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.
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.
except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?”)
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?
I'm a pretty opinionated engineer but I'll still volunteer that in a majority of "engineering" disputes, I care more about having a coordinated and consistent approach than I do about the absolute tack taken.
Maybe I've just been lucky to mostly work with decent managers, but basically I consider the tie-breaking function to be intrinsically valuable.
With this particular book, the prerequisite is that your client is trying to achieve something, yeah. I think know the type of CEOs and CTOs that you’re talking about, the ones that only want to sound smart and don’t really care about the end result. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do in this case apart from looking for a workplace where people do care about what they do.
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.
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.
Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because they’re ‘a developer,’ it’s neither an indictment of that developer or developers in general if your web front end is structurally wack. If you hired someone that’s only modified a few existing Wordpress plugins for a green field project, is it their fault or yours if they do a bad job?
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.
> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work.
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.”
"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true.
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.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job
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.
Tons of consultants are missing expertise in their clients' wheelhouses. The client and consultant each have domain knowledge, and when those domains overlap, there might be conflicts.
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."
Which types of designers? Because by the way you said "artists" it seems you're referring to graphic designers not UI/UX designers which, while they may make pretty websites and apps, are not artists and the article explicitly says to not treat their artifacts as such.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
If you are a B2B SaaS and you aren't getting big customers via the website, you're neglecting it. We get fortune 1000 customers from organic traffic, and we aren't a big company.
I’ve noticed a lot of business models intentionally try to funnel you through their sales pipeline and only expose the price after “getting to know you”.
Which is slang for “getting a chance to plead their case for why it’s going to be so bloody expensive”.
I think this applies to everyone. There's a lot of ego and pride that people can't shake.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn’t agree more. Many designers I’ve worked with have been good at making things aesthetically pleasing, but have utterly failed to understand the nuances of the software. This is obviously not all designers, and there are good ones, but more often than not I find them struggling as they are not technical experts nor business experts. This is for b2b software.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
9 times out of 10 I'd listen to Sarah's stories. Is buying a spice blend really so urgent and important? So much of life is lived incidental to transactions. Not everything improves with productivity.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
How does this generalize to firms with more than one stakeholder/owner? I don't see how it does without some magic where we assume that all members of e.g. the C-suite have similar, model-able reasoning.
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.
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!
> 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 :)
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!
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. :)
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/
Built a small SaaS recently and this hit hard. I kept asking
myself "who is this paragraph for?" while writing the landing.
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.
I remember regularly scrambling to redesign our marketing site, because the CEO was going to start speaking to investors in less than a week. So we'd always end up with a homepage that represented a new narrative the CEO was trying out, often at the expense of current customers being able to find what they were looking for (our homepage was also our primary entry point into the onboarding funnel).
I’ve found that the larger the company, the less this is a problem. At smaller orgs, it’s common for the owner or leader to have their personal identity tied up in the brand, sometimes a bit too much, which leads to hyper-involvement.
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.
"A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for." Great quote! This has already helped me frame a conversation with a client.
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.
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.
Interesting post. It pairs well with this other one^1 I bookmarked just yesterday about the way business websites' home pages so often suffer from lack of ownership (a la "tragedy of the commons"). In both cases, I'm reminded of Julie Zhuo's awesome "How to be Strategic" post^2 which emphasizes being crystal clear on WHOSE problem you're trying to solve.
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.
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.
Case in point - My first webdev job was producing a site for the city library. My boss explained to them when going through their sitemap that they should to rename their planned section from "Lending" to "Borrowing".
When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise.
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.
Very true. I did over 300 product marketing website reviews and the most common thing I would see is a generic description of this big aspirational vision of the company and none of the specifics of what a company actually does. If you’re into see what great websites do the YouTube playlist with the top sites is at http://goatedguild.com
This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals.
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!
“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.”
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.
I guess in a world filled with heavy, modern, nauseating design, being fast and simple can be a statement. But I don't think websites meant to be used should be art or statements.
Yeah I think the whole "the website is to help the user do a job" mostly exists to give people who do UX a position of authority. The user needs to do a job; we can't pre-specify that job entirely; users who are frustrated in their job will leave with it incomplete. Those three things are totally true, but they are often used to justify a third thing: input on website design should be driven by user feedback, filtered through UX research. A refusal of the third thing is where you get design like HN. You can do UX research; everyone should. But if it is more than merely an input into design, you become rudderless.
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.
Yes, the website is for prospective (and current) clients.
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 :-)
I feel like I finally get to feel the designer’s pain when people arrive with their vibe-coded pile of garbage and I have to explain why it can’t just slide into the product.
It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?
This applies to pretty much every situation. It is not just about visual things, it is more about things that are easy to have an opinion on. Its similar concept to bike shedding, but with the added emphasis of the decision maker. Though the very fact we even call them that kind of implies that they should have a say right? I guess we object to the kind of say that they have. Should a decision maker just make binary decisions? Yes to this, no to that.
Sorry to be frank and for the upcoming rant as your site is mostly fine, but looking at most websites I visite these days be it from a company, a service, a webshop, an open source project, a forum, a blog, a newspaper or almost any form of social media.
I'd say I do not know for whom anyone is designing those sites, but I can clearly say it is not for me (as a human user and/or customer).
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.
> 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 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.
It seems that websites keep finding ways around my autoplay blocking settings. Back button hijacks I haven't seen in a while I don't think, but I feel the sentiment.
True website is not for you and in the age for AI is not even for people. Its for AI agents reading your website and deciding what to do with it: recommend it, skip it, integrate with it, etc.
Yes more and more this will be the case. Websites will not be for people, because most people don't go to websites for the experience, they go there for information. And if a smart search engine can show them what they need to know without actaully showing the website, that's good enough in most cases.
You can stop worrying about layout, styles, colors, fonts, responsive design... just put the information on a page so that AI can understand it.
I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
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.
I find that I am AMAZED at how few customer-facing sites have failed to even consider the basic idea of "why is someone on our site?"
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.
Literal pages of hyper-zoomed pictures of food, followed by pictures of groups laughing while eating, followed by mentions of catering and merch... and vital info at the very bottom, with dinner menus hidden in web menus, or only available from the "Order Online" link.
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!"
This problem is inevitable in all but the most egalitarian workplaces. It's called HIPPO—The Highest Paid Person's Opinion. Organizations tend to favor the opinions of senior, high-earning leaders over data-driven evidence. And it manifests to the user in various ways, enshittification being one of them.
I thought the object of government, legal and complaints websites was to reduce customer interaction? The British government is notorious for bad or barely functional websites.
Government websites are often particular bad this way. Nobody cares who the head of the agency is or wants to read their newest blog post. Most people don’t need to know that the new records department opened in Des Moines. They need to know what programs they qualify for and how to get benefits.
perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances require, not to mention _taste_.
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
have you considered, in the specific example of google being different from the rest, that all the other services were _wrong,_ or their goals were different than google's?
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer
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.
This is true but the common implication, "UX research knows your customer" is horseapples. I will point out we allow ourselves to believe that UX research knows the customer because we train like the above. We tell our engineers they don't know what the customer wants and when it comes time to put a foot down, they have nowhere firm to stand.
I _think_ it's the best we have right now, right? Excellent UX research speaks for itself, there's just not much of it. As an industry, we've done a realllllly good job of devaluing high-quality UX research and those who do it for a living.
This writing was effective, clear, to the point, and revealed a human perspective. I can sense the frustrated professional going behind the curtain and tidying up his reservations about dealing with his clients.
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.
Except when your website is for you. That being the case where you aren't just making it because someone else is paying you or you think you might get hired because of it. Those websites aren't yours, obviously.
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.
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.
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.
except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.
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.
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.
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?
> 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)
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?
I'm a pretty opinionated engineer but I'll still volunteer that in a majority of "engineering" disputes, I care more about having a coordinated and consistent approach than I do about the absolute tack taken.
Maybe I've just been lucky to mostly work with decent managers, but basically I consider the tie-breaking function to be intrinsically valuable.
With this particular book, the prerequisite is that your client is trying to achieve something, yeah. I think know the type of CEOs and CTOs that you’re talking about, the ones that only want to sound smart and don’t really care about the end result. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do in this case apart from looking for a workplace where people do care about what they do.
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” :)
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.
> 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.
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.
Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because they’re ‘a developer,’ it’s neither an indictment of that developer or developers in general if your web front end is structurally wack. If you hired someone that’s only modified a few existing Wordpress plugins for a green field project, is it their fault or yours if they do a bad job?
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.
> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work.
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.”
"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true.
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.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job
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.
Tons of consultants are missing expertise in their clients' wheelhouses. The client and consultant each have domain knowledge, and when those domains overlap, there might be conflicts.
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."
Which types of designers? Because by the way you said "artists" it seems you're referring to graphic designers not UI/UX designers which, while they may make pretty websites and apps, are not artists and the article explicitly says to not treat their artifacts as such.
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.
> In practice, most programmers write shit.
I mean…………
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.
> 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.
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).
I see it with new hires in our company. We are small SaaS app.
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.
If you are a B2B SaaS and you aren't getting big customers via the website, you're neglecting it. We get fortune 1000 customers from organic traffic, and we aren't a big company.
I wander how many of those CEOs ask there technical teams to have a quick look and are told “avoid - it looks like it’s been abandoned “
Sounds like a case of Chesterton's Pothole (nee Fence)—a glaringly obvious suboptimal implementation that's there for an undocumented reason.
Is your pricing on your website? That's a way to cut down on the wasted time
I’ve noticed a lot of business models intentionally try to funnel you through their sales pipeline and only expose the price after “getting to know you”.
Which is slang for “getting a chance to plead their case for why it’s going to be so bloody expensive”.
I think this applies to everyone. There's a lot of ego and pride that people can't shake.
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.
100%.
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.
Sounds like the founder as well as the customers are who the designer should be gathering data points from.
I think anything where a surprise is presented (in design or otherwise) means some missed communication.
> 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’.
I tend to agree with this.
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.
Absolutely correct - as with so many things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's too easy to think "I'm right and you're wrong".
This.
Most designers are designing for their customer, their customer is the one paying their salary/commission/contract.
Couldn’t agree more. Many designers I’ve worked with have been good at making things aesthetically pleasing, but have utterly failed to understand the nuances of the software. This is obviously not all designers, and there are good ones, but more often than not I find them struggling as they are not technical experts nor business experts. This is for b2b software.
Same experience. Nice on Canva but not necessarily clear for users
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.
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.
_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.
They're not talking about personal websites, they're talking about business ones.
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?
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.
9 times out of 10 I'd listen to Sarah's stories. Is buying a spice blend really so urgent and important? So much of life is lived incidental to transactions. Not everything improves with productivity.
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.
In a mom-and-pop shop you still want good electrical wiring.
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
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.
Exactly! This whole sentiment reminds me of the Jobs quote "people don't know what they want until you show it to them".
But that isn’t the point at all.
For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
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
My personal website is absolutely for me and not anyone else :) It’s like saying the art I made is not for me !!!?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
How does this generalize to firms with more than one stakeholder/owner? I don't see how it does without some magic where we assume that all members of e.g. the C-suite have similar, model-able reasoning.
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.
I think it's implicit...
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.
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!
> 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 :)
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!
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. :)
How do you know what his side project is? I couldn’t find a link.
It's listed in his HN profile: https://kavla.dev/
Along with his personal website: https://dahl.dev/
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/
Thank you! :-)
> A patient doesn't lean over the operating table and tell the surgeon where to cut.
Web design _does_ sound much easier when clients can be anesthetized. :)
Built a small SaaS recently and this hit hard. I kept asking myself "who is this paragraph for?" while writing the landing.
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.
I remember regularly scrambling to redesign our marketing site, because the CEO was going to start speaking to investors in less than a week. So we'd always end up with a homepage that represented a new narrative the CEO was trying out, often at the expense of current customers being able to find what they were looking for (our homepage was also our primary entry point into the onboarding funnel).
I’ve found that the larger the company, the less this is a problem. At smaller orgs, it’s common for the owner or leader to have their personal identity tied up in the brand, sometimes a bit too much, which leads to hyper-involvement.
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.
"A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for." Great quote! This has already helped me frame a conversation with a client.
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.
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.
User research + your tasteful assumptions to fix pain points
is the closest thing to truth we have.
No one reads my tech blog, it absolutely is for me.
"A website isn't art"? I disagree. https://gods.art/. https://fuzzygraph.com.
Interesting post. It pairs well with this other one^1 I bookmarked just yesterday about the way business websites' home pages so often suffer from lack of ownership (a la "tragedy of the commons"). In both cases, I'm reminded of Julie Zhuo's awesome "How to be Strategic" post^2 which emphasizes being crystal clear on WHOSE problem you're trying to solve.
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.
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.
Case in point - My first webdev job was producing a site for the city library. My boss explained to them when going through their sitemap that they should to rename their planned section from "Lending" to "Borrowing".
When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise.
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.
No, my website is for me and not everything is a product
I had the same knee jerk reaction but after reading the article I think it is clear they are talking about company websites
Yes, I know, but I just couldn't get over that initial reaction...
Very true. I did over 300 product marketing website reviews and the most common thing I would see is a generic description of this big aspirational vision of the company and none of the specifics of what a company actually does. If you’re into see what great websites do the YouTube playlist with the top sites is at http://goatedguild.com
This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals.
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!
“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.”
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.
I guess in a world filled with heavy, modern, nauseating design, being fast and simple can be a statement. But I don't think websites meant to be used should be art or statements.
Yeah I think the whole "the website is to help the user do a job" mostly exists to give people who do UX a position of authority. The user needs to do a job; we can't pre-specify that job entirely; users who are frustrated in their job will leave with it incomplete. Those three things are totally true, but they are often used to justify a third thing: input on website design should be driven by user feedback, filtered through UX research. A refusal of the third thing is where you get design like HN. You can do UX research; everyone should. But if it is more than merely an input into design, you become rudderless.
> It's for the person you've never met
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.
Beware of the HIPPO! (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
had this exact fight. founder wanted it more corporate, designer had the research, designer won.
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.
Which role were you?
Yes, the website is for prospective (and current) clients.
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 :-)
I feel like I finally get to feel the designer’s pain when people arrive with their vibe-coded pile of garbage and I have to explain why it can’t just slide into the product.
It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?
Yes, it’s for agents traversing the web universe like photons.
This applies to pretty much every situation. It is not just about visual things, it is more about things that are easy to have an opinion on. Its similar concept to bike shedding, but with the added emphasis of the decision maker. Though the very fact we even call them that kind of implies that they should have a say right? I guess we object to the kind of say that they have. Should a decision maker just make binary decisions? Yes to this, no to that.
Ironic that the site has a clock in the corner which is the site owner's current time.
What's the irony? The site telling your local time would be helpful how/why?
Sorry to be frank and for the upcoming rant as your site is mostly fine, but looking at most websites I visite these days be it from a company, a service, a webshop, an open source project, a forum, a blog, a newspaper or almost any form of social media. I'd say I do not know for whom anyone is designing those sites, but I can clearly say it is not for me (as a human user and/or customer).
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
> 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 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.
It seems that websites keep finding ways around my autoplay blocking settings. Back button hijacks I haven't seen in a while I don't think, but I feel the sentiment.
True website is not for you and in the age for AI is not even for people. Its for AI agents reading your website and deciding what to do with it: recommend it, skip it, integrate with it, etc.
Yes more and more this will be the case. Websites will not be for people, because most people don't go to websites for the experience, they go there for information. And if a smart search engine can show them what they need to know without actaully showing the website, that's good enough in most cases.
You can stop worrying about layout, styles, colors, fonts, responsive design... just put the information on a page so that AI can understand it.
I get why a design studio would think this way, but in many cases it is for me.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of designers are simply not that good at what they do
"Listen to the customer/research."
Ah the customer isn't in the room? Well, too bad, now you have to listen to the author. How convenient!
I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
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.
I find that I am AMAZED at how few customer-facing sites have failed to even consider the basic idea of "why is someone on our site?"
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.
Literal pages of hyper-zoomed pictures of food, followed by pictures of groups laughing while eating, followed by mentions of catering and merch... and vital info at the very bottom, with dinner menus hidden in web menus, or only available from the "Order Online" link.
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!"
That website was not for me.
This problem is inevitable in all but the most egalitarian workplaces. It's called HIPPO—The Highest Paid Person's Opinion. Organizations tend to favor the opinions of senior, high-earning leaders over data-driven evidence. And it manifests to the user in various ways, enshittification being one of them.
Your commercial website is not for you. Would be a better title.
Or non-personal.
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.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
https://designsystem.digital.gov/
I thought the object of government, legal and complaints websites was to reduce customer interaction? The British government is notorious for bad or barely functional websites.
oh, okay then.. you can have it
https://brynet.ca/
How dare you run a website without some sort of React framework.
React wouldn't be an improvement. But adding max-width: 1200px; margin: auto; to the body sure would.
That does look nicer, thanks!
sorry
> Here's what I find genuinely strange. A patient doesn't lean over the operating table and tell the surgeon where to cut.
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?
Relevant comic:
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
Yes, it is.
Government websites are often particular bad this way. Nobody cares who the head of the agency is or wants to read their newest blog post. Most people don’t need to know that the new records department opened in Des Moines. They need to know what programs they qualify for and how to get benefits.
Counterpoint: yes it is.
Time for my favourite old man yells at cloud opinion.
The internet was a far better place when websites were created by individuals mainly for themselves. And probably hosted for free on Geocities.
perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances require, not to mention _taste_.
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
have you considered, in the specific example of google being different from the rest, that all the other services were _wrong,_ or their goals were different than google's?
Many CEOs are pricks. Many UX experts are too.
Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer
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.
...and now it's for AI to "consoom"...
This is a distillation of what we used to (still do?) teach junior SWEs.
"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."
This is true but the common implication, "UX research knows your customer" is horseapples. I will point out we allow ourselves to believe that UX research knows the customer because we train like the above. We tell our engineers they don't know what the customer wants and when it comes time to put a foot down, they have nowhere firm to stand.
I _think_ it's the best we have right now, right? Excellent UX research speaks for itself, there's just not much of it. As an industry, we've done a realllllly good job of devaluing high-quality UX research and those who do it for a living.
And why did you put a clock in your website? lol
This writing was effective, clear, to the point, and revealed a human perspective. I can sense the frustrated professional going behind the curtain and tidying up his reservations about dealing with his clients.
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.
This was clearly written with AI help, the tells are all over the place
"Can I get the icon in cornflower blue."
And you are the reason internet is putrid.
Leave technology please.
You are here to scam someone, not to have fun, not to produce anything of value, not to please anyone.
Leave technology please, never come back.
Except when your website is for you. That being the case where you aren't just making it because someone else is paying you or you think you might get hired because of it. Those websites aren't yours, obviously.
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.
very Nice Blog its Really Correct That The Website is Not for You