
How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design - smccade
https://www.simonmccade.com/blog/how-developers-and-tech-founders-can-turn-their-ideas-into-ui-design
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tannerc
This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years
(having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone
outside of the design field to read this.

It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks
like than other resources.

Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more
harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at what other apps are doing and
copy it!" Except what another product is doing may not work for your product.
The design of a final product isn't just the result of visual decisions, it's
also driven by things like: business objectives, budgets, team size, time
constraints, tech capabilities, target market size and demographics, etc.

So to have the article call attention to things like Dribbble being home to
designs that are primarily "conceptual as opposed to the finished product when
it comes to real applications" was refreshing.

Great read!

~~~
maxxxxx
"Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" doesn't work but "Look at
what other apps are doing, understand it and see what you can copy or adapt"
works really well.

~~~
tannerc
Yes!

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krm01
As a creative Director at UI/UX design firm
[http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) \- I’d like to highly recommend
founders to build their first version on intuition. The best way to design a
solid UI & UX is not from scratch, rather from a foundational prototype or v1
that’s being used by actual users. We found that the best products we helped
design (where the design significantly helped the business move forward) was
where the founders had a working prototype and user data to form the basis of
crafting a simpler and more user friendly product.

~~~
pushtheenvelope
thanks, this was a very helpful comment.

As an engineer-founder trying to build a first prototype app, i've been
conscious about not diving into building too fast, trying to get some of the
design right upfront. This has meant doing user-interviews to understand
people's problems in the area i'm working on, and doing some paper prototypes.

I was debating what is the best form to get the next round of feedback:
wireframe the whole flow in balsamiq, or a bare-bones working prototype with
ReactNative. For the former, i'd have to learn the tool. The latter i somewhat
know.

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superhuzza
Nowhere in this article does he actually mention:

-Talking to users

-Interviewing users

-Doing user testing

-Making sacrificial prototypes

This is a great way to develop a product that people don't need, with no way
of knowing how good the UX actually is. I've worked like this before, and it
really does produce suboptimal results. You really shouldn't even be making
wireframes before validating assumptions and needs first.

NNgroup has a lot of writing on trying to shortcut UX:

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-
research/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/)

~~~
ptttr
The author mentions it in the first paragraph, just chooses to focus the
article on the design part: "At this stage, I'm going to assume you've
conducted some user research or at the very least, spoken to potential
customers to test your assumptions. That way you'll be much better positioned
to turn your ideas into actual design."

~~~
superhuzza
He added it after I made my comment on HN (I'm fairly sure it's in response to
my original post):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190329103120/https://www.simon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190329103120/https://www.simonmccade.com/blog/how-
developers-and-tech-founders-can-turn-their-ideas-into-ui-design)

Anyways, it still doesn't make sense to talk to users once and then just go
crazy with UI design. A lot of user research requires having prototypes
(digital ones too). It's a back and forth, rather than a waterfall of talk to
users, think, whip up some design.

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dmitryminkovsky
The article doesn’t mention that as a startup it makes sense to minimize
novel, homegrown UI as much as possible. Unless, of course, that’s central to
your product or is the product. In Pony [0]—an email service that delivers
once a day—for example, I tried making the UI as familiar as possible, perhaps
at risk of not making it exciting enough.

I forget who said it—maybe it was the Eameses, maybe it was the Modernist
movement in general—but the best UI is invisible and stays out of the users’
way while enabling them to accomplish what they want. I believe this to be
true. The best way to do this usually is to provide a familiar, non novel UI.

So yeah, you need to make sure your flows make sense, etc, but if you’re
having “eureka” moments when developing UI, maybe your users will have to do
the same thing just to use it.

[0]: [https://www.pony.gg](https://www.pony.gg)

~~~
saagarjha
> it makes sense to minimize novel, homegrown UI as much as possible

I believe this is true in most cases. Don't reimplement controls, unless you
_really_ know what you are doing, because you're probably going to do it wrong
and break usability or accessibility or generally annoy people.

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KerryJones
It seems like the most upvoted comments are coming from designers -- which
feels problematic. It seems like the author has done a great job to capture a
UX/UI designer's flow, but that doesn't mean it translates well for
developers.

As a developer who has done this for many years, this is marginally helpful.
I'm glad to know it, but I'll tell you that on my side projects I will not be
nearly this extensive until later on, and likely pay for a designer for a few
hundred before doing all this myself.

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JamesBarney
I liked their link to PageFlows, but I was wondering if an enterprise version
exists. Is there something that focuses more heavily on the data side? The
creation, the updating, the displaying, the analysis, the graphs, etc...

I would whip out my credit card so fast for that.

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jaequery
Good article, hits home my experience. But I’d rather have a seasoned UX
designer to lead and sketch the flows rather than some one new to come up with
a Frankenstein type of app.

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veryworried
I would encourage developers to first build out their applications as a CLI.
Then add just enough UI for the masses.

But still release your CLI version. Ordering food or managing stocks on the
command line is fantastic!

~~~
saagarjha
Or, as an extension of this, implement your core logic as a library that you
can call from your {iOS, Android, etc.} app. If you're only targeting one
platform, this makes it easy for you to add another one in the future.

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dandare
This article is a surprisingly useful collection of tools.

