Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
189 comments
·March 12, 2025hliyan
rich_sasha
One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards.
Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life - no refreshed new looks or skins or dark modes (well, it's always in dark mode) or rewrites in Svelte or whatever. That's basically because the power user is essentially the only user that matters. They know all the arcane key bindings and weird abbreviations, and Bloomberg knows better than to mess with it.
I hated it at first but grew to love the stability of it.
dchest
Speaking as someone who has never used it but has spent some time researching it, the Bloomberg Terminal constantly undergoes UI changes, though not in a dramatic way. It's obvious if you look at screenshots throughout the time (it even had some gradients!). It has had its own "rewrites in Svelte", transitioning from a custom renderer to HTML/JavaScript.
But you're correct - they don't mess with it, they slightly and mostly invisibly improve it, and someone who learned it in 80s could use it without problems today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqehwCWKVVw
https://www.bloomberg.com/ux/2017/11/10/relaunching-launchpa...
https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/how-bloomberg-term...
https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/designing-the-term...
asoneth
> the Bloomberg Terminal constantly undergoes UI changes, though not in a dramatic way
This is correct. (Source: I worked on Bloomberg's UI change management policies.)
Despite dismissive comments from design industry folks and more modern-looking competitors, the folks who ran Bloomberg's UX team maintained a focus on customer needs and user research. There are even a few cases where function teams went back and re-implemented old "bugs" after a rewrite (e.g. in the MSG editor) because users had adapted to the old behavior. (Thankfully nothing as bad as spacebar heating https://xkcd.com/1172 though)
SecretDreams
> and someone who learned it in 80s could use it without problems today.
That's the true dream. Like all of those old movies where the hacker or fighter pilot has to use some foreign, alien or futuristic tech and they just use it!
MetaWhirledPeas
I just watched a few minutes of someone using it, and I have a few observations.
- Uniform menus everywhere
- Every menu has an ID visible in the corner. Imagine how easy troubleshooting would be if you could just say, I'm on menu 4388 and I'm not getting the result I expect.
- Every selection has a number. Presumably you can type this in rather than mouse over to it?
- Every page has keywords you can string together for instant searching
- No transition animations
This is nice to see: a tool for getting things done, not for nudging the user in a desired direction to satisfy marketing goals.
myth2018
My parents work for a company using an old system using numeric IDs for menus and screens. It's currently a web app, but it seems to share a good deal of code (and a great deal of philosophy) with the previous, older version, a TUI apparently built in Pascal.
I can confirm that those numeric IDs help A LOT in troubleshooting and documentation. And not only that: those IDs are frequently and naturally used by the users themselves when communicating between them. Needless to say, they also use the IDs to navigate the system, only touching the menus when they have to use some infrequent function.
I always mention this "case study" to UX folks who insist to dumb users down with childish interfaces.
asoneth
> no ... rewrites in Svelte or whatever
The vast majority of the terminal interface has been rewritten more than once, but the UX framework team does a great job mimicking the prior look and feel each time. Though if you know what to look for you can spot functions that haven't been updated in a while, and even a handful that have remained unchanged since the beginning.
> no refreshed new looks or skins
Basically right, though Launchpad was completely new and PDFU COLORS <GO> provides color themes intended for folks with color-vision deficiency.
gedy
Yeah this is a good reminder that technology rewrites do NOT need to rethink the UI. I've always favored updating the technology first to enable faster incremental UI changes afterwards.
I love my UX friends but they almost universally hop on tech updates to rethink everything, and then it muddies up the customer feedback on the rewrite. Was this a tech bug introduced? Or an annoying UX change? etc.
throwaway24124
Well, it depends on the audience of your software. Bloomberg Terminal is awesome, but has a steep learning curve. Most people who learn to use it are learning it with the specific intention of finding a job where they are paid to know how to use the Bloomberg Terminal. I agree, the UI is awesome for that, but if your startup is an app to find a dog walker or something, the vast majority of your potential users are going to be turned off by the Bloomberg Terminal interface.
edelhans
Yeah but even if your app is the new Uber for dogs the goal should still be to let users accomplish their task as fast as possible and not some app engagement metric.
eviks
> you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life
True power users could customize to remove the quirks and also be set for life, but at a better level of ergonomics. Or they could even use the best customization from one of those gray beards who cared about ergonomics more ever back in the day
And none of of the cheap criticisms of skins would change it since skins for power users are optional
dacryn
You fail to grasp the value of bloomberg terminal.
The UI has in fact, evolved, but it has never changed. For example, higher DPI screen sizes, the UI is now instrumented in a web browser, no longer the the old TUI. It is fast, it is familiar, it's the same, but it evolves, if that makes sense.
If you know how to use it in company A in decade 1980, you know how to use it in company B today. That doesn't mean it hasn't improved or improved ergonomics.
It's a beautiful piece of engineering that got the basics right. Power users add whatever they need to it, modular, but it's not like Vim or VSCode where you are basically useless without a large effort when moving into a blank new updated version, let alone things like the ribbon design vs the old design in office.
Suppafly
I worked for an insurance company for a while that was pushing their agents away from 'green screen' terminals to webapps that did most of the same stuff, the agents hated it because they had every step necessary to do quotes and such memorized and were way slower trying to navigate menus on the web.
nextts
I think to me that would be the appeal of Vim. VSCode implicitly promises this with its plugin approach. Using Ctrl Shift P for years is the sort of thing I like. One less thing in my way.
masfuerte
I'd never noticed that ctrl-shift-p was a thing. In gvim ctrl-p moves up a line but ctrl-shift-p seems to do page up. Do you know if this is documented anywhere?
msy
It's not just about 'UX backward compatibility', it's the epitome of an expert user interface. If you don't know what you're doing it's near unusable but once you've mastered it the speed at which you can operate is incomparable to 'normal' software. It's also one of the few examples of this outside of software engineering tools.
998244353
> 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
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.
arkh
You forgot one awesome feature of those SPA: once your user finally manage to get some muscle memory in, you can push a new UI redesign so get them back to square one. Because you have to give work to do to your frontend people.
dylan604
> Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user
So many upvotes for this. While the provided thing might technically work, if it is clunky for the users, the users will not like it. I understand those making the thing will probably never use the thing. The problem comes when those making do not listen to those using. There have been many times where I've made the thing, but then when I went to use the thing I wanted nasty things to happen to the person that made it. I've been in some very contentious UAT rounds where I was the user and the devs refused to listen to valid complaints.
whstl
Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much.
At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped.
Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells.
Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10.
The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.
rojcyk
I worked on a couple of internal frameworks as a designer and thats exactly what happened to our frameworks.
Throwing away all the research and optimization out of the window for one unnecessary “we really need this” scenario.
andrepd
> Visually appealing, sure.
It's not even.
conductr
At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact they have to remove their hand from keyboard to mouse pretty frequently is the biggest productivity loss, then drop down boxes and forms that aren’t very keyboard friendly and the page render times are incredibly slow in comparison.
I myself made this complaint a few times. When I was using medical erp once then again using a banking system. Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal. Hell, in the banking one I completely automated my job by writing an excel macro and sendkey commands to the terminal, then I sold it to the bank for a small sum after I quit (they asked me how I accomplished so much after realizing 3 people couldn’t handle my workload)
arkh
> Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal.
Nowadays even the login screen in Windows can not manage it anymore. Gotta wait for some animation and whatever it needs coming back from sleep mode before it starts registering keys.
nostrademons
You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find it.
conductr
While possible, the uptake/usage is very low once it requires lots of CTRL / ALT / CMD button sequences. Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard.
I'm in a role of Finance / Excel "super user" in my profession. There's a subculture of keyboard shortcut enthusiasts, but generally everyone is using their mouse a lot. I myself have about 20 that I use and rarely incorporate a new one into the mix, it has to be an action I perform repetitively for me to care enough to memorize seek out and learn the shortcut. I find navigating the ribbon usually requires too many keypresses and I instead have a custom quick access bar that I put everything I want access to so I don't have to toggle differing ribbons, I still use my mouse even though I know I could use my keyboard. It doesn't feel easier
hinkley
But it’s true that the menu systems often made the accelerations and afterthought, and regularly used functions for some people had no shortcuts and no way to set them.
I still think a World of Warcraft style action bar, user configurable and multilayered, would work just fine for power users. You can put anything you want in position eight but most people have the same things set for 1-5.
DidYaWipe
That's funny. I automated a lot of my tech-writing job in the '90s with expansive macros written in WordBasic. What a great product.
loeber
I agree with this, so much so that I wrote a long essay about this
Modern web design has completely lost the design idioms that so much thought went into during the desktop software wave of the 90s and early 2000s. This is a great loss for usability.
troupo
Not just web design. Design, period. Here's what Apple is producing these days: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633
dlivingston
That is most likely what their iOS & macOS design language will be going forward: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesig...
With that said, the design sins it commits are pretty standard in the age of minimalist/flat UI. It looks pretty similar to Apple's current design language, just with some stylistic tweaks.
Not defending it, as some of those design decisions drive me up a wall. Is this text a button or just an input field? Can I click this image or is it static? Which directions can I swipe? Does this grey text mean it's a disabled button or placeholder text on an input field?
I am not nostalgic for the blocky, grey, in-your-face design of classic UIs like Windows 98. But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design.
seanwilson
> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern.
Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.
UIs have got incrementally better in lots of ways that really add up that I don't see people mention e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided, help is integrated into the UI where you need it, inline editing vs modals, options to edit an object appear next to it (locality) rather than you having to hunt in a menu, less technical jargon where appropriate, better onboarding, better undo/redo/autosave (which avoids clunky confirmation modals).
wvbdmp
> Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.
I dunno… all of these issues are still very prevalent. The one that probably disappeared the most is the right click context menu, which I would argue was actually great for discoverability. Personally, I lament its demise. Of course context menus still exist, but it used to be a pretty reliable universal convention.
seanwilson
Right-click is fine for power users and professional tools if there isn't a better alternative, but right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything.
Whenever I help non-tech friends with software problems, I'm always reminded most people don't feel comfortable hunting around for functionality and for sure don't try right-clicking things on the chance it might do something.
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hulitu
> UIs have got incrementally better ... e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided
This is like saying, that cutting someone's foot, makes him a better man.
Today UIs are crap. Why is the scrollbar so small and hidden ? What is all the unusable space in Office's 365 title bar ? Why gray on gray ?
psadri
The root cause is that web browsers were designed for document delivery but are used for building application UIs. The browsers don’t offer a standard set of common application UI components, so every team builds their own leading to inconsistency and half baked implementations.
In contrast, when you build a native app, developers can draw on a standard set of OS provided UI widgets.
nostrademons
I think the root cause goes deeper than that, and has to do with economic incentives. Up through the 90s, the predominant business model was you sell a product, people use it to get work done, if they're happy they tell their friends and you sell more product. Starting in the 00s, the business model became you give a service away for free, get people hooked, make them so dependent upon it that they can't look away, and then either jack up prices to extort as much money from them as possible, sell advertisements so that other people can do the same, or sell their personal data so that other people can target them with sales pitches. Actually getting any work done became secondary to making the transaction happen. This applies just as much to enterprise software as consumer software, because the purchaser of enterprise software is usually some IT department, purchasing department, or executive who doesn't have to actually use the software, and they will probably move on to the next company before the consequences of their purchasing decision being useless become visible.
We are reaping the consequences of that now, where lots of transactions are happening that don't actually make anyone happy or productive.
But you can see how that would filter down into UI design. When your incentive is to make people happy and productive, you spend time studying how people actually use the product, and then optimize that so they can use the product more efficiently. When your incentive is to turn people into mindless consumers that keep coming back for more ads, you spend time studying what sort of content holds the user's attention, and then optimize that so you can work as many ads into the stream as possible without them turning away. When your incentive is to sell enterprise software, you spend time studying what sales pitches will get the budget-holder to open their company's wallets, and then optimize the sales funnel to the extent of actual product usability. Even if your users hate you, they don't get to decide whether they keep using you.
su8898
Developers always had the flexibility to create custom UI elements/colors etc even in native apps (albeit not as easily as using CSS). Even in SPAs, most UI elements follow the same style or pattern more or less (bootstrap/tailwind etc). It's the entire UI design itself that's not user friendly for enterprise/business apps (excessive padding, comically large UI elements etc).
hliyan
Wouldn't say it's the root cause, but it is a major cause. I have some experience developing desktop applications using Visual C++ / MFC in the early 2000's. I still prefer that development experience to modern React/Redux SPA development.
Kwpolska
OS widget libraries aren't always big enough to solve all problems. On the web, there are many frameworks that provide widgets for typical use cases.
But even if you have a library with hundreds of widgets, you can still make a terrible UX if you don't understand good design, and many programmers don't.
guappa
In my experience most designers don't know what UX is. They think their job is to make it look pretty. If it needs 3x more clicks to do the same thing as before so be it.
dmix
There's more consistency in UIs on the web than desktop IMO
People have less power on the web so it has more limitations, even if it lacks a number of consistent UI components baked in.Desktop apps are notorious for getting fancy. Even simple control apps from random headphones/keyboards/music gear/etc all want to reinvent the settings page and make it 'sleek' instead of usable.
DidYaWipe
And controls were demarcated as controls, not disguised as plan text or a decoration. You could tell if a function was activated by looking at the outline of the button; if the "bevel" shadowing went inward, the button was depressed and the function was on.
"Flat" design is simply derelict design. Fortunately there has been some backlash and we might be returning to legitimate GUIs.
Suppafly
>To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern.
I've done different sorts of tech support since grade school and people always ask me how I got so 'good at computers', I they never believe that actually reading the menus is 90% of it and that once you learn the common ways programs are arranged and some common shortcuts you pretty much know how to use all of them.
alphazard
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.
caseyohara
> 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.
noduerme
This is a really great comment.
To me, "UX" still feels like a relatively new term. In its modern incarnation it's not what I do, although by intent it's actually my career speciality. As a category now, it feels like a poor compromise between true design and true code/userflow. I believe the existing tools try to bridge a gap that has existed since the earliest days of web development between the designers and the code monkeys.
I'm fortunate as a solo coder to have a very tight feedback loop with my own graphic design, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I started writing code making text-based games as a kid in the 80s, then became obsessed with graphic design, went to art school, worked as a designer at a traditional ad agency which had no coders... and because of my code competency became the go-to person for making web. And later apps. So I still currently art direct designers and also write the majority of code for clients. This lets me understand the flow first and then unify the design in ways that aren't prefab or obvious, but ensure user safety and flow in a beautiful way.
I think the tools now (Figma, yes, but also the reliance on standard use cases of frameworks like React) are very limiting. They shoehorn both designers and coders into an uncomfortable middle ground that's not too different from the arguments that used to erupt between designers and the couple of devs at my ad agency in the 90s - we want it to look like THIS vs. Do you know how impossible that is? So everyone settles on a crappy solution instead of sitting down and thinking about how to make something new and better for the situation.
Honestly, Flash was so great because it allowed both sides of a team to use both sides of their brain at the same time, and cross-pollinate design with code in a way that seems hopelessly lost now, at least for normal business apps outside of game development.
There aren't so many cases where business-y or banking software needs to be beautiful, but it could at least be thought through. I look at my banks' apps and sites and slap my face at the obvious miscommunication and sheer carelessness that must have taken place between management, design, and code to produce these monstrosities.
But would I want to be on the open market, looking for new clients with my cross-disciplinary background as a "UX" person? No. What they need aren't UX people. They need art directors who can at least write some code, or (even more rare) coders who have formal design training.
re-thc
> These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code.
Same for some "architects". They just draw up random system designs that don't work for THEIR environment.
> This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized.
The worse part of it all is it's not the software engineer's fault either (most of the time). HR, managers and others haven't improved over time and instead are enforcing non-software values on the engineers. It's all about ticking boxes. You get classified as a Go REST API backend engineer and somehow you can't touch React because that's not your thing.
noduerme
Yet everything remotely serious built with React has gotten worse and worse... and apparently the project managers who rely in it and the coders who are used to its obviously major flaws can't think their way out of the wet paper bag that it's become, and see clear to writing a component from scratch. REST, sockets, whatever; the issue isn't how you send data over the wire, push it pull it or when. The issue is: Is what you're doing appropriate for the situation? My bank has started using something like React to show live stock prices in trashy grids. Guess what: That is a horrible idea because it's always wrong in some part of the screen. Let me reload if I have to, or else engineer something actually realtime.
They use these technologies because the recent grads who know how to use them are cheap and replaceable and the assumption is that the tech is uniform enough to make the coders hot-swappable. The product is enshittified garbage, but the managers don't care.
hombre_fatal
I think the reason UX moved into its own realm (like "UX designer") is to create the processes to get actual UX expertise.
Without deliberate UX expertise, you're on the hook for having UI implementers (software engineers) who happen to be good at UX, and that's not a great way to go about ensuring that you have good UX because you're reliant on serendipity.
And of course once UX becomes its own prong that you're trying to optimize for, the simplest thing to do is create UX positions in your company. Which is much simpler than figuring out how to hire software engineers with UX expertise or good intuitions.
Just consider how few hiring processes involve someone clicking into your github projects and evaluating them just to see what kind of code you write. That's much harder than doing a canned leetcode or canned questions interview.
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danielmarkbruce
This isn't just a software thing... all of corporate america has compartmentalized and while the results in churning out widgets are actually very good, the results in practically everything else are bad bad bad. Even in finance, Warren Buffett will preach that investing is not a team sport - you need all the details in one head.
hnthrow90348765
Make them learn coding instead of adding yet another responsibility onto developers.
whstl
Nobody is suggesting adding this responsibility to developers, but what actually happened was that developers who can design are almost forbidden from doing so, unless they are in positions of power.
Some of us have lost our voice when it comes to design.
staplers
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".
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xnx
> and adopts a pleasing color palette and set of fonts
This is an unfortunate side-effect of confusing apps with web pages. No one hired a designer to pick the fonts and colors for Windows 95, because that was up to the OS ad user.
sizzle
Or you know.. talk to users and understand their needs (discovery) then design solutions based off that understanding and iterate on designs with usability testing with said users until it feels like magic to them using it the first time, smooth and seamless flows across use cases with good copy and accessibility.
breadwinner
Here's the best tool for finding usability issues: 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
I'll have to use this, thanks for sharing. Isn't it problematic since Gemini isn't representative of a real user, though?
willsmith72
Definitely a huge trap to replace real user insights with anything else.
But this looks like a nice level 0 of testing
CaffeineLD50
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
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.
Tepix
More consistent? That's not a given with LLMs unless you set the temperature to 0.
CaffeineLD50
Very clever. Reminds me of using Alexa to test your pronunciation of foreign words. If Alexa has no idea you probably said it wrong.
seanwilson
> 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.
CharlieDigital
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."
rchaud
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
> The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines.
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
Yes, but not because of a self-proclaimed "law". The UX is similar across FB, Twitter and LinkedIN, because they all sell ads, and what you can charge for ads is reliant on how much time people are spending on the platform.
blendo
I knew it as “The principle of least astonishment”.
stared
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
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
I echo on the "The Design of Everyday Things" making you perpetually dissatisfied.
Thanks for the second rec, I'll give it a go
dave_sid
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.
nsxwolf
My favorite cargo cult thing today is that when you’re logged out you can’t find the login link anymore, just “Sign up”.
Ensorceled
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.
dunham
Yeah this one is really frustrating.
blendo
Text entry fields that don’t look like text entry fields.
danenania
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.
mekoka
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.
asoneth
> 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?
yapyap
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.
mamcx
> 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.
jbs789
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…
sebastiennight
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
Can you share the firm you worked with?
sebastiennight
Sure. Email is in my profile, shoot me a message and I'll put you in touch
presentation
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.
codr7
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.
cmgriffing
> 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?
karhuton
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
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.
karhuton
True. When the complexity of the software causes lot of usability issues in ”edge cases”, these technically capable customer connected people are really worth it.
I’ve also seen good things coming from hiring actual ex-users from potential customers that were using competitor’s products. They’d do user training, customer software configuration and development team support. Sometimes even full time.
-
But these people are good day-to-day at ironing out the details. Maybe even discovering underlying dissatisfaction with the product.
But the startup’s constant worry should be what else software is being used, how to be relevant in the future. Maybe through cutting costs in the process by co-designing new workflows to eliminate current tasks.
Executives at the client may be more intrested in finding ways to eliminate all the staff with automation in the process rather than optimizing their tools.
You’re not getting that input from the people working on the tasks now.
null
nextts
Would you call that role "customer success"?
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.