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xyzelement
whstl
They also very often don’t understand what’s easy and what’s hard to implement, what’s a real priority vs a nice to have, and have extremely strong opinions against off-the-shelf components and prefer building everything from scratch.
Also: The lesson of “don’t rewrite” from Joel Spolsky seems internalized in the minds of every developer, but "rewriting from scratch" is basically how designers operate by default.
Most of the explosion in frontend development complexity and amount of work in the last few years is because designers are inflating development costs and companies are eating it with smiling faces where complaining that developers are costly and wanting AI to fix the problem.
This kind of inefficiency and inequality in decision power is a huge thing in our industry. The same situation happens with QAs trying to play product and asking for modifications at the end of development that very often amount only to personal opinion and require developers to keep burning political capital to say no to.
I am not saying designers, QAs, PMs and developers should know everything, but when true collaboration doesn’t happen, due to personalities or political reasons, the result and the execution will always be lacking.
yawnxyz
really good observation, and it's interesting what will happen when implementation gets cheaper - designers will get overwhelmed with too many things to review now, probably
joshuamoyers
except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.
16mb
Those were never really that difficult to implement. The agentic way still requires proper communication, which is often what projects lack so I don’t see it changing much.
xyzelement
Replying to my own post because it's too late to edit.
This post has clearly struck a nerve as I think it's my most upvoted post on HN ever. Behind this post is 3 companies worth of experience working with great designers (really, UXers) who vehemently advocate on behalf of the user but don't realize their own limitations to understand that user (and to therefore tone down the advocacy accordingly.)
This is particularly obvious in the business setting where truly empathizing with the user requires understanding the business they are in and their realities/pressures, not just their experience in a specific program. The UX'ers over index on what they can infer about the user experience in the absence of that broader understanding - and usually the founders/sales/whoever instinct about what's actually good or bad is valuable to at least unpack because it's grounded in some business/industry/customer intuition the UXer likely doesn't have access too.
I take from the high upvotes of this comment that this is a very common perception, that almost all UXers are oblivious to.
TheGRS
Yea I mean the first reaction I had to the blog was "yes, but have you met the same designers I have?" And to be clear I've worked with great designers who understood their limitations and blind spots, but its pretty common to see ones who charge ahead and ignore valuable developer feedback.
jerf
And when the CEO says "Hey, we really need to make our contact information more visible because I get a lot of customer reports that they can't figure out how to contact us", sure.
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?
notpushkin
> 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
Simple: they’re trying to give you the solution, and it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see. Here’s a nice set of questions I’m using (from Managing projects, people, and yourself [1] by Nick Toverovskiy):
1. What did you mean by that?
2. Why is it important?
3. How is this related to the purpose of the project?
4. How does this relate to other parts of the system? What else could be affected by this change?
5. Why is it critical to resolve this before the next release / deadline?
This should paint a fairly decent picture of what’s really on your client’s (or manager’s) mind. Then you can propose a solution to the real problem – which might very well be the one that your client has proposed!
(Some questions might sound stupid in context. You can skip them, or just admit it: “I’m gonna ask some questions which might make me sound like an idiot, but that would really help me figure out the problem better. Would that be alright with you?”)
[1]: https://bureau.ru/books/fff-demo/20 (in Russian)
ninalanyon
> it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see.
I tried with wildly varying degrees of success to impress this on my fellow developers for decades. In every case it was an utterly new and foreign idea to them, including those who had actually studied computer science at degree level.
citizenpaul
My problem with most of these books is they are indirectly trying to solve the real problem. The problem that IME HN is allergic to discussing.
Power Dynamics.
The reason the CEO is nitpicking your job is because he is not a good CEO and doesn't know his place or how to do his job. Almost all these books are about an indirect way of dealing with the fact that, this person is a ID10T and you have to deal with them because they have more power than you. Yet it is literally NEVER discussed.
The books(IDK about this one) really summarizes indirect ways of how to be subservient and not accidentally antagonize your "superiors" which are frequently people just born into a better lot in life than you, without feeling like that is what you are doing.
What is the CEO's primary duties, networking?, Sales, COMMUNICATING yet its your job to read books on how to tiptoe around how to sus out what they cannot COMMUNICATE?
gtsop
[dead]
miki123211
A bad designer can design a good-looking password form. A mediocre designer anticipates that they need to design for the case where the passwords don't match. A great designer can figure out that this particular product should actually be using magic links and not passwords.
antisthenes
> A great designer can figure out that this particular product should actually be using magic links and not passwords.
If your designers are needing to generate input on technical issues like this, your product is already in trouble.
befictious
If your designers are only picking colors, fonts, and spacing then you don't have designers, you have software art directors.
lavela
If you frame that issue as a purely technical one without ux/usability implications, where you'd absolutely want to have a (good) designer in the loop, your product is in trouble, too.
ragnese
Yep. I've learned that lesson more than once. Maybe one of these days it'll stick... :p
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.
tomnipotent
> you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances
Something that's always stuck with me is a bit from the book "Don't Make Me Think" about cost vs. value in attention and complexity, that when you add a feature used by only a small percentage of users you're "taxing" 100% of users for the benefit of a few. That you should optimize for the common path and not edge cases. Over two decades later I still find this an exceedingly difficult challenge to juggle that doesn't just mean hiding advanced features behind extra menus.
chongli
Menus, gestures, keyboard shortcuts, advanced versions of the interface locked behind preferences, and fully customizable menus (including user-defined macro buttons). There are a ton of ways to hide the complexity for common users without frustrating power users. The challenge for the designer is the taste/judgement to know which features to show/hide and where (as well as how to organize all the menus logically).
kamma4434
> The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business.
And want something shiny done so they can show it in their portfolio. Especially the ones who consider themselves ‘artists’.
cm11
I'm struck by the assuredness of the responses. People seem to really dislike their designers—their low in the hierarchy, often junior colleagues who typically aren't in the meetings with the execs, the leaders, or whoever else has chosen the priorities. There's a reason the designers don't know "what's really right." There's a reason they're grasping to find or do research to inform themselves. You know, besides the part, where they're being asked to do that user research, often by their PMs and leaders. There's a weird amount of scapegoating here.
It's been my experience that leaders have rarely had enough of a vision to share, but tell the team to get started anyway. Someone has to suss that out—if not the leaders, then the PM except that the PM can skirt with vague requirements. The designs are the first place where all the ideas (many contradicting, many poorly thought out) hit a little reality. When the ideas that looked good amorphously in the head don't look good on screen, it's the design and not the requirements.
There's an insinuation in some of the comments that the projects (the leaders) are starting with a clear vision and design is muddying it up. I mean there are plenty of bad designers, but most companies have a broken product development process (they mostly all use the same one, despite different products, different team makeups, different leader strengths/weaknesses, etc.). Why are companies still hiring designers? Why is design a step in the process at all? I agree confusing designs keep coming out—there are so many enshittified products. It's design theater, but for who? Design is downstream not upstream.
sixtyj
The waterfall is this: Owners/managers - sales and marketing - agency - designers - coders…
…and owners’ spouses/partners… these have a final word in many cases :)
Customers or users? They are designed as persona types during sales/marketing and agency meetings.
I saw so many overdesigned sites and sentences not giving any sense that they would do better with a simple bullet list and CTA “Call us” :)
monokai_nl
My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.)
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.
_fat_santa
One distinction the author didn't make was personal sites vs product / services sites. My personal site is for me, but the site for my SaaS app? That's for my customers.
bisby
_should be_ for your customers.
Business minded folk can convince themselves that "ads are for the consumer because they benefit from knowing about our great deals!" but everyone else knows that ads are for the business to increase revenue. If they didn't increase revenue, the business wouldn't do it.
If your website provides an actual utility, then that utility is for the customers. Everything else on the site (upsells, cross sells, branding), is for the business.
satvikpendem
They increase revenue by...getting customers. Therefore everything on the site is for the customer, in terms of acquiring them.
satvikpendem
They're not talking about personal websites, they're talking about business ones.
simpaticoder
Wouldn't it be nice if there were less of a distinction? Think of old school mom-and-pop shops, which were actually a reflection of who they were, personally, vs. Wal-Mart or Target. Which main street do you prefer?
malfist
Depends on what I'm trying to do. I don't need your whole life story, Sarah, about how this recipe reminds you of your great aunt's second cousin's half sister's second home balcony plants. I'm just trying to figure out what seasoning blend makes up blackening spice. I'm not even here for the meatloaf recipe, just the spice blend.
satvikpendem
Whichever converts better is good for their business and actually supports the mom and pop business materially over merely aesthetic views on their website design.
jstummbillig
In a mom-and-pop shop you still want good electrical wiring.
tasuki
The article makes no mention of "personal" nor "business". Why not mention that it's talking about business websites? The original author made a (wrong) blanket statement, and monokai called them out on it.
satvikpendem
The article doesn't need to make explicit mention of it because it's implied in the article's content:
> 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.
Which personal website has a "founder, the marketing manager, or the board" much less a "customer weighing up a purchase?"
Not everything is always spelled out.
dgellow
I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here
hughw
Agree. Show people your vision. Make them understand it the way you see it. Otherwise you're publishing the same ineffective pablum we see everywhere.
willchis
Exactly! This whole sentiment reminds me of the Jobs quote "people don't know what they want until you show it to them".
xondono
But that isn’t the point at all.
For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
dgellow
Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot
satvikpendem
This is how your company goes broke. There was a company, Amie, that had this [0] as their landing page initially, without the /art path. Guess what, visitors didn't convert, and then the company redid their landing page [1] to actually explain and convert customers. They literally host their prior landing page as "art" because it was so terrible at acquiring customers.
[1] https://amie.so
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jeffhwang
Agreed. As someone who has been in charge of business websites of for both Mag7 websites and for Silicon Valley startups, there can be a productive disagreement about what exactly user needs are. As well as how to balance business conversion / sales metrics vs the larger ability to communicate brand identity.
Meanwhile, my personal website pretty much only serves my own idiosyncratic interests!
jdw64
A website is a compromise between three parties.
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.
jdw64
Why do people pay so much money for reports from dubious firms like Gartner?
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.
eszed
This, so much.
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?
jdw64
[dead]
jayers
> 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?
Keep your ear to the ground and when you start to hear rumblings of this happening, pay a skilled freelancer to update the old website (or just build a new one if its easier) to fit the new marketing director's taste. Solve marketing's problem, save the company a bunch of money, be the hero.
big85
Perhaps better stated: Your company's website isn't for you, it's to pursue the agenda of your company. Your personal homepage is for you, if you can free yourself from view count as a success metric.
bcjdjsndon
I think it's implicit...
smeej
It is, but not until you actually get into the article.
I also assumed the article would be about personal websites until I read it.
satvikpendem
People should be reading the article before posting knee-jerk responses like I see elsewhere on this thread.
josefresco
Came here to say basically this. Your company website is not for you, but your personal website should be. I spent years chasing Google traffic and useless business goals for my own blog until I realized I should publish for me, not the users.
And if I do something that Google doesn't like... who cares? It's for me and Google will come crawling (literally) back anyways.
Currently I use my blog as a bookmarking service. Instead of a browser bookmark, I built a Chrome extension that simply posts the link to my blog as a new post where it's public, and easily discoverable from any device BY ME!
aleda145
I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are.
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!
p2hari
Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also. You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
cyberge99
How do you know what his side project is? I couldn’t find a link.
Stratoscope
It's listed in his HN profile: https://kavla.dev/
Along with his personal website: https://dahl.dev/
aleda145
I remember p2hari commenting on one of my "What are you working on" comments, so maybe they got it from there. Anyway, here's the link: https://kavla.dev/
undefined
embedding-shape
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board.
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 :)
todotask2
Actually, I can see why this blogs and the agency was created after reading their FAQs (preferred Astro and Next.js). But note that, there are multiple WebSmith site which can caught new clients to be confused.
pvillano
If you're in this comment section, consider play-testing your website. Find someone who has never used it and watch them explore it for the first time, while they think out loud, without giving them any help. My personal website had links to GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. on the home page, and the first thing my brother in law did was leave the site, without ever looking at any of my posts, which were indexed on another page.
This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.
shermantanktop
The ones who treat a website as their personal taste vehicle are the designers! Over and over I see tiny illegible fonts and gray-on-gray buttons being defended by the designer who made it.
Maybe I have bad taste - I’ve built enough websites to know that good design is hard and doesn’t come naturally to me. But the professionals seem to have a hard time with being dispassionate about their own ideas.
prerok
I think there was another comment among these that said it best: "graphics designers". The main conflict seems to arise between usability (UX) and the "view". It may look pretty but if it's unusable it's a showstopper.
Sorry for regurgitating what someone else posted but it really resonated with my experience.
Nivge
The problem is that user research and competitive research are also not the truth. I prefer to ship something I know I like than what someone else thinks a third abstract person might like.
DANmode
User research + your tasteful assumptions to fix pain points
is the closest thing to truth we have.
cnst
This doesn't even touch the entire resume-driven development issue.
The vast majority of all websites today, are designed in such a way as to tout the resumes of all the people responsible for the site with all the latest buzzwords. Content hidden under drop-down menus noone cares about and which makes things very hard to find, pointless animation here and there, pointless custom zoom logic that doesn't work properly on the big screens, all the latest frameworks to display a few tables of text, progressive loading and pagination for the simplest of data (like the banking transactions of a consumer credit card) that in the old days could have simply been displayed on a single page etc.
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The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time.
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.