Does this happen to anyone else? This is so frustrating and discouraging. I often get unmotivated to finish things because of this issue. How do you guys deal with it?
I'm talking strictly about side/weekend projects.
There are 2 types of ideas where this is true:
* I can make a lot of money using your software that it would be near impossible to make otherwise.
* I can save a lot of money using your software that it would be near impossible to save otherwise.
Any other idea is just a bias guess that needs to be market tested, were UI/UX may or may not be of any importance.
If you are really sold on the Importance Of UI (tm). Read this book: Design for Hackers (https://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Be...). It will not make you a designer, but it will make your UIs not fugly.
And finally, please consider on coding the software thinking it has no UI, or that the current UI is only one of many ways to use your software. It will help you to structure it so you can fix the UI later when it is actually profitable.
If you'd like some additional advice, feel free to contact me (email should be in my profile).
For Bootstrap (UI Kit might be the same but I haven't used it) your best option is to look at their examples[1], find one you like, then view the source code from it. Use that as your starting page and go from there.
But like I said: any customizing, tweaking, etc will require you to know some HTML and CSS.
That's the easy part. Knowing what you want it to look like, that's the hard part.
Also Google 'hackathon starter' for your language. Most languages have some predesigned stuff that's open and you and hack/modify.
+ If it solves a meaningful problem, a meaningful number of people will not care about the UX. That's why people can build tools lacking a polished UX for themselves...and their coworkers...and small business...and enterprise.
+ The tools for accurately solving complicated variable problems are often complicated themselves. A high end Nikon camera has billions of combinations of settings. The interface exposing that combinatorial complexity becomes manageable with a few years of relevant experience...that few years of experience is better than the alternatives for someone who is trying to solve the complex variable problems...and not better for someone who isn't and won't be.
+ Design is iterative. More iterative than agile TDD, because a new design suggests a new set of tests...the acceptance criteria keep moving.
+ If it really matters, hire a professional designer. Don't expect designers to work for free unless you are developing something that makes their life easier...like design software. Designers get lots of chances to work for free on things that benefit someone else.
Good luck.
Don't build a GUI if you don't have the skills to build a GUI. You won't be able to compete on features in the long run, and you certainly won't be able to compete on design in the short run. And certainly not without devoting 100% of your time towards it.
Instead realize that there are three primary types of interfaces that are in wide use today: GUI, API, and CLI.
If you're a backend dev the last two are much easier for you to build. So instead of building a GUI, build and API. Hire a designer to design you a basic 1 page marketing site. Keep it simple. Put up API docs on http://readme.io/ or something like that. Then iterate on features. Once you solve someones problem well enough find a second person. Iterate until finding leads is your primary problem, not closing them. At that point switch to marketing fulltime.
This is a good idea. Indeed, if the software is useful enough, people will build free, open source GUIs and CLIs for your API. Just look at the open source mobile apps and CLIs popping up with DeepL translation system, for example.
The other part is that I learned by copying. I found an app I liked and wanted to make my own version of, and then component by component I copied it, often using the browser inspector to understand how the CSS worked.
I'll use one of my recent projects as an example. Here's the first version of the landing page : https://imgur.com/a/BDNgl and here's the current landing page : https://www.hostedcomments.com/
Even though the current version could be improved significantly, I graduated from receiving comments such as "The current one doesn't motivate me to continue, even less to buy from you" to being somewhat acceptable.
Here's what works for me : I used bootstrap but tweaked the colours of the default buttons, the colour of the navbar and footer and it made a world of difference. The default bootstrap colour scheme is pretty ordinary and the examples feel like they are literally designed to expose people like me, who just use the default bootstrap colour scheme and example code snippets and end up with a terrible design. As an example, the default navbar has rounded corners and a simple addition of the navbar-static-top class makes the navbar look significantly better.
Regarding UX, keep things as straightforward as possible. Cut out all the bullshit and fluff to deliver a flow that's natural to new users. You will need to talk to users to figure out what works and what doesn't. It's also a good idea to have helpful tooltips in areas where users can potentially have trouble understanding the flow.
In general use screenshots/gifs/videos liberally, especially on the landing page. They work pretty well.
1) increase the left and right margins for your nav menu to match the margins of your other page elements, like the price menu.
2) Change the color of the card icons, making them all the same color.
3) Use a palette maker like http://paletton.com or pre-set palettes like from http://www.colourlovers.com/ But next one is important!
4) For UX/UI beginners, USE AS FEW COLORS AS POSSIBLE. Maybe even just one accent colors along with several shades of blacks or greys. Maybe then use colourlovers or paletton to help add one additional color and ask for input. The number one mistake I see backend devs making when they make frontend sites is using lots of different colors that don't work together (btw, even very talented designers usually use no more than 2-3 colors along with various shades of white/grey/black).
If you're developing Free Software with good purposes, then contact our design team at https://bold.cat/
Remember also that many "minimalist" / "undesigned" sites (e.g. Craigslist) are quite popular. "Good" design isn't necessarily more elaborate or complicated; often users will prefer an interface that is concise and clear with a few well-thought-out options to one that looks nicer but is unusable.
I'm no designer myself, but I've done a passable job of maintaining reasonable design in my projects with a few principles: understand what your users want to do, then help them do that; use visual cues consistently (contrast, color, size, font weight, etc.); pick easily readable fonts; and so on.
A bit of reading up on design from various perspectives helps. Here's some of my favorite resources: https://www.nngroup.com/reports/, The Design of Everyday Things, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/, Understanding Comics (no, seriously! A lot of "sequential art" principles transfer well to web design), https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility (accessibility isn't just about helping the disabled; a more accessible site is, well, more accessible to everyone).
Also, learn to use the tools that are out there. There are color pickers to help you build reasonable color schemes, font libraries (e.g. Google Web Fonts) for easy-to-use readable fonts, icon libraries (e.g. Noun Project) for decent icons covering common user actions. CSS3 itself has many goodies (transitions, ::before / ::after pseudo-classes, etc.), and is worth learning in detail.
Even if you end up working with designers - I certainly do for many projects - it's worth your time to understand the basic principles.
If people are willing to use it, figure out how to improve the visual design -- delegate, sell it, design sabbatical, take some classes, whatever. This may require throwing some work away, but it's still a functioning thing.
Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have the skills.
Everyone tries to take a logical approach like it's coding, but good design is an artform and should be treated as such. Contrary to common thought right now, you can't be bad at design and good at UX, unless you're a blind person making apps for other blind people.
That really helps me get to the finish line, because I'm not thinking I'm going to launch the app in this state. I'm just trying to get it to the next checkpoint. Either I fix the UI/UX or get other involved who can.
Alternatively, UI kits are really cheap (some are free), on sites like ThemeForest, just pick one of those and run with as best you can. There will be rough edges, but for the most part the app will look good enough.
I’ve done the above before for my projects. The trick is to keep your design requests very simple and reference existing websites as an example. Also hire someone who is in a similar time zone to you.
If the project works & start making money you can go find someone who is more expensive to make it look nicer. Design is an iterative process.
This isn't meant to be a marketing message, I really actually build UI's around internal API's I write all the time. It is honestly great for side projects and we have multiple F500 organizations that use it at scale as well.
So let it look bad. Let it look terrible frankly. You can make something that works look good later more easily than you can make something that looks good work.
I also recommend React and Redux. I am a terrible UI person, but playing around with React and it's declarative model has made my brain suddenly understand how to work with UIs.
Also, feel free to steal design ideas. If your projects ever get off the ground, part of the reason will be that they are familiar enough to customers to use without a headache.
If the idea is good or useful, you will find some helping hands from the initial user base itself.
if you looking for low-cost full-time remote engineers or designers send your requirements to ajinvwilson@gmail.com
As someone mentioned, there are also plenty of great themes and templates that you can purchase to get things started. You'll need HTML/CSS skills of course but a lot of the design elements have already been completed.
They contain lots of premade components, as well as plenty of sample pages to give you ideas.
They're not free, but last time I checked, there were panty of good looking themes for under $20.
As someone who started off as a non-designer programmer, I taught myself UI/UX just by practising a lot. The two ways (that in hindsight were the most invaluable) I improved were to:
• Read highly-praised books on design fundamentals... These two literally changed the way I make / look at everything that is graphic design related: 1. The Non-Designers Design Book [1]; 2. Know Your Onions [2]. The third I can recommend is all about making websites / UX and covers everything you need to think about when you're working on a web project: 3. Don't Make Me Think (Revisited) [3]. All three are very well-reviewed and have changed people's lives.
• Copy everything you like the look of. What are your favourite web apps / pages / interfaces? What makes them tick? Try and copy sections that you like to give you a feel for how things should be laid-out. Most crucially, use a vector graphics program (I cannot recommend Affinity Designer enough, not least because it is insanely cheap for what it is), and copy as many icons / vector images as you can. Learn the fundamentals of bezier curves and how almost every piece of graphic artwork is made up of different combinations / layerings of shapes... Forget about fancy effects (e.g. shadows, gradients) at first, and just copy the shapes themselves. This was my biggest revelation and improved my UI ability to that of a professional standard. Once you realise that a fancy padlock icon [4] is just a rounded rectangle with a circle and triangle in it merged together, you'll start being able to recreate neat icons really easily.
If you don't enjoy doing any of the above, then hire a professional designer :) There really are no other 'ways of dealing with it' than doing it yourself or using a service. But trust me, it is well within reach to get yourself to a decent level in just a few months.
[1] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Wil... [2] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Know-Your-Onions-Creative-Businessm... [3] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability... [4] - https://cfl.dropboxstatic.com/static/images/business/homepag...
It took me a while but I can put together a decent site using the following tools:
- Sketch (https://www.sketchapp.com/)
- Font Pair (http://fontpair.co/)
- Paletton (http://paletton.com/)
- Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/)
- UI Gradients (https://uigradients.com/)
- Flat Icon (https://www.flaticon.com/)
I use Tachyons to limit the number of CSS choices I need to make. It works for 95% of styles and looks great. I only need to add custom classes or inline styles for special cases such as gradients, background images, transitions.
- Tachyons (http://tachyons.io/docs/)
When I design something the goal is to define components and re-use them. I usually steal components from existing projects.
- Shopify Polaris Components (https://polaris.shopify.com/components/get-started#navigatio...)
- Bootstrap Components (https://getbootstrap.com/)
- Material Components (https://material.io/components/)
- Metro UI Widgets (https://metroui.org.ua/)
Website design comes from understanding what the user wants to do and selecting components that solve the problem. I usually create a new artboard in Sketch for each purpose. For example LandingPage, PricingPage, SignInPage, SignUpPage, ResetPasswordPage, ThankYouForConfirmingEmailPage, UserSettingsPage, etc.
You should create a mobile artboard, tablet artboard, and desktop artboard for each page. You can add variants for error states, etc.
I start with the mobile artboard and add components until I accomplish the purpose. I then adapt the mobile design to tablet and desktop.
If the user needs to enter information I add a Form with a Heading, a number of Inputs with Labels, and a submit Button. If the user wants to view data I need to add a Heading, a Chart or Table, etc. If there is a lot of negative space, I find an image or commission a drawing to fill the space.
If I can't decide how it should look, I search online for inspiration. Google "login forms ui" or see how successful companies solve the problem. Adapt what they do to use my existing components, space it out so it doesn't look offensive, and I'm done.
All of my projects don't have amazing UX.
This advice is true for the 90s. Not anymore. In 2017, people expect even your MVP Web App to be responsive, and at the very least not fugly.
. Look for a friend/partner who does UX.
. Contract external freelancer or business to design for you.