DavidParmelee
But I usually find myself talking people out of getting an app made, versus a mobile-friendly website, unless all of the following are true:
- Your users would be able to access and use mobile apps on their devices.
- Your competitors’ apps are getting a lot of use (or you have no competitors).
- Your app would have key functionality (not just nice-to-have features) and benefits that a mobile website couldn't provide.
- You've verified that people need this key functionality via rigorous user research. (Asking loaded questions, like "This would be a good app, right?", is a trap. Don't do it!)
- Your user research has shown that your customers would be convinced that they should use an app for this. If it's a tough sell, take the website / web app route instead.
According to an article I saw in Recode last year, around half of mobile users no longer download a new app in a typical month.
I was pleased that this article differentiates between information architects and interaction designers, but it unfortunately treats UX designers and graphic designers as the same role. These are two different fields.
A graphic designer ought to be evaluated according to their visual design style and the way they communicate through design, whereas a UX practitioner should be evaluated for how well they solve research and/or design problems. While some graphic designers do cross over into visual design or UX, UX designers can also enter that field from development (as I did), psychology, marketing, and more. There’s a reason why there’s a joke in our field that most of us can’t draw much more than a stick figure.
I found Universal Principles of Design to be a good read that talks about human-computer interaction with some examples of psychology. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology book that often gets quoted in interaction design theory. Another one I’ve read is Emotional Design.
While About Face and Designing for the Digital Age are more general interaction design books, these have an extensive discussion on user goals, which I've extended a bit in the ebook I'm writing.
While I haven’t read it yet, Dr. Susan Weinschenk wrote 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People. She’s a behavioral scientist who has worked in UX for over 30 years. Her site is at http://www.theteamw.com.
Offering users the features and benefits they’re looking for is kind of tricky. In enterprise settings, the users are more likely to know what they need. When they’re right, they just need their idea designed and built. Where it gets difficult is when they ask for a fix of a symptom, but the root cause is what really needs fixing. For instance, people might ask for a surface-level improvement on a step of registration or onboarding that shouldn’t even be there because it doesn’t give them any value (like confirming an email address or even asking for signup for a product they’ve never tried). Or, two different users (who map to different personas) make requests that contradict each other.
- You’ll definitely need more social proof. The site says that “many” companies use it, but there aren’t any numbers, names, or testimonials. Similarly, there isn’t anything describing who the freelancers are or what kind of experience they’ve had so far on the site. Since you just made the site, you won’t have that in the beginning. But press coverage is another way to start building your authority.
- For clients, it’s not enough to look for just any developer. They’ll generally know which technology stack or languages they are looking for, or at the very least have a few platforms they’re considering. So wearing the client hat, going onto the site kind of feels like a black box.
- I’m in a few freelance Facebook groups and Slack communities. On the freelancers’ side, a common objection we have with job sites is that so many of them promise to be “the one site we need to save our business”, but then the sites woefully underdeliver - which leads to a lack of trust, a lot of stale profiles, and just a few people per skill getting all the work. You’ll really need to think through that as you open up the site to new freelancers. There’s also a significant fragmentation problem with sites that require/encourage portfolios without just allowing an external portfolio link. Freelancers may also have objections around unfavorable payment arrangements, free work, tire-kicking clients, and sites that act like they’re the only place where the freelancer ever finds work.
- The site also doesn’t really set an expectation of pricing, budget, or client experience. As a full-time independent consultant, I’m pretty well aware of freelance marketplaces that just turn into a race-to-the-bottom price competition. Still, it’s good to at least set a ballpark expectation of - for example, “these are senior developers in North America” - so that clients have a good sense of what they need in order to be here.
- On a related note, think through what kind of objections freelance clients typically encounter when they hire developers. If you’re a freelancer yourself or the developers you’re starting out with freelance full-time, they could at least help with this outreach. Some objections I can think of off the top of my head, as a former onshore developer for a small business with a mixed onshore/offshore team, might include these: their time zones are way different, their communication skills aren’t up to par, they require additional management handholding, or their resumes look a lot more impressive then they are after we hire them.
- You might want to bring some aspects of your Typeform into your landing page. Think about what the pain points or objections are around clients who want less realistic project constraints (e.g. “it needs to be done yesterday for $2k”), and how you protect both client and freelancer in both that and more ideal working arrangements.
Pain/Dream/Fix is a helpful formula for thinking about what causes a client or freelancer to want to come to your site, what they want to achieve, and how they can get there.
I love how you address value in pricing, too! And how you identify that there are lots of good states between dead and $100MM per year. I know several entrepreneurs who see their SaaS as more of a lifestyle business, and high six figures / low 7 figures gives them a very good lifestyle.
This is the first time I’ve heard of Canny, and the product has an interesting premise. As a user researcher / design strategist who was a developer before, I’d like to see it have a way to map the users giving feedback onto user personas or customer personas instead of treating each user like they’re all the same.
That would make Canny a lot more powerful, in terms of prioritizing features and showing companies how to make higher-value decisions, like redesigning their product, realigning their content, or splitting their product (for different pricing tiers or in general).