> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player.
This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly.
In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.
Your advice is actually good for a slightly unexpected reason: most people can't really understand the difference between UI and UX. Even worse are those that don't get it that "UI design" is of itself completely different from "graphic design". So if you tell someone "UX is terribly important", 90% of the time they will focus on "UI design" or "graphic design" and miss the point entirely while wasting tons of resources.
You can have:
- products with horrible UIs and horrible graphic design, but awesome user experience (UXs) -- because they solve a problem perfectly while enabling a good workflow, or are extensible and adaptable to new unanticipated workflows
- products with horrible graphic design but great UIs -- if the user flow is intuitive and productive, the interface responsive and discoverable, it really doesn't matter how shit looks
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX -- the UI may be both intuitive and awesomly designed and responsive... but if it enables wrong or sub-optimal workflows more than the right ones, nudging users towards bad mindsets/perspectives/workflows, it lowers everyone's productivity and sooner or later people will realize that they are dragged down or disabled by that product with the "great" UI
So yeah... if what I wrote above ain't obvious to you, then don't focus on UX, because you'll actually do it wrong anyway. Focus on the problem you solve, on the product you develop to solve it, and on selling the solution. If the UX is not extremely bad or you're not in a "fashion/fad" driven niche, it will probable be ok despite suboptimal UX if you do the rest right.
Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")
I worked at LastPass for a while as one of the few engineers. People hated our UX, and we honestly didn't even get close to the UX that 1password offered while I was there (They are working on it now).
LastPass killed it because they had Enterprise grade features people wanted. I totally agree with you. It's about building a product for your customers
> Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly.
All the comments disagreeing with this seem to be talking about "big" companies like Reddit. Think more IBM. OP's comment is very accurate.
And the 'core feature set' can be intangible features of the company, such as brand.
At the end of the day UX is the product, that’s what the customer sees. Maybe you could get away with it with early adopters.
A good UX team will help focusing on core features instead of useless ones and optimum experience.
For a startups, a good UX designer could validate a MVP in few days without a line of code.
SalesForce is the greatest example of this - awful UX, but so many people use it because it does simply work. Lots of startups use SFDC and it's "their choice", so again the OP's statement doesn't really hold up.
I think it should be easy to use, not complex and unintuitive. The best way to know whether your UX sucks at early stage is to ask a few friends, both technical and non-technical, evaluate your products.
How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"?
I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering.
While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule?
The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he'd roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views/controllers/assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn't know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other "executive audibles" like this, I took the next good offer and ran.
It's weird to see 'visual design' as a mainstay of an article titled 'What you should know as a founder of a software company', as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.
It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything in pieces?".
That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.
Where I write code we use git hooks to run linting and unit tests on pre-commit and integration tests on pre-push, and anyone using --no-verify gets a stern talking to. No one gets code in to the repo if it breaks the tests.
I'm still working on a way to stop commits that drop the coverage below a threshold so even new code can't be added if it isn't tested.
The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."
What if, they are paying for something already, and you build a more advanced one? That is to say, it does something the others don't that makes it a little better and easier.
One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it.
I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold.
That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.
Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it.
Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.)
We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics.
But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group.
The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes.
But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff.
Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good.
We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.
Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.
How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?
How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.
This is mentioned in the "Marketing" part as one of the core research questions. I agree that it should be addressed more but didn't want to overload the article – it's long enough already.
Really, the key is solving something important that people absolutely need, and will overlook all these weaknesses for. Then something like a good UX is a can you can kick down the road for a long time.
If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.
A tough one. Asking myself what I absolutely need, I come up with air+water+meat+housing. And I'm a coder! =) but even for softer interpretations of "absolutely", haven't ran into any such non-niches (we're talking "people", not obscure-exotic-niche-use-case-prospects) in a long time lately.
Very true. However, software engineers care about what's under the hood. And the longer your company is operational you are bound to encounter engineering turnover. Attracting promising talent could get very difficult (and extremely costly) if your software stack and/or code base is antiquated.
I work at a startup, which is around 15 months old now. We have no UI/UX designer, and have not focused on creating a good UX. We would love to have one, but have not found the right candidate yet.
But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day.
Good UX is important, but it doesn't have to be "perfect". The most important thing by far for a startup is getting out of your office and talk with potential clients.
What you should know is that the only thing that matters is solving big problems for real people problems.
If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter.
If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling more & more people why you are awesome and they'll keep paying you for more.
Our CEO doesn't know what UX is and tried to get a marketing email designer to rebuild our whole tool. he figured the kid knows photoshop so he must know best.
That was a really great article. Here's a few notes from my experience with FormAPI.io:
> One of the best ways to do it is to watch people interacting with your prototypes without giving them any hints.
This is so true. My product has a lot of very complex features, but after watching some early users, I realized that people were struggling to figure out some of the most basic things - even just adding and removing fields. I had made the 'delete' icon only show when you hovered over the field in the sidebar, but I made it more obvious by always showing it when the field was selected. I also added another 'Delete' link to the field option in the right sidebar. And then I also added a welcome modal that explain how to add and delete fields with animated GIFs. (Including the "delete" and "backspace" keyboard shortcuts.) Now that there's 3 separate ways to delete fields, people figure it out almost immediately.
Even adding fields was hard to get right. My initial version just had click-and-drag, so you had to first click, then drag to adjust the field width. I saw that new customers were just clicking on the page, and nothing would happen. So I added support for single clicks as well, and now it adds a field at that position with a default width.
It's scary that I might not have realized these UX problems if I wasn't paying attention.
> Nowadays it’s easy to get amazing stock templates for less than $50 instead of spending thousands on a custom design.
I strongly recommend https://pixelarity.com. I've used 3 of their templates now, and I think they're very good. Some of them even have jekyll versions that you can download. http://unsplash.com is incredible for stock photos, and I have a subscription to https://thenounproject.com for vector icons. There are a lot of free icons out there, but the Noun Project has a ton of variety, and lots of things you can't find anywhere else.
> When doing the development yourself, it is easy to slip into a false productivity when you increase the amount of code without achieving your business goals. The most infamous examples are building tools instead of a product or overthinking a complicated architecture "for the future."
This is really tough, but I'm actively trying to avoid this. Not just the fun tools and side-projects you want to build, but even some feature requests from customers. Certain might end up taking weeks or months, and they'll over-complicate your product, or they just won't be a good investment of your time.
> New and trendy technology usually means bugs, breaking changes, immature tooling and lack of documentation. "Boring" mature tech will allow you to achieve the same goals much faster and make it easy to find developers for hire.
I used Rails and React, since I'm very familiar and productive with those. I was tempted to try Elixir, but I think it would have taken me so much longer to build an MVP. I have a friend who started building their startup with Elixir, but switched back to Rails for the better productivity.
> Depending on the country, your experience with these business aspects can range from mildly unpleasant to the absolute worst.
I've almost finished setting up my company with Stripe Atlas, and I can say that it has been the absolute best experience. I can't recommend it strongly enough. I'm going through the post-incorporation stuff now with UpCounsel, and everything is just so easy.
[+] [-] ukulele|8 years ago|reply
This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly.
In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.
[+] [-] nnq|8 years ago|reply
You can have:
- products with horrible UIs and horrible graphic design, but awesome user experience (UXs) -- because they solve a problem perfectly while enabling a good workflow, or are extensible and adaptable to new unanticipated workflows
- products with horrible graphic design but great UIs -- if the user flow is intuitive and productive, the interface responsive and discoverable, it really doesn't matter how shit looks
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX -- the UI may be both intuitive and awesomly designed and responsive... but if it enables wrong or sub-optimal workflows more than the right ones, nudging users towards bad mindsets/perspectives/workflows, it lowers everyone's productivity and sooner or later people will realize that they are dragged down or disabled by that product with the "great" UI
So yeah... if what I wrote above ain't obvious to you, then don't focus on UX, because you'll actually do it wrong anyway. Focus on the problem you solve, on the product you develop to solve it, and on selling the solution. If the UX is not extremely bad or you're not in a "fashion/fad" driven niche, it will probable be ok despite suboptimal UX if you do the rest right.
[+] [-] lostcolony|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|8 years ago|reply
Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched.
If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
[+] [-] ejcx|8 years ago|reply
LastPass killed it because they had Enterprise grade features people wanted. I totally agree with you. It's about building a product for your customers
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anjc|8 years ago|reply
All the comments disagreeing with this seem to be talking about "big" companies like Reddit. Think more IBM. OP's comment is very accurate.
And the 'core feature set' can be intangible features of the company, such as brand.
[+] [-] daleco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellboy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeukhon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hkmurakami|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|8 years ago|reply
Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?
[+] [-] save_ferris|8 years ago|reply
I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering.
While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule?
The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he'd roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views/controllers/assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn't know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other "executive audibles" like this, I took the next good offer and ran.
It's weird to see 'visual design' as a mainstay of an article titled 'What you should know as a founder of a software company', as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.
[+] [-] john_moscow|8 years ago|reply
That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
The goal is to develop a sense of good design, so you can pick a good template or hire good designers later and argue about the results of their work.
[+] [-] onion2k|8 years ago|reply
I'm still working on a way to stop commits that drop the coverage below a threshold so even new code can't be added if it isn't tested.
[+] [-] vacri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptybits|8 years ago|reply
#1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it.
Sorry it's not more catchy.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|8 years ago|reply
The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joshuaheard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
"Have I solved a problem serious enough for people to bother to become my customers?"
[+] [-] idlewords|8 years ago|reply
I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold.
That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.)
We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics.
But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group.
The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes.
But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff.
Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good.
We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.
[+] [-] nathan_f77|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gr33nman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmdoss|8 years ago|reply
They do not solve a customer problem.
Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BadassFractal|8 years ago|reply
If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.
[+] [-] dualogy|8 years ago|reply
A tough one. Asking myself what I absolutely need, I come up with air+water+meat+housing. And I'm a coder! =) but even for softer interpretations of "absolutely", haven't ran into any such non-niches (we're talking "people", not obscure-exotic-niche-use-case-prospects) in a long time lately.
[+] [-] paulie_a|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minton|8 years ago|reply
This is a hard truth.
[+] [-] mkez00|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olavgg|8 years ago|reply
But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day.
Good UX is important, but it doesn't have to be "perfect". The most important thing by far for a startup is getting out of your office and talk with potential clients.
[+] [-] dharma1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanr|8 years ago|reply
If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter.
If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling more & more people why you are awesome and they'll keep paying you for more.
[+] [-] brightball|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mi100hael|8 years ago|reply
While reading the article, I had no idea you weren't a native speaker until I reached that line. So: congrats.
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nestorherre|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccvannorman|8 years ago|reply
If you're B2B the strategy may be somewhat different.
[+] [-] nathan_f77|8 years ago|reply
> One of the best ways to do it is to watch people interacting with your prototypes without giving them any hints.
This is so true. My product has a lot of very complex features, but after watching some early users, I realized that people were struggling to figure out some of the most basic things - even just adding and removing fields. I had made the 'delete' icon only show when you hovered over the field in the sidebar, but I made it more obvious by always showing it when the field was selected. I also added another 'Delete' link to the field option in the right sidebar. And then I also added a welcome modal that explain how to add and delete fields with animated GIFs. (Including the "delete" and "backspace" keyboard shortcuts.) Now that there's 3 separate ways to delete fields, people figure it out almost immediately.
Even adding fields was hard to get right. My initial version just had click-and-drag, so you had to first click, then drag to adjust the field width. I saw that new customers were just clicking on the page, and nothing would happen. So I added support for single clicks as well, and now it adds a field at that position with a default width.
It's scary that I might not have realized these UX problems if I wasn't paying attention.
> Nowadays it’s easy to get amazing stock templates for less than $50 instead of spending thousands on a custom design.
I strongly recommend https://pixelarity.com. I've used 3 of their templates now, and I think they're very good. Some of them even have jekyll versions that you can download. http://unsplash.com is incredible for stock photos, and I have a subscription to https://thenounproject.com for vector icons. There are a lot of free icons out there, but the Noun Project has a ton of variety, and lots of things you can't find anywhere else.
> When doing the development yourself, it is easy to slip into a false productivity when you increase the amount of code without achieving your business goals. The most infamous examples are building tools instead of a product or overthinking a complicated architecture "for the future."
This is really tough, but I'm actively trying to avoid this. Not just the fun tools and side-projects you want to build, but even some feature requests from customers. Certain might end up taking weeks or months, and they'll over-complicate your product, or they just won't be a good investment of your time.
> New and trendy technology usually means bugs, breaking changes, immature tooling and lack of documentation. "Boring" mature tech will allow you to achieve the same goals much faster and make it easy to find developers for hire.
I used Rails and React, since I'm very familiar and productive with those. I was tempted to try Elixir, but I think it would have taken me so much longer to build an MVP. I have a friend who started building their startup with Elixir, but switched back to Rails for the better productivity.
> Depending on the country, your experience with these business aspects can range from mildly unpleasant to the absolute worst.
I've almost finished setting up my company with Stripe Atlas, and I can say that it has been the absolute best experience. I can't recommend it strongly enough. I'm going through the post-incorporation stuff now with UpCounsel, and everything is just so easy.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]