[xyzelement]

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.

[whstl]

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.

[yawnxyz]

really good observation, and it's interesting what will happen when implementation gets cheaper - designers will get overwhelmed with too many things to review now, probably

[whstl]

Good point. But TBH I was already seeing it, even in the pre-AI landscape.

Bad designers are a huge bottleneck and terrible gatekeepers of information, delaying the work even before the development starts, during and after. I saw this a lot in high-performance teams that had bad designers, but AI is making it even more clear now.

Good designers, on the other hand, know how to define standards and components, and have been empowering teams for quite some time. But of course this means there's less micromanagement and less reliance on Figma for every single screen.

What AI has really changed IMO is that there's no need for designers to ask developers to ask for micro-changes that take longer to explain than to ask an AI to do.

...but even that was already possible and extremely fast by simply having a designer pair with a developer and ask for changes on the fly.

IMO communication skills, organization and collaboration is what makes or breaks it, regardless of AI or not.

[joshuamoyers]

except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.

[16mb]

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.

[xyzelement]

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.

[TheGRS]

Yea I mean the first reaction I had to the blog was "yes, but have you met the same designers I have?" And to be clear I've worked with great designers who understood their limitations and blind spots, but its pretty common to see ones who charge ahead and ignore valuable developer feedback.

[jerf]

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?

[notpushkin]

> 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)

[citizenpaul]

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?

[mikepurvis]

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.

[notpushkin]

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.

[theendisney]

We do it like that with everything. If you consider yourself an artist it is quite simple to say you cant put your name on it if anything changes. You can also explain what you just wrote: Youve hired me, trust me to do it and focus on your tasks. Or: we will be different from otters but in a limited number of ways and your suggestions dont offer enough roi to make the cut.

[ninalanyon]

> it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see.

I tried with wildly varying degrees of success to impress this on my fellow developers for decades. In every case it was an utterly new and foreign idea to them, including those who had actually studied computer science at degree level.

[miki123211]

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.

[antisthenes]

> 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.

[befictious]

If your designers are only picking colors, fonts, and spacing then you don't have designers, you have software art directors.

[lavela]

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.

[tqwhite]

"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.

[chongli]

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.

[cybercatgurrl]

if you’re hiring a graphic designer without UX experience to do a UI then you’re hiring the wrong person and your end product will be hated by your userbase

[arijun]

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."

[satvikpendem]

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.

[nothrabannosir]

> In practice, most programmers write shit.

I mean…………

[ragnese]

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.

[tomnipotent]

> 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.

[chongli]

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).

[kamma4434]

> 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’.

[sixtyj]

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” :)

[bsoles]

The "design thinking" BS led many UX designers to think that they can come into any project and design user interfaces without really understanding the field, the customers, nor the application.

I have seen this in my own organization where the UX organization assigns a UX person to a project on demand. They have no understanding of the particular application domain and yet they presume they can build good user interfaces because they practice design thinking. All the while ignoring technical experts on the team.

But domain experts and developers are also to blame since they cannot claim their turf successfully enough.

[econ]

Mockups in Gimp are great. Then can start with everything wrong, get input and make lots of versions.

Thinking about it, we should probably have some tool to make pictures behave like websites for demos.

[whh]

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.

[basket_horse]

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.

[kamma4434]

Same experience. Nice on Canva but not necessarily clear for users

[abanana]

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".

[ozim]

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.

[cael450]

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.

[Angostura]

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 “

[patmorgan23]

Is your pricing on your website? That's a way to cut down on the wasted time

[butterlesstoast]

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”.

[gavmor]

Sounds like a case of Chesterton's Pothole (nee Fence)—a glaringly obvious suboptimal implementation that's there for an undocumented reason.

[almostarockstar]

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.

[dnnddidiej]

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.

[cybercatgurrl]

i would much rather work under a designer founder with someone who understands their domain than just about anyone else

[fny]

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.

[cybercatgurrl]

a designer can still make a terrible UI if they have no understanding of UX. in fact the worst UX with a UI i’ve ever seen have come from professional designers and not amateurs

[cm11]

I'm struck by the assuredness of the responses. People seem to really dislike their designers—their low in the hierarchy, often junior colleagues who typically aren't in the meetings with the execs, the leaders, or whoever else has chosen the priorities. There's a reason the designers don't know "what's really right." There's a reason they're grasping to find or do research to inform themselves. You know, besides the part, where they're being asked to do that user research, often by their PMs and leaders. There's a weird amount of scapegoating here.

It's been my experience that leaders have rarely had enough of a vision to share, but tell the team to get started anyway. Someone has to suss that out—if not the leaders, then the PM except that the PM can skirt with vague requirements. The designs are the first place where all the ideas (many contradicting, many poorly thought out) hit a little reality. When the ideas that looked good amorphously in the head don't look good on screen, it's the design and not the requirements.

There's an insinuation in some of the comments that the projects (the leaders) are starting with a clear vision and design is muddying it up. I mean there are plenty of bad designers, but most companies have a broken product development process (they mostly all use the same one, despite different products, different team makeups, different leader strengths/weaknesses, etc.). Why are companies still hiring designers? Why is design a step in the process at all? I agree confusing designs keep coming out—there are so many enshittified products. It's design theater, but for who? Design is downstream not upstream.

[TheGRS]

Another pretty bad trend I see is designers who don't make pragmatic tradeoffs for the underlying technology. Not incorporating reusable components, not considering rendering times, not considering the design language already established. Sometimes designers decide they know better and that usually rubs me the wrong way.

Worse still are designers who don't use established patterns, not just within the company, but like throughout the web. They want to make something truly unique that would completely ostracize the user, not to mention make it waaaay more time-consuming to develop. Get a grip, this isn't your art thesis, its a business.

[topham]

This.

Most designers are designing for their customer, their customer is the one paying their salary/commission/contract.

[DrewADesign]

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.

[taneq]

> 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.”

[DrewADesign]

Yes it’s really that clear. The moment non-technical people see code syntax or hear technical jargon, they instantly nope out. That’s why people ask their developer friends and family to fix their computers — they don’t know the difference. It’s all just ‘tech’ to them. It’s also why people toil away at bonkers “no-code” machinations that would have been far simpler with a little more tech knowledge… it’s very intimidating to outsiders. OTOH, far fewer people even know what problems designers are meant to solve, let alone judge the solution, but many think ‘well I have good taste and I’ve worked with designers before’ and confidently wield their broken ideas based on false assumptions.