> 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.
You seem to have a really good understanding of this topic. In your view, what do you think the definition of UX, UI and graphics design is? I think that would be beneficial to the readers of your comment.
Also, can you cite some examples of the list of products?
I can think of
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX: Shopping cart checkouts that if you click something, you have to write the CC/Name-details again. Multi-city flight search on any major travel site is a pain in the ass.
Ok, I noted on my TODO to expand this to an actual article... I'll probably post an Ask HN to asks people for more examples from each category after I add a few.
Yeah, getting to a good definition of UX vs. UI that everyone could agree on would be great ;)
I'd start with UX defined as "what the users actually ends up doing while using your UI, the actually followed user journeys, the workflows they lead to, all this from the user's subjective perspective (hence the 'experience' part)". Also relating all this to goals and talking about "conversion" etc. would be about UX. And the general feeling of "this really helped me get the job done" that the user gets after using something. Heck, even customer-service can be part of UX if your product does something so complex that having users regularly and often interact with customer service is part of the "regular usage pattern" (think stuffs where CS is not just where you complain, but where you may have talks with reps about "special shipping and assembly arrangements" etc.)
And UI would be "what and how can the user possibly do with your interface, what are the actual interface elements that actually dictate these "how" and "what" of the user's actions, things like responsiveness, intuitiveness (matching user's previous expectations), information density, discoverability". So you can talk about "user satisfaction/enjoyment" here, about "intuitiveness" etc. (but these don't necessarily mean 'higher conversion' or making the user more productive!) Also accessibility comes here. And think things like "is this button big enough to be tapable" or "it that option in hover-only menu that is impossible to access on mobile devices" or "is that other thing a keyboard only shortcut that tablet users will likely miss" etc. These are obviously independent form how things look: the design can be horrible, but everything can be easy to find/tap/click etc.
Graphic design is obviously "how things look" and this also affect the "how easy is to find things", to it does affect both UX and UI... but, there is a big "but" here: designs that receive awwards and are perceived as beautiful tend to have functionality harder to find, and more confusing user journeys. Think about the "ghost buttons" that people used and still use... but have been proven to decrease conversion quite a lot! ...but now the trend might have reverse because users are finally getting used to them. Like, do you really want to be playing this fashion game that can hurt conversions when you don't expect it in a resource constrained startup?! If you're Apple, you can "reeducate users' aesthetic tastes" and stuff which is cool, but you're not Apple. So better under-design a bit just to be safe :)
> - 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
Thank you for articulating this point so well. I think websites like HN, 4Chan to an extent Reddit are best examples for this category
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!")
> ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")
That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected, or drawing areas where they shouldn't be, etc.
It's almost like if some people wanted to screw over their customers on purpose. But, I guess, it's more of people who don't know what they're doing selling things to people who don't know how to use them.
It's a bimodal distribution, where a group of people cares deeply about the meaning a graph presents, and another group of people cares deeply about how wowing the graph is when presented.
The intersection of those too groups is too small to make any difference, thus tools will be heavily optimized for one of those.
I'd argue while perhaps they are examples of brutalist functionality, the wikipedia, reddit and HN offer a very nice UX and a simple, easy to learn UI.
HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now).
Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many, many front-end engineers and UX designers, and Wikipedia, Reddit, HN as well as old-school Gmail and FB start looking amazing.
Man oh man do I miss old Gmail... that was a great interface. I exclusively use FB on mobile, no-js mode.
Funny thing about inifi-scrolling is that it's designed to save bandwidth, but I'd wager that most of the time the extra JS packages are bigger than the content actually being "saved"
Sorta, it does save bandwitdth, but more importantly it is used to keep users on your site longer by removing the decision point of browsing to the next page. Though for the best effect you need to do it background so that user never really realises that the feed/list never really ends.
Whatever you do, just, please, add a link for the next page at the end of your results. You can move it later with JS once you downloaded more results, but make sure the link is there.
I'm quite tired of not being able to use sites on slow connections.
Gmail was a revolutionary UI by standards of the day. It was one of a handful of apps that ushered in Web 2.0 and AJAX. Facebook was rougher to be sure, but if you compare to the tire fire of MySpace you realize it was relatively quite good.
Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch.
In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.
I don't live in the US but classifieds are more user-friendly in other countries.
You can't launch Craiglist in 2017 though. I know that there are numerous exceptions from the 00s and even from the App Store 5-6 years ago. But it's not the same anymore because blue oceans are rare nowadays.
However, for all these projects, the UI may be relatively primitive, but the UX is outstanding because it's stripped to exactly the things the user needs to accomplish what they're trying to do.
Yes they have good enough UI but also there free to use. I know if I'm going to pay for software. It better look nice and function well or I'm not buying.
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
The best expression I've heard is "As CEO, I'm the Money Guy". Whether it be selling product or raising money, the #1 job of CEO is to do whatever is necessary to keep the coffers flowing.
> 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.
SalesForce was founded in 1999. Are there any examples that released after 2010 and got a significant part of their markets? Except for maybe Snapchat which is not too bad, just weird.
Because in the last years all the markets have become extremely competitive, including the niche ones. Even if you find an "easy" market and make a product with weak UX for it – it's only a matter of time before a competitor redesigns your idea into something better (example: HipChat and Slack).
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.
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.