ux_designer

They did use a voice impersonator.

He didn't point this out, but the 13" macbook air and the 15" macbook pro have the same screen resolution. The air has a much higher dpi screen.

The Svbtle publicity stunt now comes full circle.

This contributes to the problem the article illustrates. You outsource your design, as you put it the "logos, color and layout selection, or a new look for something," and then say that the PM and engineers wing the UI and UX?

So you outsource your design and art, and then don't even really have a resource, outsourced or not, for user experience.

Also, it's quite a shame that you're associated designers with being "hip and not passionate" and "specializing and not being an adequate generalist."

Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."

Where are you going to find a office that has 50-something private offices?

I've worked in places with 30+ programmers - what building exists that a company could afford to have 30 private offices??

I'm a 100% creative type. I used to be a visual designer, and now I focus on UX design with visuals taking a secondary role. As just the type of designer they are describing, Don Draper on Mad Men summed it up:

"[...]we’re the least important, most important thing there is.”

Traditionally, design (and user experience) is the last thing to be added, and the first thing to be cut. If you have 2 founders, a business guy, and a engineer, you can make a product. No design required. But a designer and a business guy? They can make a prototype, but nothing functional.

And we live in a world (the startup, internet world) where function always supersedes form. For every 1 site with good design and bad functionality, there are 50 with bad design and good functionality.

It just so happens that a great many startups are started by technical people. And typically, they can develop a working product, or very advanced prototype, with no designer help at all. And when you add in the "inmates are running the asylum" mentality, most technical founders and engineers don't notice/care if their design (ux, ui, graphic arts) aren't superb because that's just "lipstick and lace."

There are a lot of engineers and technical founders that realize this isn't the case, but they are in the minority.

Dustin Curtis didn't create a blogging platform, he created another PR and traffic grab. Which is great for his career and visibility.

But come on, the only way this could get any more farcical is if Dustin revealed that he orchestrated this whole thing and is in fact both parties.

If I were Dustin, I'd be ecstatic that I'd almost permanently glued to the front page of HN. Any publicity is good publicity.

You pay for people, link farmers, to link back to your webpage with specific anchor text. The link farmers typically have a network of websites they can distribute this over, offering you a few hundred or thousand links back to your site with your targeted keywords. Sometimes, the link farms even have good pagerank, which makes it even better.

That's the whole point of the Google backlinks - get as many links back to your site as you can, and you'll get good SEO.

And if you do this, and Google detects it, they nail you.

If serious, I would love to show what I mean. I am not a programmer at all, I know nothing but photoshop, HTML, and CSS.

I would be happy to create a demo "web3.0 startup" landing page on bootstrap doing nothing but adding 1 less file and some graphics. And then I could write what I did on my blog or something, or just make a post here.

When people say they "use bootstrap", are people just using it unmodofied?

Throw a "custom.less" at the bottom of your styles.less, and you can make bootstrap completely indistinguishable from the vanilla style.

right now I am building a very large browser app on bootstrap, and you'd never know by looking. All I do is add styles to the "custom.less" and change what needs changing.

Programmers need to realize that customizing the look and feel of bootstrap is VERY VERY easy. It's perfectly safe to use for production.

All bootstrap did was make a vanilla, simple template so you don't have to redo all the boring html work over and over. There is nothing that constrains you to a layout or visual style.

I get the reason if your post.

But saying you can't skin Bootstrap? There is nothing hard about changing all the .less files to be skinned to whatever you want. I am in the middle of doing it for a large project right now, and there won't be any visible evidence of Bootstrap.

Someone who doesn't want to design a skin might not want to take the time, but that doesn't mean it's not easy for someone who is a adept graphic designer and CSS author. Especially with .less.

Anyways, I think we're talking about different things. If you say I can't change Bootstrap to fit my design, that's just plain wrong. Every single line of every .less file can be modified, and it's probably tremendously faster and easier than starting with a reset.less and writing EVERYTHING from the ground up, let alone all the IE hacks and HTML5 workarounds.

I honestly don't see the difficulty in adding/modifying .less files, or changing class names. All the div layouts and HTML can be whatever you want. You don't have to use their grid or responsive layouts.

So saying you can't skin it is ridiculous. The entire .less source is included. Skin it as much as you want. Every single CSS and HTML aspect is customizable. And again, you are no worse off for doing so.

Seems like this article has made the rounds here a few times already.

24% in my area.

To expand a bit, Ive done a great deal of UX work and research, more of what I'm worried about is the visual appeal and attractiveness.

It's easy for me to make a slick, good looking startup splash page or website. But I am not totally sure what makes a enterprise, behind the firewall app still be attractive and "cool" while maintaining its critica function. Part of my challenge is to get emotional buy in and "fun" in the ease of use.

Or are people people and just stick to whatever works in the b2c world when it comes to visuals and aesthetic?