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.

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.

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.

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” :)

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?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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