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How can engineers improve their design skills?
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?
We are a startup and cannot afford to hire a design expert. So UI/UX is done by the engineers. It works but we agree that it can be a lot better.
How can we fix this? Are there any startups where engineers do UX? How did they do it?
- michaelwww 11y agoI'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.
- pratheekms 11y agoThank you. Your answer is very useful.
- melling 11y agoRead Karen's Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-a-job-as-a-designer-without-going-to-design-school https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-a-job-as-a-designer-wit...
- pratheekms 11y agoThis is very useful. Thanks for the share.
- eschutte2 11y agoRegarding 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.
- pratheekms 11y agoYes. 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.