Indie founders: let’s talk design
Hey everyone,
I’m currently in the process of putting together a guide on how indie founders can incorporate UX without having to be a design guru or hire a specialist. Just actionable, impactful steps to vastly improve the UX of their products. None of the fluff.
I want to know how you feel about design as an indie founder. Do you struggle with anything? Want any particular advice or recommendations?
Let me know! Would love to pick your brains!
I'm an programmer-founder and my two biggest challenges for my design is
finding a way to keep a consistent look and feel across multiple frameworks. docsite is written in docusaurus. marketing page is webflow. webapp is material ui + react. which ive just given up on for now.
trying to identify edge cases such as error and intermediate states. The happy-path usually looks and feels great but its everything else users do that complicates my UI/UX since i have to put up guard rails.
Interesting stuff. Consistency across frameworks can be a massive pain. Would you ever consider working with a designer to create a design system? Which could alleviate some of the pain there.
Also get your point on the edge-case states, I think a lot of companies (not just indie) suffer with this. I have too before. A solution for this could be user testing or an automated user tracking tool like HotJar to see where people are going wrong. Would you ever consider working with a designer to implement some stuff like that?
i have worked with a few designers but i have always been disappointed. I've had more success by analyzing popular web services UI's and adjusting them to fit my UX.
right now i use a component framework (material UI) and storybook to develop my component library which i try to share across platforms but that doesnt always work (looking at you webflow).
i do not like the solution of relying on customers or session replay and heres why: i look at software like manufacturing. and the most expensive thing you can do is change code that is already in production. the cheapest state for code is the design phase.
ideally you can nail all these things down before you go live otherwise you an insanely long cycle which scales exponentially with the size of the codebase or impact of the edge-case. =>
100% agree with this, the amount of times I’ve seen teams spend months developing a throwaway prototype…
Regarding the session replays etc I agree it’s better to avoid having problems in the first place, but I’m sure you’ll agree users always find a way around something, no matter how many guard rails you put up. Personally I’ve found tools like HotJar to be quite useful for quickly spotting those moments and being able to suggest fixes before it impacts a large number of users.
thats a good point. this is why i still end up having to use a customer analytics platform. 🫠