandon a game that's even slightly too frustrating, confusing, or boring.

sebastiennight 2y ago
Be warned: reading "The Design of Everyday Things" will make you incredibly frustrated at hotel doors, light switches in your house, kitchen appliances, and many other daily interactions with objects - once you realize that best practices to make them usable have existed for 40 years and designers still can't be arsed to make a restroom faucet you can understand on the first try.
tb8424 2y ago
I echo on the "The Design of Everyday Things" making you perpetually dissatisfied. Thanks for the second rec, I'll give it a go

alphazard 2y ago

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.

staplers 2y ago
You just perfectly laid out why it's simultaneously difficult to find a new job in UX while getting paid well once you do find a job (if you're good). Those who understand what good UX is and how it manifests itself, value it highly, while many (even in tech) still consider it pixel-pushing and "pretty colors".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
caseyohara 2y ago
> It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation. This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. It wasn’t that long ago that the same person designing an interface was also responsible for developing it. Or that design and development were one and the same, part of the same process. These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code. Some even have an allergic response to the very idea of coding. That’s fine, but naturally it means there’s a wide gap in understanding between design and implementation. This leads to the UI equivalent of the dreaded Architecture Astronaut[1]—so disconnected from the reality of how software works and is built that they design absurd interfaces that look great in Figma but fail miserably when put into practice. In my experience, the closer you are to the implementation—and by this I mean the more involved you are in the actual coding—the tighter the feedback loop on the quality of the user experience. It affords the sanding and polishing required for a great UI with a great experience. Some of the very best interfaces that I’ve seen and used, both in terms of quality user experience and visual design, were designed and built by those rare engineers that happen to have outstanding intuition and taste for great design. The worst UIs I’ve used are from designers that don’t code handed over to engineers with no design taste. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

breadwinner 2y ago

Here's the best tool for finding usability issues: https://aistudio.google.com/live https://aistudio.google.com/live You share the screen with Gemini, and tell it (using your voice) what you are trying to do. Gemini will look at your UI and try to figure out how to accomplish the task, then tell you (using its voice) what to click. If Gemini can't figure it out you have usability issues. Now you know what to fix!

potatoman22 2y ago
I'll have to use this, thanks for sharing. Isn't it problematic since Gemini isn't representative of a real user, though?
- willsmith72 2y ago
  Definitely a huge trap to replace real user insights with anything else. But this looks like a nice level 0 of testing
- CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  A real user might be worse. A program is less flexible (maybe) and more consistent (definitely) than a meat space CBL. The goal is not realism but a kind of ready made "you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster" threshold. Discovering edge cases with dodgy human users has its value, but that's a different value.
  - gffrd 2y ago
    A real user will be worse … but that’s kinda the point. The most valuable thing you learn in usability/research is not if your experience works, but the way it’ll be misinterpreted, abused, and bent to do things it wasn’t designed to.
    - cpeterso 2y ago
      Enter "Drunk User Testing". Host a happy hour event and give some buzzed users some scenarios to test. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/an-open-bar-for-beta-testers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/an-open-bar-fo... https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/ https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/

dustbunny 2y ago

Where do startups typically get their branding done? I'm assuming the VCs usually refer their cohort to the same group of branding agencies? Who are the quick and dirty ones? Do they ever hire direct freelancers? Possibly to save money?

perardi 2y ago
I’m a UX designer and developer at a healthcare fintech startup. We do all our B2C communication design and product UX/UI design in-house with a small team. But for our B2B site…I can’t name names…one of our investors did refer us to a well-established design agency who does small and medium-scale enterprise branding and marketing. And they did great work. So yes, there are a few ringer VC design agencies out there.
sebastiennight 2y ago
We got our branding guide done through a 99Designs contest. Over the last few years there has been an incredible increase in how many design entries you get per dollar on that platform. It was definitely worth it, and then we redesigned the website, and now the app based on that branding guide. 10/10 would recommend.

osigurdson 2y ago

Tailwind + daisyui can get you pretty far. My thinking is, if your start up takes off a real designer can remove all of the daisyui stuff and re-design with only tailwind.

codr7 2y ago

Can't remember last time I worked with a dedicated designer, someone who actually knew anything worth knowing about UX. Devops seem to be going down the same path, it's like they expect coders to do it while the code is compiling. Next up seems to be coders. And I get it, hiring professionals is very inconvenient.

cryptozeus 2y ago

Great try this and see how far it goes ! None of this matters if u don’t find pmf and u don’t need a designer for this. Totally disagree with this. Article started great but then niched out too small with login flows. No startup is reinventing this.

atomicnature 2y ago

Design must flow from customer demand/desires. And 90% of design is just "correctly assigning priority" to elements and actions. If you know what is important (and what is less important) you use... - white space (more whitespacce = more important) - dimension (larger = more important) - contrast (higher = more distinct) - color (brighter = more important) ... to practically implement the decided priority. How to validate you have implemented priority correctly? Just ask a few people what do they see first, second, third, etc in a page. If you designed it right - their eyes will see things exactly in the order you expected them to. In short - "design is guiding user's senses in the most prioritized manner to the user in achieving their goals" In our startup - we call this the "PNDCC" system (priority, negative space, dimension, contrast, color). There are a few more tricks to make it even more powerful - but as I said - just getting these right puts you in the top 10%

Tepix 2y ago

As a quick alternative, why not use a freelancer?

conductr 2y ago
Dribbble is a great resource IME
tb8424 2y ago
OP here - A good freelancer gets you a long way. What I found is that during the development process, people hit edge cases and have questions... doing a lot of the discovery and thinking yourself helps you answer those questions faster. Alternatively, if you find a freelancer within your budget that can stick with you until the feature is out of the door is a great win.

hliyan 2y ago

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If you want to change settings, you open the settings dialog (Tools > Settings), and it as tabs like "General", "Fonts and colors" etc. Most people were a lot less computer literate back then, but they were able to use most applications with little help. If they really needed help, the help system was built into the application. The goal back then was to have the user get the work done as efficiently as possible, in effect, minimizing the time the user pends on the application. Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down.

998244353 2y ago
> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.
- hliyan 2y ago
  Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's day (e.g. they have to wade through this table multiple times per hour, while on the phone with a customer), they will immediately realize the feel good factor of white spaces, pastel colours and high contrast icons are very low priority.

jmathai 2y ago

I have a different approach. I look for a theme on Theme Forrest which has most of the layouts and components I think I'll need and I lean on those VERY heavily. And for logos I use icons from Font Awesome or Bootstrap. Most of the time the project doesn't take off and when it does I can hire a designer. Some examples of both a theme based app using an icon as the logo :). [1] https://getpreppy.app https://getpreppy.app [2] https://withlattice.com https://withlattice.com

jboogie77 1y ago
As a non designer this is the same approach I take

sebastiennight 2y ago

From experience I will say that you can hire a UX designer even if bootstrapped and low on cash, and that it's a very valuable investment. Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice. Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to flesh out into a clickable prototype, then workshop again, then final prototype, can come out within a $5k-$10k budget. That's 100% worth cutting $5k from your front-end dev budget, and will definitely translate into way more than $5k in user retention gains within the first year. This is what we did before coding the MVP, and we're doing it again now (at Seed stage) before shipping our biggest upgrade to the product.

jboogie77 1y ago
Can you share the firm you worked with?
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  Sure. Email is in my profile, shoot me a message and I'll put you in touch

h4ny 2y ago

I like the article because it's very similar to the workflow that I developed while working on my first project after quitting my last job. One thing that I would add to "Be Explicit About Your Goal" is that it should be about both your goal and the user's goal. Otherwise it's very easy to hit blind spots that both you, another person, or AI will miss because of bias. A small related rant is that many large companies with a dedicated team that works on design system don't seem to actually care much about UX. It feels demoralizing because sometimes it feels like many people are just using UX to push some other agenda.

karhuton 2y ago

Here’s some typical reasons why a startup can fail: 1) it failed to communicate and market it’s product 2) it’s product didn’t fit the user’s needs 3) it’s technology strategy made development too expensive 4) it’s product technical quality was too low 5) it’s product did not look appealing to potential new users Developers are responsible for 3 and 4, sales and marketing for 1 and finally designers for 2 and 5. With competent developers you can start a startup and make sure 3 and 4 never come to pass, but lack of good product designer will eventually kill it. Here I use the broader sense of user-centered designer, which includes: - research - testing - prototyping - validation - UI/UX design - visual design - … The first four being the most important for a product market fit. This is especially important for B2B products, because there understanding the needs of the business and their processes is key to making sure the product fits the user’s day-to-day work but the businesses’ future needs as well. It may not be common, but you can and should use extended UCD research methods on the customer business processes itself instead of relying on PMs and sales just asking customer’s what they want. (This is often called Business Design or Service Design around here.)

noduerme 2y ago
My most successful client (a company I have ownership in, now) has another slot besides marketing, design and code. That is our point person for filtering, testing and verifying user experience issues. Putting a single point person in charge of that onslaught of emails, who fully understands the software, and having them run a full time bug reporting/feature request channel, I think, is indispensible. They advocate on behalf of users but also know when the requests are silly or something is user error. They know whether an issue is mainly design or mainly code. Having them in place and engaging daily with users means we can filter out 90% of the noise in the signal. But it needs to be coupled with open-mindedness to customer feedback from the earliest iterations. Whatever requests or issues come through that person must be addressed. That person should understand what they can and cannot promise customers, what is crucial vs what is fluff, and how to prioritize those requests. Her official role is "General Manager" but in fact she was promoted from a customer service role and the position was created for her because she was so good at spending extra time off-hours writing detailed, reproducible bug reports on behalf of customers who had experienced some issue. Reproducing and screenshotting the flow and the issues herself. This person is a 10x force multiplier by virtue of being a power-user of the software who also interacts with customers and management daily, although she has no code or design experience.

mediumsmart 2y ago

It takes a designing engineer to startup a touch minefield that User X practically cannot survive without triggering a popup.

kskjfjfkdkska 2y ago

> Common patterns—like password strength indicators—usually exist for good reasons. NIST does not recommend password strength indicators. Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password

looperhacks 2y ago
The page does not recommend them directly, but also doesn't discourage them. In fact, it requires "guidance", which IMO might as well be a strength indicator. > Verifiers SHALL offer guidance to the subscriber to assist the user in choosing a strong password
erinaceousjones 2y ago
Reading through their guidance they don't really mention anything about password strength indicators being a good or bad idea. Sure, they list out a set of rules to verify passwords by and state no OTHER arbitrary rules should be included. But that doesn't prevent you from calculating password strength based on the rules they specify ie. minimum length and complexity. But I get that "strength" is a poor metric. It shouldn't allow "weak" passwords. It should be binary - pass or fail. The nicest thing about strength indicators - and I reckon this is why they are copied a lot - is that they are usually real-time feedback to the user with a nice red/orange/green invalid/weak/strong indicator that updates as the user types. The best ones even go as far as show you the list of rules your password is failing to meet, again updating as you type. Much much nicer than the server-side validation form submission loop imo. So, remove the middle concept of "weak but allowed" passwords from the strength indicator widget, I think then you get good UX that meets NIST recommendations..?
Ensorceled 2y ago
> Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. The number of sites that go out of their way to prevent password managers, well any "paste" mechanisms, is still annoying but are becoming fewer.
- 2y ago

seanwilson 2y ago

> If every product in your space does something the same way, there’s probably a good reason. If one company does something different, ask yourself: Is this intentional, or just a mistake? To add to this, often you can come up with a lower friction UI idea for your specific use case (e.g. that requires less clicks) if you think hard about it, but if you stray too far from what people are used to seeing and interacting with it creates its own kind of friction, and you'll get feedback like "I found this unintuitive" or "it took me a moment to figure out how to use it". So you need to balance using familiar patterns vs new ideas. E.g. maybe you think you can improve on the Amazon checkout experience for your own site, but by doing something different, you're tossing out the familiarity bonus you get for free. Similarly, by preferring checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and text fields, over custom widgets, you get so much for free like user familiarity in reading the current state, and knowing how to change the state. "Unintuitive" can often mean "I'm not used to this pattern" even if it might be a good pattern once people get used to it.

ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago

If you're not hiring a designer, someone else ends up doing their job instead. Someone, whose pay is probably 5-10x higher. You don't even need them on the team permanently, commission a design or a review of the existing one. Perhaps I'm biased. Graphic designers are dirt cheap. From our perspective, UX crowd is full of underqualified people looking for easy tech money. I can see how it can make hiring far more complicated.

nextts 2y ago
5-10x? Are you sure?
- ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
  I might be exaggerating, but I know how much I and my coder friends earn. Western companies hire much more engineers and adjacents than designers. Consequently, for designers, the income is much closer to a local median. As my perspective is one of a person currently living outside the US or western Europe, I see a huge disparity between pay grades.
  - nextts 2y ago
    For example I reckon in my country say I'm on 150k TC as a senior eng and a senior designer may be on 75k. Using USD conversion. So 2x may be normal. 10x would make me probably in the top 100 highest paid devs in the country except those who got lucky with share comp or own a chunk of the biz.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
      Don't want to be overly specific, but consider difference between 10-25 and 30-130. Remotely hired UXers get more competitive compensation, so my original estimation is wrong. But, there's far less of them than SWEs so they don't tend to raise the local pay mean as much.

dmje 2y ago

Like... sorry to be That Guy, but maybe just employ / have a team with the right people from the start? If a designer had a tech startup with no engineers, we'd all be (rightly) sniffy about it. Imagine this post the other way round: "Hey, designers, here's everything you need to know about engineering and devops and coding in ONE PAGE!". Think about the HN response to this - it'd go down like a ton of hot shit. And rightly so. I used to work at an educational tech company and they would - without even breaking into a sweat - take one of their engineering team and put them in charge of marketing. Same rule applies - imagine it the other way round, a marketing person with no knowledge of engineering setting the strategy for engineering. (And yes, I know it happens, but when it does we all moan on about it, no...?!) Long and short: a startup / product without a UX person or designer in it right from the start is likely to be a clusterfuck.

nextts 2y ago
An early startup starts with jack of all trades. If you needed the full team that even a $10m company would have you are probably not a typical early startup. The reality is marketing is a skill most people can fudge because they have done it. They have gotten jobs, dates and haggled for a free beer before. Programming is only something freaks do so the average marketer won't code. And if they do the average coding marketer won't make resilient 99% uptime code without subtle bugs. Hate to circlejerk but man .... programming to produce robust, correct, reliable systems that do something useful is hard. Despite what the AI bros are hot taking on X these days. Have you ever noticed that some tradespeople do their own books but bookkeepers won't come and fix your AC unit. Anyway rant over :)

devops000 2y ago

Practical UI from Tailwind is a very good guide for this.

MikeBenemorhbc 2y ago

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darkstarsys 2y ago

Or, just hire a good UX designer. Seriously, nobody would think about "practical coding for startups surviving without a programmer." () Well, with AI coding... who knows...

rchaud 2y ago
...or designers could just learn some HTML/CSS/JS instead of using half-measures like Figma that need a FE developer handoff step. See how that works?

CharlieDigital 2y ago

That was a lot of words to say "Jakob's Law"[0] "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." "1. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar." "2. By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models." "3. When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time." [0] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/ https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

rchaud 2y ago
There's an enormous difference between HCI and UX. HCI relates to computer usability for general use cases. A CAD program is there to help you get tasks done, not waste your time, so must follow general HCI principles. UX is watered down HCI that takes business considerations into account. Think about how Microsoft jams a Copilot button into everything, all the way down to the blinking cursor. That doesn't help users (and it is not removable), but it helps Microsoft claim it added 100+ million Copilot users. The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. HCI considerations would posit that going back to the algo-free, chronological version would help users "get what they want" faster. But helping users complete tasks faster hurts how much FB can charge advertisers for your attention.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. This is not really relevant to the discussion of the content of the post: "do what others are doing, do what your users are already used to doing" Whether Facebook's content is good or bad is not really relevant; the UX of FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost every other social media app is remarkably similar in layout and function.
  - rchaud 2y ago

rchaud 2y ago

We need a part 2 for this, the stage after you've picked up a bag of VC money: 1) Add an AI chatbot to every screen, add "AI-powered" to the homepage headline 2) On the pricing page, title the top tier as "Call our Sales Team" 3) Make buttons with undesirable actions hard to see and click ("Cancel Plan")

ChicagoDave 2y ago

My startup is a non-standard domain targeting the iPad. Our need for a designer with functional knowledge and creativity is very high. I’ve muddled through with iterative designs of my own, but this challenge has delayed our beta. Designers don’t work for equity where nearly every other kind of talent will. This is a real blocker for startups.

rojcyk 2y ago
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whartung 2y ago

I’m hardly a UI, well, anything. But I want to point out the application that is used at the Quest Diagnostics lab. The one they use to enter your demographic, lab info, etc. The daily driver for their legion of phlebotomists, at least here in So Cal. One word. It’s fast. Oh man is it fast. Bunches of fields, bunches of dialog boxes, looks like a Windows back office application. Prints all of the vial tracking labels. These people are trained and know what is coming when. But, it seems to be in a web browser tab. Perhaps they’re running a RDP tab to a nearby server running some Windows based desktop app, but, again, this app flies. I’ve not seen modern app this fast. I’d love to know how they are pulling it off.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

eh. For who want's to get deeper/broader view, there's a "bible" on UX.. called "Usability engineering" by Jakob Nielsen ~1993 [0]. IMO The first 2 (two) chapters are, like, mandatory - the what and the why. The rest, is mostly details - how. (but it has even how to organise random-street-user-tests and what to look for in those, etc) Although, looking at recent 10 years of (software-or-car) UXs, i feel noone reads these anymore :/ Sadly. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Usability-Engineering-Interactive-Technologies-Nielsen/dp/0125184069/ http://www.amazon.com/Usability-Engineering-Interactive-Tech... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_Engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_Engineering

nbzso 2y ago

AI is not designing good? How? The tech bros hate artistic minded people. They hate design because it is the engine of growth and change. Tech bros like sameness and libraries. They love "design patterns". But change is inevitable and design is not in the colors, fonts, whitespace. Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional. And for this there is no Tailwind, React, AI solution, or design patterns template. PS: I am a designer and frontend engineer with 20+ years practice with my own company and plethora of delivered solutions for my clients. The divide between engineers and designers is the most persistent thing that I have seen in my life. It is beyond my understanding.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional Having worked around design and UX people for a long time, I'd say there are plenty of design people who are practical and don't talk about emotional tasks.
- nbzso 2y ago
  So they are missing a lot. And this is the core of the problem. Emotions are practical. They are a part of human experience. You cannot approach design process as a framework documentation or recipe. Moving with current trends of double diamonds or whatever tools are fashionable. You have to be a generalist first and tap not only to the tech stack or quantitive approach, but also into a psychology and culture. >Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. https://shorturl.at/EKhRu https://shorturl.at/EKhRu

StevenNunez 2y ago

Were em-dashes this popular before LLMs?

majoe 2y ago

1qq

cytocync 2y ago

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cmgriffing 2y ago

> Use AI to spot blind spots > Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s a quick sanity check—not perfect, but better than guessing. > Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than guessing. Some prompts to try: Was this an intentional joke?

rglover 2y ago

Highly recommend Ryan Singer's (original Basecamp designer) work. His blog [1] is filled with great stuff. In particular this [2] post has given me over a decade of value re: designing UI and UX flows. [1] https://ryansinger.co https://ryansinger.co [2] https://www.ryansinger.co/thinking-of-interfaces-as-sets-of-jobs/ https://www.ryansinger.co/thinking-of-interfaces-as-sets-of-...

presentation 2y ago

Surviving without a designer? More life thriving without one. Honestly I think many startups at an early stage don’t need designers at all and they just want to look trendy (which admittedly is critical for consumer-focused companies that live and die on becoming trendy, but that’s not what I do). The best designer for an early stage startup these days is someone with not awful visual/UX taste (no need for a specialist or a visual prodigy; most teams I’ve met have at least somebody who isn’t hopeless in this respect); but with a strong understanding of their target users and what they’re familiar with, so you can just copy prior art as is relevant. Much better than taking a designer who knows nothing about the space and needing to transfer your learned experience into their brain somehow. Most startups aren’t doing anything truly novel from a UI standpoint so why reinvent the wheel? Designers become more useful when you stop having strong communication and trust in your team since it just got too big for that.

artur_makly 2y ago

And If you want to automatically audit track changes in your Competitor website’s UI/UX and page architecture - checkout: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com

LIzzyytujghf 2y ago

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