Stages of Accepting Your Design Sucks | Hacker News Reader

Stages of Accepting Your Design Sucks

blog.aurous.me

24 pointscodeusasoft23 comments

Design is just a part of a product. If this is your first product that you built from the ground up, then pat yourself on the back.

Great design is such a deep field. Your article seems to mention design as aesthetic. It's certainly a part of it but it's not the biggest.

Design is choice. Everything in your screenshot are choices that you took, explicitly or implicitly.

Looking at your website (aurous.me), I see that what you present is quite far from the screenshot. Not in term of aesthetic but in term of design choices.

You seem to add a lot of popup. Why did you add those? Can't you have only 1 step, like you show? You don't need to fit every use case. Restrictive path is better and it's been proven times and times again.

You have a table with many columns. Are those necessary? If you focus on listening music, I don't think knowing the date added, length of the song or the user means a lot.

Here's a few suggestions that are design-focus:

- For every song in the playlist, a suggestion to replace it. Often I check the upcoming song and know right there I'm not in the mood for some song that are upcoming. Being able to swap with a suggestion would keep the flow of the song and your app would do the heavy lifting of suggesting before I realize I want to change the song

- Is your search a main feature? Then it shouldn't be a popup always there, ready for someone to input data.

Hey thanks for the reply.

The reason for many popups is for multi taskers, the ability to copy and paste links into a playlist builder that is its own windows without interrupting the flow of playing songs currently was the main reason for this. Also the same thing for importing, separating sub features from the main application as utility widgets.

As for the columns here is the reasoning

>Date added Playlist subscriptions are coming, so knowing when a song was added to a playlist can help you know how current that version might be; bands or artist can re-release mastered versions of older songs. So its important to know when the playlist was last changed for that song.

>length

You can sort it from shortest to highest, allowing it to play in that order

>user

Soon you'll be able to login on your own account or subscribe from others, people will be able to fork other peoples playlist to edit them, its mainly just for credit so you know who put effort into building a nice playlist.

I do agree for searching though, I will refine it to be on main display not as a popup and replace the main table where loaded playlist are.

As for suggestions, when out of focus the app will display a popup showing you whats next, should I add this feature to that popup?

Instructive, but the design of the website itself is not that great - eg. FAQ link takes you nowhere.

Just by reading what's on the site I'm not 100% sure what the thing does - is it like Spotify and Grooveshark?

I'd like to have a more unambiguous idea of what I would be installing :)

I've fixed that issue.

https://aurous.me/faq/

Just FYI, there are a multitude of grammar errors in that FAQ; get it edited to avoid leaving a bad impression. :)

Indeed :) Thanks.

>Realizing you’re a software developer and not a designer

I hate when people pigeonhole themselves by giving themselves and others labels like this. What's stopping someone from being both a great designer and a great software developer? Visual/UX design is actually very similar in its principles to software and engineering type of design in my opinion.

While there might not be anything stopping somebody from being both a great developer and great designer, I've never come across somebody that is (though I've come across people that think they are...). I've seen exceptional developers who are terrible designers, decent developers who are decent designers, and exception designers who are terrible developers. I'm sure you could find some counter example but I've never come across them.

I think it is simply that there are only so many hours in a day. Somebody that spends 40+ hours a week over the course of years honing a particular craft will become more skilled than somebody that splits their time between multiple crafts (especially if they have existing talent in the area).

I also disagree that visual design and engineering share many of the same principles. Engineering is about making things work, visual design is about creating an emotional connection. There are no formulas or rules that can be systematically applied to make a product feel right. People that think they are similar probably have never had the pleasure of working with a top visual designer.

However, when people pigeonhole themselves, they are actively denying themselves the capability to become something more. And this is a problem worth commenting about...

You call it pigeonhole but a lot of people call it specialization. Some trades require it, others don't. I don't think you can generalize it and call it a problem. It's almost like expecting an expert plumber to wire up your 20 story condo building. Sure you can find a handyman that can do plumbing and electrical, but for your 20 story condo building you are going to call in people that specialize in electrical. And that's okay.

>Engineering is about making things work, visual design is about creating an emotional connection. There are no formulas or rules that can be systematically applied to make a product feel right. People that think they are similar probably have never had the pleasure of working with a top visual designer.

Aside from the most broad of things(be concise, etc), what are some "formulas or rules that can be systematically applied" to make any piece of arbitrary software or solution well engineered?

They are both basically about "making things work". You can have cobbled together software that only does the bare minimum and just works but the actual code is a buggy clusterfuck or tackles problems that could be solved simply with needless complexity, just as well you can have a shoddy interface that allows the user to navigate/get whatever functionality out of the product that they need but is clunky and ugly, as the OP post in question in fact demonstrates; the original interface he designed on his own sucked by his own admission, but it worked in the bare minimum of the sense in that it facilitated access to the features of his thing. I'm sure you would agree with me that a great engineer/developer is not someone who just makes things work, but does it elegantly, manageably and efficiently as well. You could say the same of a great designer with the qualities I listed swapped out with whatever you think makes a great designer(makes things work beautifully, intuitively, whatever). Being an exceptional engineer and an exceptional designer both basically boil down to "design", be it in the software sense or the UX sense.

They are both somewhat subjective, lots of people have different opinions on software design principles as well as visual/UX design principles, but there are some basic guidelines which can be followed(most software people would agree that its good software design to get as much as you can done with as little code as you can, most designer people would agree that you should make functionality as intuitive for the user as possible).

I don't think that they are really a result of rote skill honed by practice, more a state of mind(though this can be reshaped through experience).

I just don't like it when people assume people who program are some kind of autistic robots who can only understand machines and not other people, or assume designers are some artsy-fartsy type who hasn't the time or will for the perceived rigid structure of coding. Or when people just want to stay in their bubble all day and never try anything new because they think they are afraid of failure or have preconceived notions about the task.

I do agree that I would rather have 2 people on my team, one who was an exceptional engineer and one who was an exceptional designer rather than one person who was so-so at both - but I be most pleased with someone who was exceptional at both, and I see no reason why one couldn't be.

Some great PG essays that are sorta inline with what I'm saying(I've been on a big PG kick lately):

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

http://paulgraham.com/langdes.html

P.S. I apologize in advance to those upset by my use of engineer synonymously with software developer/programmer, I know some people get their panties in a bunch about this.

When I say engineering is about making it work, I mean it mostly in the sense that nobody gets to see how the sausage is made. No customer is ever going to critique your code or double check your cement pour. As long as it works, that's all that matters.

On the other hand, the work that a visual designer does is front and center, it is literally the only thing that a client will interact with. For example, when Microsoft introduced Metro that's all anybody talked about (good or bad). Nobody ever talked about what the code looked like that went into producing it. Customers only connect with what they can see.

> No customer is ever going to critique your code or double check your cement pour.

Surely that rather depends who your customers are - I'm sure I've read about places like the military/NASA/whatnot forcing code reviews on external contractors.

>Engineering is about making things work, visual design is about creating an emotional connection.

No, they're both about "making things work". Visual design isn't arbitrary, touchy-feely stuff.

I think you're confusing visual design and UX design. I agree that UX design is mostly about making things work. Visual design (fonts, color palettes, use of white space, emphasis, etc) is mostly arbitrary, touchy-feely stuff. Some people just intuitively know what 'looks good' and what will create that emotional connection with users. This is much different then somebody doing a wire frame with a title and a text box.

You're essentially calling the entire graphic design profession "mostly arbitrary, touchy-feely stuff". No, it's graphic design, not art. The visual design of something performs many functions and solves problems.

I take it you don't have any formal design education?

Design is complicated and very much like taste - subjective. Of course there are guidelines of what goes together and what not. Overall it is nice to see transition between the different stages of the product.

As per product itself, I assume it is very much alike tomahawk, is that right? It would be nice to have well designed tomahawk type of product which would work fast and be easy to use, so keep up.

Want to notice that I've tried to download application, but windows "SmartScreen" tells me that app is from Unknown Publisher and strongly encourages NOT to install. I assume this will prevent most windows users from installing this application.

> Design is complicated and very much like taste - subjective.

The problem is "Design" is a bit like UX/UI ,it doesnt really mean anything concrete,but some vague thought process to create a product.

Usability is not subjective,that's why I prefer that word.

Usability is a hard science,there are rules,just like in programming.

You want a product to be smart,to facilitate whatever your user is trying to do,to make simple what might sound complex,but you also want to get user's feeback because they'll always try to use your app in unexpected ways.

I think that field could benificiate from all these machine learning experts.Imagine apps that really adapt to their users,trying to learn patterns,adapting the UI depending on usage etc ... I'm not aware of the researches in that field,but it could be the next big thing in usability.

>Design is complicated and very much like taste - subjective.

Aesthetics are subjective. Design is not. Design can contain aesthetics, which complicates things.

Just because something is difficult to measure doesn't mean that it can't be measured. A design exists to solve a problem. How well it solves problems is not subjective. The priorities might be subjective, but how well it fulfills its goals is not subjective.

> How well it solves problems is not subjective.

It may very well solve the problem better for some people than others. Which is one definition of 'subjective'.

You can decide you want to target some types or groups of people and not others, for commercial or other reasons. Even "most people" is some people and not others, and is a choice.

>It may very well solve the problem better for some people than others. Which is one definition of 'subjective'.

That's like saying a hammer's effectiveness is subjective because it doesn't work well with screws.

What about saying a scissors effectiveness is subjective because it doesn't work well when used by left-handed people?

...it objectively doesn't work well for left-handed people. It's not really a matter of personal taste. A right hand glove does not "subjectively" fit poorly on a left hand.

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