7 ms·

> 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 cr

> 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.

hkmurakami 9y ago
Box is a good demonstration of what you describe.
pier25 9y ago
As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
- ivm 9y ago
  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.
  - piptastic 9y ago
    Who do you use instead of craigslist?
    - pier25 9y ago
      Exactly
    - ivm 9y ago
      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.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Ebay has a Craigslist competitor, too, in Germany running as ebay Kleinanzeigen.
      - Nursie 9y ago
        Is that not what gumtree is in a lot of places? That's what I've used in the UK and Australia, an ebay own it too.
    - sbarker 9y ago
      I like Facebook Marketplace because I can search with in X miles of my location on my phone and I don't have to check, "Has Photos" like craigslist.
- dasil003 9y ago
  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.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Ajax was invented for Outlook Web Access. I guess Gmail brought it to the masses, along with a decent amount of free storage.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      I'm well aware that Microsoft invented AJAX, I don't see how that has any relevance to my point.
- jszymborski 9y ago
  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. Web brutalism should be the new hotness.
  - fastbeef 9y ago
    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"
    - Illotus 9y ago
      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.
      - marcosdumay 9y ago
        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.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Actually, due to the way commenting works, HN breaks the back button.
- DonnyV 9y ago
  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.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Or the classic example of Craigslist. 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.
maxxxxx 9y ago
Agreed. The mantra needs to be selling, selling and more selling. For a CEO everything else should be second.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  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.
lostcolony 9y ago
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!")
- jchanimal 9y ago
  Also a good experience tells developers you value their time and attention.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > ("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.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    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.
  - steamer25 9y ago
    Best presentation of your point I've seen: http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked/ http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...
ejcx 9y ago
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
daleco 9y ago
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.
yeukhon 9y ago
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.
vacri 9y ago
> are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?
nnq 9y ago
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.
- senecamarcus 9y ago
  > - 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
  - ranit 9y ago
    Why do you think HN has horrible graphic design? Just curious.
    - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wellboy 9y ago
Or the high number of users that create a strong network ( Craigslist, Reddit, Facebook)
anjc 9y ago
> 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.
mbesto 9y ago
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.
- ivm 9y ago
  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.
  - mbesto 9y ago
    > SalesForce was founded in 1999 Why is that fact relevant? Care to elaborate?
    - ivm 9y ago
      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).

hkmurakami 9y ago

Box is a good demonstration of what you describe.

pier25 9y ago

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

ivm 9y ago
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.
- piptastic 9y ago
  Who do you use instead of craigslist?
  - pier25 9y ago
    Exactly
  - ivm 9y ago
    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.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Ebay has a Craigslist competitor, too, in Germany running as ebay Kleinanzeigen.
    - Nursie 9y ago
      Is that not what gumtree is in a lot of places? That's what I've used in the UK and Australia, an ebay own it too.
  - sbarker 9y ago
    I like Facebook Marketplace because I can search with in X miles of my location on my phone and I don't have to check, "Has Photos" like craigslist.
dasil003 9y ago
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.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Ajax was invented for Outlook Web Access. I guess Gmail brought it to the masses, along with a decent amount of free storage.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    I'm well aware that Microsoft invented AJAX, I don't see how that has any relevance to my point.
jszymborski 9y ago
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. Web brutalism should be the new hotness.
- fastbeef 9y ago
  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"
  - Illotus 9y ago
    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.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      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.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Actually, due to the way commenting works, HN breaks the back button.
DonnyV 9y ago
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.
twobyfour 9y ago
Or the classic example of Craigslist. 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.

maxxxxx 9y ago

Agreed. The mantra needs to be selling, selling and more selling. For a CEO everything else should be second.

hkmurakami 9y ago
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.

lostcolony 9y ago

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!")

jchanimal 9y ago
Also a good experience tells developers you value their time and attention.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> ("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.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  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.
- steamer25 9y ago
  Best presentation of your point I've seen: http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked/ http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...

ejcx 9y ago

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

daleco 9y ago

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.

yeukhon 9y ago

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.

vacri 9y ago

> are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?

nnq 9y ago

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.

senecamarcus 9y ago
> - 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
- ranit 9y ago
  Why do you think HN has horrible graphic design? Just curious.
  - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wellboy 9y ago

Or the high number of users that create a strong network ( Craigslist, Reddit, Facebook)

anjc 9y ago

> 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.

mbesto 9y ago

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.

ivm 9y ago
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.
- mbesto 9y ago
  > SalesForce was founded in 1999 Why is that fact relevant? Care to elaborate?
  - ivm 9y ago
    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).