So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founders actually more correct.
When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them, probably not.
Which one is more common?
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack.
Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
If you hire an architect to redo your house, it's fine to say "I see where you're going with this thing for my kids, but I know them and they will never go for it."
I mean…………
Starry eyed business person thinks he can tell us whatever there is about making websites because our landing page is basically neglected.
Business we are in B2B and this specific product is not getting customers this way.
We get customers via CEO or business partners connections.
All the “organic traffic” is waste of time for us because when they hear the price of product they never call again.
Having a lot of small customers is not our business model because our app is not for small businesses.
The complexity in dev is a lot more obvious than the complexity in design. There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. With design work, the whole idea is to make something that clearly communicates its purpose. That makes a lot of people think they understand what went into it because if it’s done well, the solution should feel ‘obvious.’ Getting something that feels obvious is way more nebulous and convoluted than getting from point a to point B in most dev tasks.
It's hard to build something great if you don't know the customer. It's hard to know the customer if you don't get opportunities to understand their pain, or just don't care.
Specifically, I'm not a "designer", but I regularly end up making/changing UIs (mobile apps, web apps/pages, etc). When it comes to design, it really matters who the target audience is.
If you're creating a UI for "mass market", you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances what your average user expects, generally, from UI/UX, and the more you ask them to "invest", the worse you're going to do. On the other hand, if you're making a tool for a B2B (business-to-business) product, you have more freedom to set baseline expectations of what the end user needs to be able to do and understand. You can also expose more powerful options, etc. You can sometimes end up going in very different directions. Even error handling and logging can sometimes be handled differently, depending on the context.
And want something shiny done so they can show it in their portfolio. Especially the ones who consider themselves ‘artists’.
Usually, the copy and structure of a landing page is dictated by founders or marketing folks. Sales people also make this mistake on their slides. They have too many slides about a fancy team, fancy product, and fancy features -- then maybe they show a tailored use case or two.
I highly recommend Donald Miller's Marketing Made Simple as an antidote.
Ignoring the fact that sometimes founders feel the need to put their stamp on everything, for startups and scaleups that haven't progressed to corporate slog, I think it's near impossible for even the best staff designer in the world to arrive at the optimum website/deck/infographic/widget without founder or leader feedback.
The key ingredient is their insight. That's what sets any startup apart. Otherwise the designer would be the founder.
I think anything where a surprise is presented (in design or otherwise) means some missed communication.
Most designers are designing for their customer, their customer is the one paying their salary/commission/contract.
The article states "A website isn't art". This product mindset fundamentally makes the web a boring place. I would personally welcome all websites that are art.
For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
User: I want to get the information I came for.
Business: I want to build brand trust and drive conversion.
Internal organization: I want the owner’s taste and preferences to be reflected.
The article strongly says that a website is for the user. I agree with the spirit of that argument, but in practice, most users’ “taste” is shaped by brand reputation.
And where does brand reputation come from? Often, it comes from the owner’s taste, positioning, and accumulated decisions.
A SaaS landing page is not only a place where users get information. From the company’s perspective, it is also a tool for imprinting the company’s positioning in the user’s mind.
I think this phenomenon is essentially a principal-agent problem.
In real client work, most clients are not thinking about UX. They are thinking about the owner’s experience — OX, so to speak. And in practice, most companies operate based on OX.
In the ideal story, everyone says they care about UX. But most businesses do not actually run on UX. They run on OX.
The key question is whether the owner’s taste happens to align with the public’s taste.
The game they are playing is almost like a coin toss. If you look at the Gartner reports that become publicly visible, they are often wrong.
So why do reports from companies like Gartner still sell?
Because they reduce the anxiety of the owner or decision-maker.
Business is complex. Even a bad product can succeed because of advertising. Exaggerated marketing, fraud, timing, distribution, and luck all exist, and they can all produce success. UX is an ideal. But in practice, developers often have to satisfy OX: owner experience.
Companies appear to pursue profit because most owners like money. But in reality, many companies are closer to the realization of the owner’s ideology, taste, and worldview.
So what matters?
For a developer, it becomes important to judge how closely the owner’s taste aligns with the public, and with the target audience. That is why developers often end up flattering the owner: not merely because of hierarchy, but because the owner’s taste is frequently the actual operating system of the business.
I'm the IT Director of a medium sized (for our industry) company. Some years ago I worked with an amazing free-lance developer, and our then-director of marketing, to build a custom website that we were pretty proud of. A year ago our new marketing director paid mid-five figures to move to one of the site-builder services because 1.) the old CMS back-end to update content was "too technical", and the hours / a day wait for me or the developer to do it instead was too long, 2.) marketing didn't have direct control over design elements, and our questions like "do you want all of the buttons changed to match this style?", or "we use drop-downs on these other similar forms, should we use that here, too?" were... impertinent, I guess?
The mistake we made, which you beautifully articulate, was paying insufficient attention to the Owner Experience. The old CMS was functional, but it was ugly; the previous marketing director didn't care about back-end looks, and didn't want to put resources into making it look pretty. I should have recognized that that priority had changed. We also could have made them a form-builder + page-builder of some kind, with a way to directly edit templates. Whatever it took, we should have made the old system more satisfying to its new "owner" - and I should have put that expense into the IT budget, rather than have expected it to come out of theirs. That would have better for the company. Live and learn.
All that apart, not being responsible for the website is great: it's nice not to deal with text editing and image updates. I said my piece about the advantages of a custom site, and was heard and overruled, and that's fine. I made sure I am not an owner of the new site; they have their playground, and are welcome to it.
UX is, of course, degenerating, and marketing are (predictably; I predicted it) starting to chafe against the limitations of this company's product. I expect we'll move back to a custom site in a few years. But, what they've got is for now a better Owner Experience, which for them is worth the many multiples of cost, and the current functionality shortcomings.
I expect next go-around they'll want to pay some big design agency for a custom site; it'll probably be six figures. I don't know how I should approach that discussion. Any ideas?
I also assumed the article would be about personal websites until I read it.
Design research will inevitably always lead to a place thats reductive, nostalgic, and average (i.e. https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). Designers themselves are loaded with biases and often enough want to perform design work that doesn't serve the business (in software we would call this Resume Driven Development - building with shiny new things so you can put it on your resume).
On the flip side, design is constantly victim to Dunning-Kruger or "bike shedding" - people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence.
If the author was trying to write about the latter, they are failing to first acknowledge the former... for all we know the "decision makers" have decades of competent experience in brand, design, and user experience.
It should though, if people only got involved in stuff they're directly using themselves, all software would end up so much better.
The best software out there seems to be when people who feel responsible over something, also uses that same thing themselves and they earn a comfortable living by doing so. If we could find a way of increasing the amount of software produced in this way, we could maybe avoid falling over spaghetti in some decades, otherwise we'll just live with 50% broken software which seems to be the current direction.
Edit: I probably should have read the landing page first, which says:
> Partner for designers - Websmith Studio builds future-ready websites in collaboration with world-class designers.
They're clearly building client websites for others, then yeah, what they say is true, you're not building for yourself :)
But my target audience are data analysts, and they just want to analyze some data!
I have gone through a lot of design revisions because I have a hard time containing my technical excitement. I was surprised how hard communicating a product clearly is.
As a backend/data person I was on the high horse thinking that designers jobs are so much easier than distributed systems. Now I feel the opposite!
Along with his personal website: https://dahl.dev/
As you move up the food chain, the distance between the people you answer to and the source of the money they are spending grows, personal attachment to the outcome diminishes, and you get a lot less meddling. It’s one of the main reasons our team turns away very small customers.
Well, you have made a big assumption there. Maybe you haven't met the decision makers. It's not just their own whims and fancies. It's true that one's own perception of what the customer likes, is influenced by their personal taste as well. But on the other hand, building something while disregarding your own taste completely, doesn't give the required motivation.
1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/website-you-havent-rebuilt-ma...
2. https://medium.com/@joulee/how-to-be-strategic-f6630a44f86b
PS Disclaimer: It feels strange to share links to LIN and Medium, two problematic platforms I'd prefer not to support. But these specific posts are worthwhile, so I'm sharing anyway.
A small annoyance in startup circles is getting feedback about my website front page along the lines of "I didn't understand your hero, everybody should understand in one sentence what you do". Well, no, my clients will self-select as in not everybody needs to understand what "troubleshooting servers" or "devops" is :-)
Then I realised that the article talks about business websites, not personal websites. Quoting from the article:
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content.
Yes, I agree. While not really a business, I've always liked https://nhs.uk/ for its simplicity. I especially like the A-Z section where we can find details about a large number of medical conditions. Among actual businesses (small ones particularly) I like https://buttondown.com/ and https://kagi.com/ quite a bit.
That said (and this is off-topic for this article), the part of the web I enjoy most is where your website is indeed for you, the small web of personal websites. That part of the web was an important part of me growing up from my late teens into adulthood and it remains the part I enjoy most even now. I want this part of the web to remain healthy and vibrant for as long as possible.
We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!
This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.
Eh, I don’t think this is accurate. A website does serve utility, but if you remove art from the discussion, then it becomes soulless, which is not the world we want to live in.
Take HN for example. The first time I visited, I thought it was a terrible, dated design. But over time I grew to appreciate it. I think it is, in fact, quite artistic; it has a style, it makes a statement.
If HN were “modern and user-first” maybe users would have an initial better impression, maybe they would even “convert” better initially. But long-term, it would start to lose its soul.
The websites with the best UX I know are mostly those who haven't really changed for the past 20 years.
I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to find someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.
I've yet to hear from someone liking no longer being able to say "no" and being only allowed to say "yes" or "maybe later" (which is a code for "I'll annoy you till you finally break and say yes"). I've yet to hear someone liking to have less informationen visible and being forced to navigate a maze of menu items for things which used to be just their. Or who simply likes not being able to tell what is or isn't an element which can be interacted with.
Who are those people who like to give almost every other site their phone number? And who are those who likes telling almost every other click how the "experience" with the website was so far? Who are those people who like being reminded about the mostly useless annoying AI assistance every other click?
I've yet to find someone who sad "Oh boy, it was really nice that they asked me to give the online shop on some rando rating site 5 stars". Or "Oh boy, I sure love the popup about signing up to the awesome informative newsletter each time I visit the site". Or "I really like that my PC fan starts to spin audible whenever I go to this website". Or "Oh yes, I was so happy being asked to install the mobile app for an rando website I found via a search engine" Or "It's really nice that I always have to solve a captcha and noone is telling me why"
In my experience people do not like modern website, they at most tolerate them. It's like paying taxes. Can't do nothing about it.
Edit: Typos
> I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to finde someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.
Are these really common features for modern websites? I think most browsers block auto-play of videos. Back button hijacks: annoying but again I feel like I stumbled across that more often 5-10 years ago.
Nowadays the annoying website thing seems to be screwing around with the scrollbar.
Although, I definitely do agree that the 20-30 years ago style is best. Just give me some text. I’m going to block the JavaScript and set my own background colors and font anyway, so the less clutter the better.
Ah the customer isn't in the room? Well, too bad, now you have to listen to the author. How convenient!
Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.
There are non-commercial websites such as Government that put a lot of effort into focussing on the user.
Some of the Gov design systems are well worth looking at.
A great example is a restaurant site. If a user has to scroll and click around to find an address, a phone number, and hours of operation, the site has FAILED.
What I see all the time. I hate it so much. "Oh, honey, this restaurant has a picture of pepperoni on cheese. Let's eat there... wherever it is!"
Actually - the websites I create, design and maintain, are ... primarily for me. I am a very critical user though, so I am also a great feedback person. I tell myself "you need to improve this". Then I either do so, or put it in a todo file that is rarely looked at lateron again. So I don't agree that a website is not "for you". I think that a website CAN be for you. The article makes no such distinction; it only insinuates that everyone is incompetent and designs for things other people may not need or want.
Besides, people are also different - designing a perfect webpage is not possible. You have to make compromises. Take reddit.com - I can only use old.reddit.com because the new interface is so useless. That's one example of so many more that could be given here.
The internet was a far better place when websites were created by individuals mainly for themselves. And probably hosted for free on Geocities.
"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.