11 ms·

Give It the Craigslist Test

356 points by promiseofbeans 3y ago

kmoser 3y ago
Proving once again that the KISS principle always applies.
vecplane 3y ago
Is this describing the practice of 'grayboxing' in design?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Yeah, or wireframing, or low-fidelity prototyping. Definitely not new advice, but I guess it'll be somebody's first exposure to the idea, so they'll learn a new thing today.
  - thoughtpalette 3y ago
    Yea, I find this article kind of weird in the number of comments it has drawn. Low-fidelity wire framing for workflows has been a UX/UI standard for like a decade now.
- kmoser 3y ago
  It's more about mockups that show the final design. Wireframes, in contrast, are always sparse by definition.
bradgessler 3y ago
I took this approach for https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/ and https://www.thingybase.com/ https://www.thingybase.com/. The art on Thingybase is all poorly drawn stick figures that I sketched out on my iPad. Not only do I recommend doing this when building apps or websites initially, but I recommend it for the final product. It ends up being much faster, easier to maintain, easier for people to read, and more accessible. I have another app in the works that’s using https://picocss.com/ https://picocss.com/ with basically no CSS. It’s great not having to think too much about design elements and focus on only the most important bits of the application.
- s1k3s 3y ago
  Minimalism for the sake of minimalism is just as bad as the concept described in the article. For example I find your blog very easy to read but very hard to navigate. I don't understand its structure, I can't find any menus and I don't know when I'm at the end of "something".
  - bradgessler 3y ago
    Glad it’s easy to read! That’s exactly what it’s optimized for. There’s no real structure to the site, hence no menus and nothing really to navigate to. I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design—I don’t advocate for that. What I do advocate for is minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
- woozyolliew 3y ago
  Bookmarking Legible News! I have been surviving on https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com, https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/, and http://68k.news/ http://68k.news/, but your site is much easier on the eye, so will be taking it for a spin.
  - welovetacos 3y ago
    If you're into sports also check out https://plaintextsports.com https://plaintextsports.com Amazingly well done
- akpa1 3y ago
  For Thingybase, unless I'm mistaken, your privacy policy and ToS have "if xyz, contact us" scattered all over them, but there is no email address anywhere to be found on the site to contact you at. Edit: oh, and the delete profile button doesn't work.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I needed some artwork for the Empire game, and needed it right away. So I made some "placeholder" graphics with MS-Paint, in my 2nd grader style, and never got around to doing proper artwork.
echelon 3y ago
Plenty of people use HN. Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit". I'm continually reminded of how 4chan is still a thing. We admire bare bones web design, spartan blogs, and archeological finds from the 90's web that are still around. You don't need a design team to build something useful that people will consume.
- webmobdev 3y ago
  Functionality always trumps jazzy designs. (E.g. Craigslist vs olx.in).
- myself248 3y ago
  They load faster, too. I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.
  - ghostpepper 3y ago
    There must be something about grocery sites that makes them so awful. I've even submitted feedback to a delivery service that I used to use with comments like "enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products" "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters" "searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists" etc. How can it be so bad??
    - toast0 3y ago
      > "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters" My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2 and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.
    - lost_tourist 3y ago
      Instacart's "plugin" for Aldi is sooooo slow compared to Amazon. It's some weird amalgamation of single page and multi page "post" type designs. It's kinda pretty though I guess.
webmobdev 3y ago
This is really good advise. When I started out, one of the best advise I got as a web designer was to always ask new clients to focus on the content. I had to repeatedly emphasise to the clients who got distracted with beautiful templates or wanted flash-bang animated, multimedia on their site that you need to focus on specific objectives, with content to match this, and my job as designer was to present the content to achieve these goals. But no, the clients were still obsessed with wanting a "banner that showed ripples in water when a drop falls on it" ...
dougSF70 3y ago
Totally agree, substance over style.
kazinator 3y ago
The real Craigslist Test: "would people still love it if it looked like Craiglist, and then took RSS away to spite them, like Craigslist".
alasdair_ 3y ago
Similar to this: I raised a seed round with a deck that was (deliberately) just black Times New Roman text on a white background, plus a few screenshots. The product was also deliberately simple and rough around the edges. I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes. Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was the content, not the presentation.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  I wonder what percentage of investors might actually draw the conclusion that while you may have a great product, you might be bad at marketing it? Because, while lots of engineers would like to think that the success of a product is due to the tech and features, the reality is that good market can make a crap product successful a lot more often than a good product can overcome bad marketing and presentation. Craigslist seems to be an exception rather than the rule.
  - blululu 3y ago
    It might have been great marketing for the same sort of counter signaling as the Mark Zuckerberg hoodie. “A man who can dress that poorly must be really good”. Craigslist is an outlier in many ways. The most significant is that they did not raise huge venture rounds so they have never been existentially committed to fulfilling an investor’s opinion of what a top 25 website should be.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Similar to this: consistently be a total weirdo and end up with a girl that actually likes you. (Don’t ask me how I know)
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    This is a tangent, but perhaps similar to what you are saying. Dare to stand out. Even if it’s unpopular and immediately pushes away 90% of people. Your goal when dating is not to make everyone like you. It’s to find one person that loves you.
turnsout 3y ago
Speaking as a design consultant who specializes in software: this is good advice! Use the lowest fidelity possible until you figure out what your product is and who it's for. Once you know that, it will give you a clear direction for the visuals and interactions.
55555 3y ago
I'm a lazy guy, so when I _first_ validate a business opportunity for product-market fit, I do a purposefully bad job. If a good job is required, the opportunity isn't good enough.
ec109685 3y ago
That example of Maybe.co and their pivot was illustrative of form over function. However, I can’t see how their new approach will be successful either: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758 https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758 Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? They are competing head on with billion dollar companies and adding a chat interface and video conferencing as the differentiation. They have to do all the hard parts to onboard users, convince them to connect with their financial institutions, establish trust with financial recommendations, build a two sided marketplace with financial advisors, yet Mint or wealth front or many other companies could spend six months and have a better product out in the market with an established user base and way of making money. Why are investors excited by this pivot?
- balderdash 3y ago
  I’d go a step further and say that none of these types of products actually do the hard work that people would be willing to pay for. E.g. most of these statistics are wrong (net worth increased x% because I rolled over my IRA, dividend reinvestments treated improperly, basis accounted for the wrong way, etc)
- indymike 3y ago
  > Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? In this case, I think the founders realized that by focusing on UI and data engineering, they were not focused on the right things: what kind of digital financial assistant is worth paying for? Finally, the question, "why won't big existing player come eat your lunch?" directs conversation away from opportunity. Products like maybe.co often end up being acquired by big, existing players because huge companies often struggle with invention and ideation, and it's often easier to deploy money to buy the kernel of a great product than what happens in most large, risk-adverse companies when innovation requires internal failure after internal failure before success. > Why are investors excited by this pivot? I'm not an investor in maybe.co, but I'm much more interested in what they are doing now that they aren't focused on pretty UI. They have a long way to go before they have something, but as they say, keep a good team on the field long enough... and good things happen.
gpt5 3y ago
Craigslist is an example of the strength of network effects. It’s succeeding despite its user hostile design because it has no incentive to change. Using it as an example for MVP of your design is ludicrous.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Hmm, first-mover advantage maybe, but there's no real "network effect" I can see - are all my friends on CL? How would I even know? Craigslist is heroically ugly, but I wouldn't call that "user hostile" - the only obvious dysfunction I can see are the usual gaming of listings a la eBay etc., from local car dealerships spamming keywords, etc.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Network effects in a marketplace are clear. Buyers go where the sellers are, sellers go where the buyers are, etc. Craigslist networking is mostly local, so some places there's not much in the way of listings (for jobs, services, marketplace, etc) and some places only one category is popular and some places you would find your job, your apartment, your furniture, and before personals went away, maybe your spouse.
- chomp 3y ago
  This is definitely a take. Can you explain the network effects and user hostility?
- bityard 3y ago
  I've used Craigslist for, what, decades and I never found it to be user-hostile. If I owned it, I would probably make a few tweaks here and there but I have no trouble at all placing an ad or browsing the listings. It's a very honest design and I think that speaks to people. Contrast that to the thing that is replacing it: Facebook marketplace. It's beautiful, but, the barrier to entry is high, there is no practical way to browse specific categories, search shows tons of irrelevant results, there is no way to set up keyword or category alerts, and it's riddled with scams and flakes. The entire object of FB is not to get anything done, it's to keep you scrolling for as long as possible.
leobg 3y ago
Hacker News is actually another great example of this concept. If you plotted the appearance vs. usefulness ratio for 1,000 websites, HN would be one of the crazy outliers. Good one! Thanks for posting this.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I feel like human raters at Google ruined my SEO after looking at the graphic design of my website :( Not only is ranking on appearance faster than usefulness, a rater can confidently do that because their other raters will do the same. “Tight inter-rater variability” = confidence in rating for some reason, as opposed to consistency in bias.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    I wonder if there's something generally true about bureaucracies in that: do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy? Given how bureaucrats often travel in large packs and seem to find safety in numbers, maybe it's unsurprising that they would value agreeing with each other over finding the truth. I had no idea the SEO world had its own bureaucracies of human web-site raters, though. I guess it makes sense that lots of large companies would invest in creating that sort of thing. :(
    - mlhpdx 3y ago
      That’s what the Black-Scholes equation does: variation is risk. It’s manifest everywhere.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy? There are some issues to be aware of here. It isn't possible to do the reverse - to value accuracy over precision - because your accuracy is limited by your precision. This is a theorem in psychometrics, where the phrasing is that the validity of an assessment (the degree to which it accurately measures some quantity of interest to you) is bounded by the reliability (the degree to which, if you assess the same thing twice, you get similar estimates). If you find that your assessments aren't accurate enough, you can only fix that by increasing your precision, so the concept of valuing precision over accuracy is a little bit weird.
ex3ndr 3y ago
Well, AirBNB wouldn't pass this test in early days since they mostly started to grow after starting making professional photos
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I always felt like Craigslist pre-validated AirBNB as a business. Short-term rooms for rent was already a popular Craigslist section. AirBNB took that and (1) added payment, (2) parametric searching and (3) better profiles. Craigslist is/was largely where things get listed that don't have a specialized site that fulfills those at least 2 of those. E.g. etsy, ebay, stubhub, online dating, rideshares, gigs https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-a-platform-eroded-by-platforms/ https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-... Image from above link: https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000 https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Craigslist did classifieds at the price of free which is impossible to beat (though apparently they're slipping to Facebook marketplace now, but I've no recent data). And the Craigslist interface is damn close to a classified section in a paper.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      > free which is impossible to beat I mean, they could also pay you, the content creator, but yeah, that wouldn’t work as well on a classified ad website.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
As someone who is still scared of CSS and HTML, all I can say is: my time has come.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  You can do it!
- gwd 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the advice was to focus on the important user interactions. Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have. I can tell that there's something wrong, but I can't really tell how to fix it.
  - mattgreenrocks 3y ago
    That comes with practice. Use the fewest built-in controls for an interaction, then try it out. You’ll probably need to tweak it: add/remove labels, add a control, line breaks, etc. There’s no magic gene for this, it’s just the willingness and ability to navigate a large design space.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have. I'm reminded of Adam Savage's observation that practice alone gets you 80% of the way to mastery. Talent is what gets you the last 20%, but for most things, 80% is good enough.
Waterluvian 3y ago
For about a decade now I've been building robotics software UIs in a context where we don't have a design team (internal software, tech savvy users, start-up pace). One of the things I've found to work so consistently well is the kind of test shared in this article. I regularly say, "to learn what we don't yet know about the problem space" when asked about why I like shipping things ASAP and then worrying about design characteristics later. I'm convinced that design regularly impacts a feature's usefulness, but is rarely necessary to make it useful at all. That is: it's important but not required. Of course this is for a captive audience. For something you're trying to sell, window dressing can matter.
draw_down 3y ago
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indymike 3y ago
When I onboard a new designer, I usually talk with them about Craig's List, Amazon versus "beautiful" UI. The point is exactly the last line of this article: "Focus on content and functionality when you’re designing new products; that’s the validation that will build a business." Now I'm going to add this article to required reading for new engineering team members.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  Both are important but look is always second to reliability and functionality. You can have the prettiest book cover in the world but if it's a sandwiching a pile of crap it won't sell.
  - indymike 3y ago
    I think in this case content is being blended with functionality since the AI is actually in the business of delivering content. Regardless, I can’t agree with you more about functionality and reliability. Functionality sells, and reliability keeps it sold.
- jasmer 3y ago
  Amazon is bad UI though. The information they present is inconsistent, the descriptions barely make sense, it's hard to compare products. It's byzantine.
  - indymike 3y ago
    I Amazon really bad? Their transaction volume would seem to indicate that users are succeeding in placing orders at a very high frequency. This is exactly why Amazon is a great study for new designers and engineers.
    - jasmer 3y ago
      Yes, you are right, and I should have qualified that because I'm aware it's optimized, but it's effectively a grey pattern at best: a UI that is sub-optimal in terms of presentation of information, but optimized for click-through. I'm sure one could make a case for 'if they buy it it was good' but I suggest people are easily manipulated, especially when confronted with a massive machine with $Billions to figure how to. But even with both of those things said - I think it is still actually crappy because 1) the click through may be optimized and yet some information could be available to make it better that may not affect click through and 2) the 'long term funnel' may be affected by maligned customers; I avoid Amazon, I suggest others might as well though it may not be that many.
kayo_20211030 3y ago
Garbage. People pick products all the time, based purely on how the presentation makes them feel. They buy crap products all the time based on aspirational signals. People are people; this is selling a book; and most of the comments seem to just reveal/confirm a success bias (just 'cuz) or a failure bias (just 'cuz) with absolutely no evidence.
spikey_sanju 3y ago
Sure, I agree. I simplified my SaaS product SticAI.com and removed any unnecessary features to make it work better. This reduced any difficulties for users. I did the same thing for my open source portfolio website spikeysanju.com, where I made sure that users could consume the content without any distractions. That was the main goal for both projects.
bravura 3y ago
Aside: Is there a "WIP" looking theme for bootstrap? Something purposefully minimal / rough-around-the-edges / handwritten?
- DreaminDani 3y ago
  Paper.CSS
sneed_chucker 3y ago
Tangential, and probably preaching to the choir here, but I really hate the modern web design trends. I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page. I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.
- tgv 3y ago
  They copy each other (and frankly, so do we). This style is their common idea of “professional image”. Since many companies have siloed off marketing, they have no real understanding of what’s going on in the rest of the company. At least, that’s how I see it.
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    If the website contains many sophisticated-looking things like animations etc. it makes many people think you must know a lot because you can come up with such a stylish and sophisticated web-site. In other words it serves as part of the portfolio of your technological prowess. It does not really help the user of the web-site, it helps to fool them into thinking your product must be awesome. The web-site is part of the product, it's the box around the thing you sell.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  In this regard I like the front page of https://www.kraken.com/ https://www.kraken.com/ a lot. > Buy bitcoin & crypto > Sign up today to easily buy 200+ cryptocurrencies. Get started in minutes with as little as $10. > Buy crypto with $10 It is instantly clear what service Kraken offers.
k__ 3y ago
This resonates with me. I'm a developer and writer, not a designer. I'm a bottom up kind of guy, I want to get the things work correctly, without building mockups or a strategy first. Iterative creations, you know? Obviously, non-technical people have to do it the other way around, so most resources you find online focus on the top down approach.
cyberax 3y ago
Also. PLEASE USE LARGER FONTS. One thing I hate about modern design is the use of microscopic fonts with giant margins around them. Often with poor contrast. The whole "material UI" is built like this.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  Really? I don't like modern design or material UI at all, and one of the things I most dislike is huuuge fonts. I apply custom CSS to reduce them to 10-12 pt where 16-24 pt seem common now.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Yes. Look at the GMail UI for example, or Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev (BTW, its UI designer needs to be fired and banned from working on UI design for life). There are large empty margins around each line. That grow if you try to increase the scale. If these margins were decreased, you could have seen more information on one screen.
  - greazy 3y ago
    I think whats happening is that displays/devices are increasing in resolution but some websites specify tiny font sizes which don't scale. Not a web developer so I could be wrong. Hacker news is actually an example of this. I usually zoom in by 110%. Maybe my eyes are getting worse.
deleted 3y ago
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ericamerica 3y ago
Author of the article here — thanks for all the thoughtful comments and personal experiences! I thought I'd add a couple clarifications: 1. I'm not saying your product needs to look like Craigslist all the way up until the end, just that it's a key test in early stage concept validation. Yes, later on, once VALUE is proven, by all means consider design polish to make the experience even better! 2. Yes, this idea is not unique or brand new (I'm an old Balsamiq fan, Basecamp fan, etc) —— the post is just a direct response to the increase in AI-generated interface mockups. Trying to get people to think a bit more deeply about those.
- greazy 3y ago
  The mockup at the top of the article would be useful. Any chance you could share a higher res or svg?
  - ericamerica 3y ago
    Sure, glad it's useful (I'm going to release a version as a digital bonus with the book too) https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2vjj5iv50p5sst/Think-in-4D-Sketching-Kit-4x.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2vjj5iv50p5sst/Think-in-4D-Sketch...
    - greazy 3y ago
      Thank you :)
chrismarlow9 3y ago
I like to use low hardware machines and tweak the os and software to conform to it. One of my favorite changes is to disable websites from using their own fonts and colors and other things in Firefox. It basically disables all css that doesn't deal with layout mechanics. Here's the docs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors-websites-use https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors... Anyway everything ends up looking like craigslist and it's nice if you're into that. Probably a good way to POC with this idea.
gregmac 3y ago
> It’s never been so easy to create incredibly polished mockups The advice in this article applies even to literal mockups you do as part of regular development (ie: even as part of adding new features to an existing, polished product). The more "real" your mockup looks, the more concrete it looks and, even if unconsciously. With high-fidelity mockups, you'll typically get feedback about font choice, colors, spacing and other trivial bits. If you do low-fidelity, you'll get feedback like "why does this data have to be a table?" "Can we just not have these input fields, and move them to advanced options?" "Woah, I thought this would be an entirely different workflow, like (example)". In the first pass, Low-fidelity can be as low quality as a whiteboard, sharpie or mspaint. If it takes more than a couple minutes to draw (not including thinking / discussion time) it's probably too detailed.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> The aesthetic-usability effect I encounter this, all the time. Highly polished UX, and crap functionality (or buggy functionality). In the app we're developing, we spent a lot of time, prototyping the functionality, with a mediocre UX. Once we had decided on it, I refined the business logic into a standalone module, and we're redoing the UX, with a designer.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
I fight this battle all the time with my UX people vs my engineers. UX are informed over and over about the technical limitations of our platforms. Nonetheless I have to calm down the engineers when we do updates/redesigns and the UX try to do things they should know quite well by now that we can't do and wouldn't even make sense. Being a part time PM is rough. I'm looking into getting back into strictly coding now, as the extra money and promotion was not worth it. Hopefully I picked up some people management skills though -_-
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
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stephen 3y ago
Love it. I'd add a 3rd reason to her list, which is not a human bias like the two, but just that high-fidelity mocks lock ideation in the hands of UX. PMs & engs typically don't have Figma editor rights (I worked with a PM who briefly had it once, and then had it revoked for stepping out of line) or Figma knowledge to brainstorm ideas. And a 4th reason: high-fidelity mocks encourage snowflake "Figma being used as a new Photoshop" to do novel pixel-perfect layouts instead of the design system's stock/boring layouts.
anigbrowl 3y ago
This also applies to downvoted posts on HN. On a windows machine i have to highlight them to read them, on mac it's a problem because the highlight color doesn't make a good contrast with the grey, and I don't want to change my system highlight color just for HN. I would much prefer a numerical score, or the downvoted comments being rendered into comic sans than having the comment fade away. Often good and valid comments are hidden through groupthink. Also, I still want to read comments I might disagree with even if they come from people I dislike.

kmoser 3y ago

Proving once again that the KISS principle always applies.

vecplane 3y ago

Is this describing the practice of 'grayboxing' in design?

karaterobot 3y ago
Yeah, or wireframing, or low-fidelity prototyping. Definitely not new advice, but I guess it'll be somebody's first exposure to the idea, so they'll learn a new thing today.
- thoughtpalette 3y ago
  Yea, I find this article kind of weird in the number of comments it has drawn. Low-fidelity wire framing for workflows has been a UX/UI standard for like a decade now.
kmoser 3y ago
It's more about mockups that show the final design. Wireframes, in contrast, are always sparse by definition.

bradgessler 3y ago

I took this approach for https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/ and https://www.thingybase.com/ https://www.thingybase.com/. The art on Thingybase is all poorly drawn stick figures that I sketched out on my iPad. Not only do I recommend doing this when building apps or websites initially, but I recommend it for the final product. It ends up being much faster, easier to maintain, easier for people to read, and more accessible. I have another app in the works that’s using https://picocss.com/ https://picocss.com/ with basically no CSS. It’s great not having to think too much about design elements and focus on only the most important bits of the application.

s1k3s 3y ago
Minimalism for the sake of minimalism is just as bad as the concept described in the article. For example I find your blog very easy to read but very hard to navigate. I don't understand its structure, I can't find any menus and I don't know when I'm at the end of "something".
- bradgessler 3y ago
  Glad it’s easy to read! That’s exactly what it’s optimized for. There’s no real structure to the site, hence no menus and nothing really to navigate to. I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design—I don’t advocate for that. What I do advocate for is minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
woozyolliew 3y ago
Bookmarking Legible News! I have been surviving on https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com, https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/, and http://68k.news/ http://68k.news/, but your site is much easier on the eye, so will be taking it for a spin.
- welovetacos 3y ago
  If you're into sports also check out https://plaintextsports.com https://plaintextsports.com Amazingly well done
akpa1 3y ago
For Thingybase, unless I'm mistaken, your privacy policy and ToS have "if xyz, contact us" scattered all over them, but there is no email address anywhere to be found on the site to contact you at. Edit: oh, and the delete profile button doesn't work.
WalterBright 3y ago
I needed some artwork for the Empire game, and needed it right away. So I made some "placeholder" graphics with MS-Paint, in my 2nd grader style, and never got around to doing proper artwork.

echelon 3y ago

Plenty of people use HN. Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit". I'm continually reminded of how 4chan is still a thing. We admire bare bones web design, spartan blogs, and archeological finds from the 90's web that are still around. You don't need a design team to build something useful that people will consume.

webmobdev 3y ago
Functionality always trumps jazzy designs. (E.g. Craigslist vs olx.in).
myself248 3y ago
They load faster, too. I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.
- ghostpepper 3y ago
  There must be something about grocery sites that makes them so awful. I've even submitted feedback to a delivery service that I used to use with comments like "enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products" "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters" "searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists" etc. How can it be so bad??
  - toast0 3y ago
    > "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters" My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2 and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    Instacart's "plugin" for Aldi is sooooo slow compared to Amazon. It's some weird amalgamation of single page and multi page "post" type designs. It's kinda pretty though I guess.

webmobdev 3y ago

This is really good advise. When I started out, one of the best advise I got as a web designer was to always ask new clients to focus on the content. I had to repeatedly emphasise to the clients who got distracted with beautiful templates or wanted flash-bang animated, multimedia on their site that you need to focus on specific objectives, with content to match this, and my job as designer was to present the content to achieve these goals. But no, the clients were still obsessed with wanting a "banner that showed ripples in water when a drop falls on it" ...

dougSF70 3y ago

Totally agree, substance over style.

kazinator 3y ago

The real Craigslist Test: "would people still love it if it looked like Craiglist, and then took RSS away to spite them, like Craigslist".

alasdair_ 3y ago

Similar to this: I raised a seed round with a deck that was (deliberately) just black Times New Roman text on a white background, plus a few screenshots. The product was also deliberately simple and rough around the edges. I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes. Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was the content, not the presentation.

jjeaff 3y ago
I wonder what percentage of investors might actually draw the conclusion that while you may have a great product, you might be bad at marketing it? Because, while lots of engineers would like to think that the success of a product is due to the tech and features, the reality is that good market can make a crap product successful a lot more often than a good product can overcome bad marketing and presentation. Craigslist seems to be an exception rather than the rule.
- blululu 3y ago
  It might have been great marketing for the same sort of counter signaling as the Mark Zuckerberg hoodie. “A man who can dress that poorly must be really good”. Craigslist is an outlier in many ways. The most significant is that they did not raise huge venture rounds so they have never been existentially committed to fulfilling an investor’s opinion of what a top 25 website should be.
asdfman123 3y ago
Similar to this: consistently be a total weirdo and end up with a girl that actually likes you. (Don’t ask me how I know)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  This is a tangent, but perhaps similar to what you are saying. Dare to stand out. Even if it’s unpopular and immediately pushes away 90% of people. Your goal when dating is not to make everyone like you. It’s to find one person that loves you.

turnsout 3y ago

Speaking as a design consultant who specializes in software: this is good advice! Use the lowest fidelity possible until you figure out what your product is and who it's for. Once you know that, it will give you a clear direction for the visuals and interactions.

55555 3y ago

I'm a lazy guy, so when I _first_ validate a business opportunity for product-market fit, I do a purposefully bad job. If a good job is required, the opportunity isn't good enough.

ec109685 3y ago

That example of Maybe.co and their pivot was illustrative of form over function. However, I can’t see how their new approach will be successful either: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758 https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758 Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? They are competing head on with billion dollar companies and adding a chat interface and video conferencing as the differentiation. They have to do all the hard parts to onboard users, convince them to connect with their financial institutions, establish trust with financial recommendations, build a two sided marketplace with financial advisors, yet Mint or wealth front or many other companies could spend six months and have a better product out in the market with an established user base and way of making money. Why are investors excited by this pivot?

balderdash 3y ago
I’d go a step further and say that none of these types of products actually do the hard work that people would be willing to pay for. E.g. most of these statistics are wrong (net worth increased x% because I rolled over my IRA, dividend reinvestments treated improperly, basis accounted for the wrong way, etc)
indymike 3y ago
> Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? In this case, I think the founders realized that by focusing on UI and data engineering, they were not focused on the right things: what kind of digital financial assistant is worth paying for? Finally, the question, "why won't big existing player come eat your lunch?" directs conversation away from opportunity. Products like maybe.co often end up being acquired by big, existing players because huge companies often struggle with invention and ideation, and it's often easier to deploy money to buy the kernel of a great product than what happens in most large, risk-adverse companies when innovation requires internal failure after internal failure before success. > Why are investors excited by this pivot? I'm not an investor in maybe.co, but I'm much more interested in what they are doing now that they aren't focused on pretty UI. They have a long way to go before they have something, but as they say, keep a good team on the field long enough... and good things happen.

gpt5 3y ago

Craigslist is an example of the strength of network effects. It’s succeeding despite its user hostile design because it has no incentive to change. Using it as an example for MVP of your design is ludicrous.

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Hmm, first-mover advantage maybe, but there's no real "network effect" I can see - are all my friends on CL? How would I even know? Craigslist is heroically ugly, but I wouldn't call that "user hostile" - the only obvious dysfunction I can see are the usual gaming of listings a la eBay etc., from local car dealerships spamming keywords, etc.
- toast0 3y ago
  Network effects in a marketplace are clear. Buyers go where the sellers are, sellers go where the buyers are, etc. Craigslist networking is mostly local, so some places there's not much in the way of listings (for jobs, services, marketplace, etc) and some places only one category is popular and some places you would find your job, your apartment, your furniture, and before personals went away, maybe your spouse.
chomp 3y ago
This is definitely a take. Can you explain the network effects and user hostility?
bityard 3y ago
I've used Craigslist for, what, decades and I never found it to be user-hostile. If I owned it, I would probably make a few tweaks here and there but I have no trouble at all placing an ad or browsing the listings. It's a very honest design and I think that speaks to people. Contrast that to the thing that is replacing it: Facebook marketplace. It's beautiful, but, the barrier to entry is high, there is no practical way to browse specific categories, search shows tons of irrelevant results, there is no way to set up keyword or category alerts, and it's riddled with scams and flakes. The entire object of FB is not to get anything done, it's to keep you scrolling for as long as possible.

leobg 3y ago

Hacker News is actually another great example of this concept. If you plotted the appearance vs. usefulness ratio for 1,000 websites, HN would be one of the crazy outliers. Good one! Thanks for posting this.

Scoundreller 3y ago
I feel like human raters at Google ruined my SEO after looking at the graphic design of my website :( Not only is ranking on appearance faster than usefulness, a rater can confidently do that because their other raters will do the same. “Tight inter-rater variability” = confidence in rating for some reason, as opposed to consistency in bias.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  I wonder if there's something generally true about bureaucracies in that: do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy? Given how bureaucrats often travel in large packs and seem to find safety in numbers, maybe it's unsurprising that they would value agreeing with each other over finding the truth. I had no idea the SEO world had its own bureaucracies of human web-site raters, though. I guess it makes sense that lots of large companies would invest in creating that sort of thing. :(
  - mlhpdx 3y ago
    That’s what the Black-Scholes equation does: variation is risk. It’s manifest everywhere.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy? There are some issues to be aware of here. It isn't possible to do the reverse - to value accuracy over precision - because your accuracy is limited by your precision. This is a theorem in psychometrics, where the phrasing is that the validity of an assessment (the degree to which it accurately measures some quantity of interest to you) is bounded by the reliability (the degree to which, if you assess the same thing twice, you get similar estimates). If you find that your assessments aren't accurate enough, you can only fix that by increasing your precision, so the concept of valuing precision over accuracy is a little bit weird.

ex3ndr 3y ago

Well, AirBNB wouldn't pass this test in early days since they mostly started to grow after starting making professional photos

Scoundreller 3y ago
I always felt like Craigslist pre-validated AirBNB as a business. Short-term rooms for rent was already a popular Craigslist section. AirBNB took that and (1) added payment, (2) parametric searching and (3) better profiles. Craigslist is/was largely where things get listed that don't have a specialized site that fulfills those at least 2 of those. E.g. etsy, ebay, stubhub, online dating, rideshares, gigs https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-a-platform-eroded-by-platforms/ https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-... Image from above link: https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000 https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000
- bombcar 3y ago
  Craigslist did classifieds at the price of free which is impossible to beat (though apparently they're slipping to Facebook marketplace now, but I've no recent data). And the Craigslist interface is damn close to a classified section in a paper.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    > free which is impossible to beat I mean, they could also pay you, the content creator, but yeah, that wouldn’t work as well on a classified ad website.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

As someone who is still scared of CSS and HTML, all I can say is: my time has come.

neon_electro 3y ago
You can do it!
gwd 3y ago
Unfortunately, the advice was to focus on the important user interactions. Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have. I can tell that there's something wrong, but I can't really tell how to fix it.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  That comes with practice. Use the fewest built-in controls for an interaction, then try it out. You’ll probably need to tweak it: add/remove labels, add a control, line breaks, etc. There’s no magic gene for this, it’s just the willingness and ability to navigate a large design space.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have. I'm reminded of Adam Savage's observation that practice alone gets you 80% of the way to mastery. Talent is what gets you the last 20%, but for most things, 80% is good enough.

Waterluvian 3y ago

For about a decade now I've been building robotics software UIs in a context where we don't have a design team (internal software, tech savvy users, start-up pace). One of the things I've found to work so consistently well is the kind of test shared in this article. I regularly say, "to learn what we don't yet know about the problem space" when asked about why I like shipping things ASAP and then worrying about design characteristics later. I'm convinced that design regularly impacts a feature's usefulness, but is rarely necessary to make it useful at all. That is: it's important but not required. Of course this is for a captive audience. For something you're trying to sell, window dressing can matter.

draw_down 3y ago

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indymike 3y ago

When I onboard a new designer, I usually talk with them about Craig's List, Amazon versus "beautiful" UI. The point is exactly the last line of this article: "Focus on content and functionality when you’re designing new products; that’s the validation that will build a business." Now I'm going to add this article to required reading for new engineering team members.

lost_tourist 3y ago
Both are important but look is always second to reliability and functionality. You can have the prettiest book cover in the world but if it's a sandwiching a pile of crap it won't sell.
- indymike 3y ago
  I think in this case content is being blended with functionality since the AI is actually in the business of delivering content. Regardless, I can’t agree with you more about functionality and reliability. Functionality sells, and reliability keeps it sold.
jasmer 3y ago
Amazon is bad UI though. The information they present is inconsistent, the descriptions barely make sense, it's hard to compare products. It's byzantine.
- indymike 3y ago
  I Amazon really bad? Their transaction volume would seem to indicate that users are succeeding in placing orders at a very high frequency. This is exactly why Amazon is a great study for new designers and engineers.
  - jasmer 3y ago
    Yes, you are right, and I should have qualified that because I'm aware it's optimized, but it's effectively a grey pattern at best: a UI that is sub-optimal in terms of presentation of information, but optimized for click-through. I'm sure one could make a case for 'if they buy it it was good' but I suggest people are easily manipulated, especially when confronted with a massive machine with $Billions to figure how to. But even with both of those things said - I think it is still actually crappy because 1) the click through may be optimized and yet some information could be available to make it better that may not affect click through and 2) the 'long term funnel' may be affected by maligned customers; I avoid Amazon, I suggest others might as well though it may not be that many.

kayo_20211030 3y ago

Garbage. People pick products all the time, based purely on how the presentation makes them feel. They buy crap products all the time based on aspirational signals. People are people; this is selling a book; and most of the comments seem to just reveal/confirm a success bias (just 'cuz) or a failure bias (just 'cuz) with absolutely no evidence.

spikey_sanju 3y ago

Sure, I agree. I simplified my SaaS product SticAI.com and removed any unnecessary features to make it work better. This reduced any difficulties for users. I did the same thing for my open source portfolio website spikeysanju.com, where I made sure that users could consume the content without any distractions. That was the main goal for both projects.

bravura 3y ago

Aside: Is there a "WIP" looking theme for bootstrap? Something purposefully minimal / rough-around-the-edges / handwritten?

DreaminDani 3y ago
Paper.CSS

sneed_chucker 3y ago

Tangential, and probably preaching to the choir here, but I really hate the modern web design trends. I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page. I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.

tgv 3y ago
They copy each other (and frankly, so do we). This style is their common idea of “professional image”. Since many companies have siloed off marketing, they have no real understanding of what’s going on in the rest of the company. At least, that’s how I see it.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  If the website contains many sophisticated-looking things like animations etc. it makes many people think you must know a lot because you can come up with such a stylish and sophisticated web-site. In other words it serves as part of the portfolio of your technological prowess. It does not really help the user of the web-site, it helps to fool them into thinking your product must be awesome. The web-site is part of the product, it's the box around the thing you sell.
codetrotter 3y ago
In this regard I like the front page of https://www.kraken.com/ https://www.kraken.com/ a lot. > Buy bitcoin & crypto > Sign up today to easily buy 200+ cryptocurrencies. Get started in minutes with as little as $10. > Buy crypto with $10 It is instantly clear what service Kraken offers.

k__ 3y ago

This resonates with me. I'm a developer and writer, not a designer. I'm a bottom up kind of guy, I want to get the things work correctly, without building mockups or a strategy first. Iterative creations, you know? Obviously, non-technical people have to do it the other way around, so most resources you find online focus on the top down approach.

cyberax 3y ago

Also. PLEASE USE LARGER FONTS. One thing I hate about modern design is the use of microscopic fonts with giant margins around them. Often with poor contrast. The whole "material UI" is built like this.

orhmeh09 3y ago
Really? I don't like modern design or material UI at all, and one of the things I most dislike is huuuge fonts. I apply custom CSS to reduce them to 10-12 pt where 16-24 pt seem common now.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Yes. Look at the GMail UI for example, or Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev (BTW, its UI designer needs to be fired and banned from working on UI design for life). There are large empty margins around each line. That grow if you try to increase the scale. If these margins were decreased, you could have seen more information on one screen.
- greazy 3y ago
  I think whats happening is that displays/devices are increasing in resolution but some websites specify tiny font sizes which don't scale. Not a web developer so I could be wrong. Hacker news is actually an example of this. I usually zoom in by 110%. Maybe my eyes are getting worse.

deleted 3y ago

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ericamerica 3y ago

Author of the article here — thanks for all the thoughtful comments and personal experiences! I thought I'd add a couple clarifications: 1. I'm not saying your product needs to look like Craigslist all the way up until the end, just that it's a key test in early stage concept validation. Yes, later on, once VALUE is proven, by all means consider design polish to make the experience even better! 2. Yes, this idea is not unique or brand new (I'm an old Balsamiq fan, Basecamp fan, etc) —— the post is just a direct response to the increase in AI-generated interface mockups. Trying to get people to think a bit more deeply about those.

greazy 3y ago
The mockup at the top of the article would be useful. Any chance you could share a higher res or svg?
- ericamerica 3y ago
  Sure, glad it's useful (I'm going to release a version as a digital bonus with the book too) https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2vjj5iv50p5sst/Think-in-4D-Sketching-Kit-4x.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2vjj5iv50p5sst/Think-in-4D-Sketch...
  - greazy 3y ago
    Thank you :)

chrismarlow9 3y ago

I like to use low hardware machines and tweak the os and software to conform to it. One of my favorite changes is to disable websites from using their own fonts and colors and other things in Firefox. It basically disables all css that doesn't deal with layout mechanics. Here's the docs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors-websites-use https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors... Anyway everything ends up looking like craigslist and it's nice if you're into that. Probably a good way to POC with this idea.

gregmac 3y ago

> It’s never been so easy to create incredibly polished mockups The advice in this article applies even to literal mockups you do as part of regular development (ie: even as part of adding new features to an existing, polished product). The more "real" your mockup looks, the more concrete it looks and, even if unconsciously. With high-fidelity mockups, you'll typically get feedback about font choice, colors, spacing and other trivial bits. If you do low-fidelity, you'll get feedback like "why does this data have to be a table?" "Can we just not have these input fields, and move them to advanced options?" "Woah, I thought this would be an entirely different workflow, like (example)". In the first pass, Low-fidelity can be as low quality as a whiteboard, sharpie or mspaint. If it takes more than a couple minutes to draw (not including thinking / discussion time) it's probably too detailed.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> The aesthetic-usability effect I encounter this, all the time. Highly polished UX, and crap functionality (or buggy functionality). In the app we're developing, we spent a lot of time, prototyping the functionality, with a mediocre UX. Once we had decided on it, I refined the business logic into a standalone module, and we're redoing the UX, with a designer.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

I fight this battle all the time with my UX people vs my engineers. UX are informed over and over about the technical limitations of our platforms. Nonetheless I have to calm down the engineers when we do updates/redesigns and the UX try to do things they should know quite well by now that we can't do and wouldn't even make sense. Being a part time PM is rough. I'm looking into getting back into strictly coding now, as the extra money and promotion was not worth it. Hopefully I picked up some people management skills though -_-

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

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stephen 3y ago

Love it. I'd add a 3rd reason to her list, which is not a human bias like the two, but just that high-fidelity mocks lock ideation in the hands of UX. PMs & engs typically don't have Figma editor rights (I worked with a PM who briefly had it once, and then had it revoked for stepping out of line) or Figma knowledge to brainstorm ideas. And a 4th reason: high-fidelity mocks encourage snowflake "Figma being used as a new Photoshop" to do novel pixel-perfect layouts instead of the design system's stock/boring layouts.

anigbrowl 3y ago

This also applies to downvoted posts on HN. On a windows machine i have to highlight them to read them, on mac it's a problem because the highlight color doesn't make a good contrast with the grey, and I don't want to change my system highlight color just for HN. I would much prefer a numerical score, or the downvoted comments being rendered into comic sans than having the comment fade away. Often good and valid comments are hidden through groupthink. Also, I still want to read comments I might disagree with even if they come from people I dislike.