Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
39 comments
·March 12, 2025hliyan
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.
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.
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.
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".
null
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.
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.
Tepix
More consistent? That's not a given with LLMs unless you set the temperature to 0.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
dunham
Yeah this one is really frustrating.
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.
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…
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.
dave_sid
There may be a reason for it, but best to understand what that reason is before applying the same approach.
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.
jmathai
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 :).
osigurdson
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.
atomicnature
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
As a quick alternative, why not use a freelancer?
dustbunny
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?
sebastiennight
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.
perardi
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.
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.