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A comment on Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering software design for future use cases?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering software design for... by badams2527 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:15AM (#23614157)
How much time do you spend "making it pretty" after you've got it functionally working? Interested to hear your experiences on that.

For a long time we would "pretty it up at the end", in one of my coworkers words, which lead to a ton of horrible UX decisions early on that required major legwork later. We switched to doing ux-driven development from the start and it's saved us a ton of time and saved ourselves from poor decisions haha.

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Re:Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering software design for... by theshrike79 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @01:37PM (#23617355)
I make it pretty until I hit a deadline or the customer runs out of money :D

It depends on the customer and project which parts I focus on making "pretty". If it's a data-intensive thing, I might spend time optimising the protocol, compression and making the data pipeline robust. For a web app I'll spend more time making it more usable by streamlining the most relevant flows (which I know of since the client has been testing the (M)VP already).

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