

How can engineers improve their design skills? - pratheekms

As an engineer I can build products which are great in terms of features. What I dont understand is how do I make it usable and appealing?<p>We are a startup and cannot afford to hire a design expert. So UI&#x2F;UX is done by the engineers. It works but we agree that it can be a lot better.<p>How can we fix this? Are there any startups where engineers do UX? How did they do it?
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michaelwww
I'm an engineer and my designs look like it. I've been trying to improve
lately. It started when I took a look at
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) and then
looked at
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)
It was an eye opener to me how just a few changes made the basic page so much
better. Then I took a look at
[http://www.csszengarden.com/](http://www.csszengarden.com/) and by that I
mean more than a look. I spent a lot of time studying how each designer did
their work. I really tried to get into the mindset of a designer and how CSS
is used to do this kind of thing. These people are genius to me; it seems so
far out of reach. I started paying attention to design as I browsed the web. I
thought about what I like and how they did it. I showed source to see what css
libraries are being used. I subscribed to designers on social media (Facebook:
I like WIMP - Web and Interactive Media Professionals, Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/search?q=web%20design](https://twitter.com/search?q=web%20design))
I started browsing [http://thenews.im/](http://thenews.im/) once in awhile.
I've been absorbing some of the ideas by osmosis. I'm starting to think in new
ways about it without too much effort. It's mostly a matter of paying
attention instead of thinking about code all the time. I'm not very far along
the path, but the effort I made above is already paying off. Hope this helps.

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pratheekms
Thank you. Your answer is very useful.

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eschutte2
Regarding your first sentence, usability is a feature - maybe the most
important one.

If you don't already have a knack for design, it's probably going to be hard
to force it, but the Quora answer linked by another commenter seems pretty
reasonable to me.

The only trick I think you can use is to go minimal - the fewer "moving parts"
the fewer things there are to screw up. Almost every bad engineer design I see
is due to too much stuff going on rather than too little.

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pratheekms
Yes. I completely agree with you. The problem is we are building an analytics
dashboard. I cant reduce the number of moving parts here which is what makes
my problem even more complex.

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melling
Read Karen's Quora answer:

[https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-a-job-as-a-designer-
wit...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-a-job-as-a-designer-without-
going-to-design-school)

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pratheekms
This is very useful. Thanks for the share.

