
Ask HN: Designer Critique and Feedback? - tmaly
For all the non-designers out there,<p>Is there a paid service or forum where one could post their site &#x2F; web app and get critique from designers along with suggested improvements to the look &#x2F; UI?
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vitovito
Probably not in the way you imagine it happening.

First, you're probably not looking for open-ended critique. There are probably
a limited number of things you're open to and capable of changing. They're
probably mostly superficial things at best; you're probably not going to pay
what it would actually cost for someone to analyze e.g. an onboarding flow.

Most designers deal with people who only want superficial changes all day long
for their day jobs; they don't also do that for fun or beer money.

Second, a designer doesn't know anything about your users or your vertical.
The most a designer could do is suggest things for you to test. You still have
to build them out and test them.

If you're like most startups, you don't have infrastructure or traffic enough
to do this well, to measure a baseline beforehand and change after the fact,
etc.

Third, wherever you're located, there are probably local design meetups and
professional chapters. They probably have happy hours and office hours. If
you're really interested in improvement, you could follow my suggestions from
this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756258)
pasted below:

Put together your customer lists. Make sure you understand their demographics
and their usage patterns and why they purchased and what they were considering
instead. Make sure you have ways to contact them for research interviews and
if it's possible to go on-site to see them use your product live. Document how
your competitors present and discuss their products.

Then, pick something. One small thing. A landing page. A particular form. A
headline. Copy for a Google Adwords ad. Something you can measure your current
performance on, and measure a change to afterwards. If you're not high-volume,
this might be harder to find than you think, but go through the exercise of
figuring out what you can collect enough data on now, and what can wait to
change until you can measure it later (or what you don't care about
measuring).

Then, you can take that one thing to a designer and say, "I'm looking to
experiment with different changes to <X>. What are some things you think might
be interesting to try? Anything goes."

You're not asking them to do any work. You're not asking them to stake their
reputation on the line. Your language ("experiment," "different changes
(plural)," "interesting," "try," "anything goes") all says you're willing to
respect their time and level of engagement and also that you're prepared to
handle their advice properly, that you're not looking for a silver bullet,
you're looking for all of the lead bullets.

Say you ask for help with a landing page. A designer might suggest some copy
or visual design tweaks for clarity (specific changes), but also suggest you
test different headlines (without providing any), and also changing your
format from short form to long form or vice versa (definitely without
providing any content to you, but maybe they would be interested enough to
sketch out some varied layouts). These are all great ideas. You should read up
on A/B testing and test all of them in isolation, and also all together. You
should test big dramatic changes even more frequently than you test small copy
changes, because you don't want to be stuck looking for a local maximum. A UX
person might also suggest ways to find out other things to test, research
questions to ask, and suggest books or other resources so you can collect that
data well.

A startup that came to office hours that well-prepared would basically almost
not need design help at all.

~~~
tmaly
Vitorio,

thank you for taking the time to write a detailed response. I agree with all
of what you said. I have one small aspect on my project that I would like to
improve. Specifically, it is the layout of the food dish information and how
it is presented for a single dish.

Example: [https://bestfoodnearme.com/best-
food/7](https://bestfoodnearme.com/best-food/7)

I do not have that much traffic to the site now, maybe 30 - 50 new visitors a
day, but I do have an accurate idea of how they are using the site through
Google analytics.

I did consider trying some multivariate testing via bandit algorithms instead
of A/B, but at my current traffic numbers, this might be a bit too early.

I will try to find some local designer meetups as you suggest, I am very close
to NYC.

Thanks again,

Ty

