Your website is not for you
websmith.studio
websmith.studio
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.
Most designers are designing for their customer, their customer is the one paying their salary/commission/contract.
Ignoring the fact that sometimes founders feel the need to put their stamp on everything, for startups and scaleups that haven't progressed to corporate slog, I think it's near impossible for even the best staff designer in the world to arrive at the optimum website/deck/infographic/widget without founder or leader feedback.
The key ingredient is their insight. That's what sets any startup apart. Otherwise the designer would be the founder.
I think anything where a surprise is presented (in design or otherwise) means some missed communication.
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.
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.
Usually, the copy and structure of a landing page is dictated by founders or marketing folks. Sales people also make this mistake on their slides. They have too many slides about a fancy team, fancy product, and fancy features -- then maybe they show a tailored use case or two.
I highly recommend Donald Miller's Marketing Made Simple as an antidote.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack.
Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
If you hire an architect to redo your house, it's fine to say "I see where you're going with this thing for my kids, but I know them and they will never go for it."
I mean…………
The website is a tool to get customers and most designers do not know marketing, scaling or growth engineering because it's not their job to know, it's the marketer's job to say, let's add an onboarding flow with these features and the designer collaborates with them on what it should look and work like.
I would qualify that as most graphic designers know what they’re doing, when they’re working in graphic design media: logos, magazines, billboards, and other print media.
Unfortunately, our industry (software) has shifted towards hiring graphic designers to do user interface design, a task which they’re often grossly unqualified for. This is how we get interfaces which are attractive but frustrating and difficult to use, both for beginner/non-technical users and for expert/power users, for different reasons. Beginners need intuitive interfaces with high discoverability for the most important operations and power users need efficiency and clean access to automation tools for the most common tasks.
Graphic designers often sacrifice power user features entirely in favour of minimalism. They also sacrifice intuitiveness in favour of their own artistic vision. In both cases they frequently sacrifice information density in favour of minimalism, making it hard for users to quickly locate the information they need. This is especially egregious on mobile-first designs where the accuracy of mouse pointers and the information capacity of large displays is ignored.
And want something shiny done so they can show it in their portfolio. Especially the ones who consider themselves ‘artists’.
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?
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)
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?
Maybe I've just been lucky to mostly work with decent managers, but basically I consider the tie-breaking function to be intrinsically valuable.
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.
The complexity in dev is a lot more obvious than the complexity in design. There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. With design work, the whole idea is to make something that clearly communicates its purpose. That makes a lot of people think they understand what went into it because if it’s done well, the solution should feel ‘obvious.’ Getting something that feels obvious is way more nebulous and convoluted than getting from point a to point B in most dev tasks.
Is it really that clear? Or do we just think so because most of us here are devs, while everyone else is thinking “Wow what happened? That codebase was great until suddenly it wasn’t.”
It's hard to build something great if you don't know the customer. It's hard to know the customer if you don't get opportunities to understand their pain, or just don't care.
Starry eyed business person thinks he can tell us whatever there is about making websites because our landing page is basically neglected.
Business we are in B2B and this specific product is not getting customers this way.
We get customers via CEO or business partners connections.
All the “organic traffic” is waste of time for us because when they hear the price of product they never call again.
Having a lot of small customers is not our business model because our app is not for small businesses.
Which is slang for “getting a chance to plead their case for why it’s going to be so bloody expensive”.
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.
Bad designers are a huge bottleneck and terrible gatekeepers of information, delaying the work even before the development starts, during and after. I saw this a lot in high-performance teams that had bad designers, but AI is making it even more clear now.
Good designers, on the other hand, know how to define standards and components, and have been empowering teams for quite some time. But of course this means there's less micromanagement and less reliance on Figma for every single screen.
What AI has really changed IMO is that there's no need for designers to ask developers to ask for micro-changes that take longer to explain than to ask an AI to do.
...but even that was already possible and extremely fast by simply having a designer pair with a developer and ask for changes on the fly.
IMO communication skills, organization and collaboration is what makes or breaks it, regardless of AI or not.
If your designers are needing to generate input on technical issues like this, your product is already in trouble.
…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” :)
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.
I have seen this in my own organization where the UX organization assigns a UX person to a project on demand. They have no understanding of the particular application domain and yet they presume they can build good user interfaces because they practice design thinking. All the while ignoring technical experts on the team.
But domain experts and developers are also to blame since they cannot claim their turf successfully enough.
Thinking about it, we should probably have some tool to make pictures behave like websites for demos.
Worse still are designers who don't use established patterns, not just within the company, but like throughout the web. They want to make something truly unique that would completely ostracize the user, not to mention make it waaaay more time-consuming to develop. Get a grip, this isn't your art thesis, its a business.
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.
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.
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.
If I go to your restaurant's website and have to dig to find the menu and the page is just plastered with "Fine dining with a wonderful view" and pictures of models eating... that's not helping me, that's advertising to me. And now your website is no longer a utility/service, it is a billboard. The only reason I tolerate the billboard is because of the utility, and if the utility doesnt exist, why would I ever come back.
> 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.
For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
[1] https://amie.so
Also: the current website is for a different product altogether. They pivoted.
Attributing low conversion rate to the style of the page isn't really fair when it was apparently a last attempt at attracting customers for an idea that was eventually abandoned.
Meanwhile, my personal website pretty much only serves my own idiosyncratic interests!
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.
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.
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?
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.
You'll have to trust me: from a customer-facing POV the old site was miles better than the new; it's only from an "Owner"-facing POV that the new one is preferable.
Um, I guess that hints at the answer: any new proposal has to start with their (Marketing's) experience of the product - flatter them to the max. This probably should start with my being a little more-attuned to their specific frustrations with their new solution. Hmmm.
Thanks for thinking this through with me, HN. Would welcome any other advice.
I also assumed the article would be about personal websites until I read it.
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!
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!
Along with his personal website: https://dahl.dev/
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 :)
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.
Sorry for regurgitating what someone else posted but it really resonated with my experience.
This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.
A great example is a restaurant site. If a user has to scroll and click around to find an address, a phone number, and hours of operation, the site has FAILED.
What I see all the time. I hate it so much. "Oh, honey, this restaurant has a picture of pepperoni on cheese. Let's eat there... wherever it is!"
is the closest thing to truth we have.
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.
Then hn comes and takes it out of that context.
Ended up cutting almost 60% of what I had planned. Most of it was reassuring myself, not the visitor. The stuff that survived were the things that confronted them — like a 4,000-dot grid showing every week of an average human life.
The post is right that visitors aren't there to be impressed by you. But I'd add: they're not there to be reassured either. They're there to be confronted with something they already suspected was true.
As you move up the food chain, the distance between the people you answer to and the source of the money they are spending grows, personal attachment to the outcome diminishes, and you get a lot less meddling. It’s one of the main reasons our team turns away very small customers.
Then I realised that the article talks about business websites, not personal websites. Quoting from the article:
> 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.
Yes, I agree. While not really a business, I've always liked https://nhs.uk/ for its simplicity. I especially like the A-Z section where we can find details about a large number of medical conditions. Among actual businesses (small ones particularly) I like https://buttondown.com/ and https://kagi.com/ quite a bit.
That said (and this is off-topic for this article), the part of the web I enjoy most is where your website is indeed for you, the small web of personal websites. That part of the web was an important part of me growing up from my late teens into adulthood and it remains the part I enjoy most even now. I want this part of the web to remain healthy and vibrant for as long as possible.
1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/website-you-havent-rebuilt-ma...
2. https://medium.com/@joulee/how-to-be-strategic-f6630a44f86b
PS Disclaimer: It feels strange to share links to LIN and Medium, two problematic platforms I'd prefer not to support. But these specific posts are worthwhile, so I'm sharing anyway.
There are non-commercial websites such as Government that put a lot of effort into focussing on the user.
Some of the Gov design systems are well worth looking at.
We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!
And in this case, the article is exactly right, the website is not an art piece, it must serve the function of making people buy from you to be successful, otherwise your company is a very expensive hobby.
You've actually described exactly the same problem that we've mentioned in our expectations as a design studio: https://klad.design/expectations
Well, you have made a big assumption there. Maybe you haven't met the decision makers. It's not just their own whims and fancies. It's true that one's own perception of what the customer likes, is influenced by their personal taste as well. But on the other hand, building something while disregarding your own taste completely, doesn't give the required motivation.
Web design _does_ sound much easier when clients can be anesthetized. :)
A small annoyance in startup circles is getting feedback about my website front page along the lines of "I didn't understand your hero, everybody should understand in one sentence what you do". Well, no, my clients will self-select as in not everybody needs to understand what "troubleshooting servers" or "devops" is :-)
This is extremely funny given we're the industry full of folks that brought the world QS and longevity hacks, together with the peptide boom.
"But that is only because doctors don't keep current/have preconceived notions"
Which would never happen to designers?
> It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.
In my experience, the people paying are often more sensitive to this than the designer. The designer wants it to look nice in their portfolio.
The websites with the best UX I know are mostly those who haven't really changed for the past 20 years.
I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to find someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.
I've yet to hear from someone liking no longer being able to say "no" and being only allowed to say "yes" or "maybe later" (which is a code for "I'll annoy you till you finally break and say yes"). I've yet to hear someone liking to have less informationen visible and being forced to navigate a maze of menu items for things which used to be just their. Or who simply likes not being able to tell what is or isn't an element which can be interacted with.
Who are those people who like to give almost every other site their phone number? And who are those who likes telling almost every other click how the "experience" with the website was so far? Who are those people who like being reminded about the mostly useless annoying AI assistance every other click?
I've yet to find someone who sad "Oh boy, it was really nice that they asked me to give the online shop on some rando rating site 5 stars". Or "Oh boy, I sure love the popup about signing up to the awesome informative newsletter each time I visit the site". Or "I really like that my PC fan starts to spin audible whenever I go to this website". Or "Oh yes, I was so happy being asked to install the mobile app for an rando website I found via a search engine" Or "It's really nice that I always have to solve a captcha and noone is telling me why"
In my experience people do not like modern website, they at most tolerate them. It's like paying taxes. Can't do nothing about it.
Edit: Typos
> I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to finde someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.
Are these really common features for modern websites? I think most browsers block auto-play of videos. Back button hijacks: annoying but again I feel like I stumbled across that more often 5-10 years ago.
Nowadays the annoying website thing seems to be screwing around with the scrollbar.
Although, I definitely do agree that the 20-30 years ago style is best. Just give me some text. I’m going to block the JavaScript and set my own background colors and font anyway, so the less clutter the better.
‘This is the bit that gets lost.’ as a start of the paragraph, and then the very next sentence parroting the chapters title. 3 sentences for 0 new information and this pattern is overused to death.
Don’t you people read what you publish? So disrespectful
Eh, I don’t think this is accurate. A website does serve utility, but if you remove art from the discussion, then it becomes soulless, which is not the world we want to live in.
Take HN for example. The first time I visited, I thought it was a terrible, dated design. But over time I grew to appreciate it. I think it is, in fact, quite artistic; it has a style, it makes a statement.
If HN were “modern and user-first” maybe users would have an initial better impression, maybe they would even “convert” better initially. But long-term, it would start to lose its soul.
Actually - the websites I create, design and maintain, are ... primarily for me. I am a very critical user though, so I am also a great feedback person. I tell myself "you need to improve this". Then I either do so, or put it in a todo file that is rarely looked at lateron again. So I don't agree that a website is not "for you". I think that a website CAN be for you. The article makes no such distinction; it only insinuates that everyone is incompetent and designs for things other people may not need or want.
Besides, people are also different - designing a perfect webpage is not possible. You have to make compromises. Take reddit.com - I can only use old.reddit.com because the new interface is so useless. That's one example of so many more that could be given here.
You don't have designers and governing boards; it's written about sites for bigger organizations.
six months later pipeline was dead. buyers were enterprise procurement, the new look read as too small to trust with our budget.
research was right. just not about these users.
It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?
Design research will inevitably always lead to a place thats reductive, nostalgic, and average (i.e. https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). Designers themselves are loaded with biases and often enough want to perform design work that doesn't serve the business (in software we would call this Resume Driven Development - building with shiny new things so you can put it on your resume).
On the flip side, design is constantly victim to Dunning-Kruger or "bike shedding" - people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence.
If the author was trying to write about the latter, they are failing to first acknowledge the former... for all we know the "decision makers" have decades of competent experience in brand, design, and user experience.
"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."
You can stop worrying about layout, styles, colors, fonts, responsive design... just put the information on a page so that AI can understand it.
Ah the customer isn't in the room? Well, too bad, now you have to listen to the author. How convenient!
in my experience large corpos will always prioritise business incentives over a happy customer even when you make it blindingly obvious that a happy customer is actually better for their bottom line
Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.
GOOGLE did not look like the rest of the search engine engines on purpose. We agree completely. It looked very different and it operated in a very different way.
If instead, we designed GOOGLE like we designed website websites now, with Jakob’s law front of mind, what would have been created would have just been another entry in a forgettable list.
The argument is that user research will tell you when your customers want a faster horse. It will not tell you all that much else. If you want customers who want a faster horse or if what you need is to be told to make a faster horse—which is most websites— it works great.
The internet was a far better place when websites were created by individuals mainly for themselves. And probably hosted for free on Geocities.
I'm talking about the websites you make because it is actually your choice, not when you are coerced into it by external forces. That website is for you, it is your backyard garden of the mind and everything about it is only what you like. And it matters a whole lot more than anything you're being paid to do.
I would definitely suggest sending the beta beta version to friends and family before investing 90% more time on it.
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.