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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.

The vast majority of all websites today, are designed in such a way as to tout the resumes of all the people responsible for the site with all the latest buzzwords. Content hidden under drop-down menus noone cares about and which makes things very hard to find, pointless animation here and there, pointless custom zoom logic that doesn't work properly on the big screens, all the latest frameworks to display a few tables of text, progressive loading and pagination for the simplest of data (like the banking transactions of a consumer credit card) that in the old days could have simply been displayed on a single page etc.

You've actually described exactly the same problem that we've mentioned in our expectations as a design studio: https://klad.design/expectations

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘This is the bit that gets lost.’ as a start of the paragraph, and then the very next sentence parroting the chapters title. 3 sentences for 0 new information and this pattern is overused to death.

Don’t you people read what you publish? So disrespectful

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!

And in this case, the article is exactly right, the website is not an art piece, it must serve the function of making people buy from you to be successful, otherwise your company is a very expensive hobby.

Web design _does_ sound much easier when clients can be anesthetized. :)

> It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.

In my experience, the people paying are often more sensitive to this than the designer. The designer wants it to look nice in their portfolio.

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.

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 :-)

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

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.

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.

It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?

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.

Ah the customer isn't in the room? Well, too bad, now you have to listen to the author. How convenient!

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.

https://brynet.ca/

I would definitely suggest sending the beta beta version to friends and family before investing 90% more time on it.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

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?

Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.

"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."

It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.

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.

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.

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.