Ask HN: Building an MVP without a designer in 2017?

[Narzerus]

For a developer building an MVP, what tools do you recommend to use for a project, without a designer? - App is not a throw-away project, can be incremented into a professional, beautiful app - No designer available as stated above - A designer WILL be hired in the future

The only options I can think of: - Bootstrap / Semantic-ui (Can these be customized and used for years ahead or do they require extirpation) - Copy other designs and pray your code won't be to hard to turn into a great design in the future

[gls2ro]

You are probably asking what frameworks to use. But I suggest you should first use Sketchapp or Adobe Experience Design (at least these two I used and liked a lot).

They allow you to do some UI mocks/basic design with very little effort.

You can find and import in them Boostrap templates providing you with all the elements you need. Then the next step I suggest to do is to pick the basic colors you want to use for normal text, action buttons ... This way you will make sure that in your app you will use only those colors providing a consistent color scheme.

And then you can start to design your interface. Both apps provide simple tools to use and with very little learning curve for doing simple design.

For me (even if I am not a designer) doing this helps me focus on understanding how the elements that I want to build integrate with each other on UI side. And also forces me to focus on using the same elements and the same colors.

For both apps you can also find a lot of free designs provided by various authors from which you can inspire.

You can also browse https://dribbble.com or https://www.behance.net to be inspired by designs that you like.

[iDemonix]

I really struggle to design things in a design app. If I have to design something with Bootstrap I just browse for a bit of inspiration on Dribbble then start coding.

I'd love to be able to design things in PS or Sketch but I find it takes 5x as long as it'd take me to make something by hand.

[ninjaofawesome]

As a front end developer, I would say if you need an MVP to get out the door and you've got a bunch of plates in the air, then yes, Bootstrap (and also Font Awesome!) works just fine for all the things that you don't really care to worry about at the present moment. Its also easy enough to remove if you do eventually bring in a UX person or a designer to refine things.

That being said, the little things that you can do make a huge difference between a site that looks like its made with bootstrap vs a site that has a bit more going on under the design hood. Pay a bit of attention to your fonts and line heights, add in -webkit-font-smoothing, and lock down your colors before you start (e.g. black, white, brand colors, grays, etc.) Consistency will make your life so much easier to get that UI looking amazing, and it takes about 15 minutes or less to write down some variables (assuming you're using a CSS preprocessor). Also, optimize your assets (images, etc) and make sure you have fallbacks if something doesn't load fast.

Lastly, make sure you know what you (roughly) want your app to look like on mobile, tablet and desktop before just diving in to Bootstrap- even just roughly sketching out boxes on paper helps me sometimes with that. I like to use the Chrome emulator for a rough idea of any device as I work on phone, tablet and desktop in either orientation as well.

All in all, what I've described you can easily implement in a a few hours to a few days (depending on the complexity of your site) and makes a huge difference. Once you're making millions, you can hire a great designer to push your site to the next level!

[alaskamiller]

Buy an UI. I've been building digital stuff for twenty years. In the end, just buy an UI with the tech stack you're familiar with. Themeforest, CodeCanyon, whatever. Especially if it's a enterprise dashboard/admin tool. Just buy the most well built and most contributed to UI and master it so that you can re-deploy it over and over again. You've got more important things to do.

[ixacto]

Yes. I did this for my last client, much easier.

[JeffreyKaine]

Bootstrap with material design is my suggestion here. Material is versatile enough for both iOS and Android, and it translates decently well to web. The color palette and font stack are both easy to work with.

https://mdbootstrap.com/material-design-for-bootstrap/

[dyeje]

If you're going to hire a designer in the future, then just use Bootstrap for now.

[tbird007]

You could check html5up for free templates to start with.