How Early-stage Founders Can Create a Killer User Experience (Without Hiring a UX Designer)

It’s not as hard as you think, but the results can skyrocket your startup

When I talk to founders, they often fall into one of two camps.

First, the computer science and software engineering camp; the people who have the technical chops to build a product.

Second, those with a sales and marketing background or deep industry-specific knowledge; for example, a lawyer building an app for lawyers.

What I rarely find is a founder with experience and deep knowledge in design and user experience.

As SaaS continues eating the world, the best products and the fastest growing companies are the ones creating an incredible user experience. Whether it’s an app for consumers, businesses, or enterprise-level companies, to succeed it needs to be well designed, easy to use, and simple.

I want to explore this concept of user experience, or UX, because it’s my background, where I started my career. Hopefully, this post will shed some light on the supposedly dark art of UX, and help founders understand that you can implement a good UX practice yourself if you have a good grasp of the basic principles.

So, let’s dig into UX.

What is UX? First of all, user experience ≠ design

There is a difference between UX and design. While visual design is an important component, it’s only one part of crafting a great user experience.

UX is an umbrella term for all the processes involved in making an intuitive and easy-to-use product that people love.

It incorporates all customer-facing elements of your product, touching everything from customer support, to the copy, to the functionality of the software itself, as well as how visually appealing it is.

The goal of a good UX practice is to align these components to provide your customers with just that — a good experience.

Think about some of the great products you love and use all the time. Some of the best in the world feel like they just work. Slack, an all-in-one communication and messing workflow software, is a good example of a great user experience.

In Slack, no matter what you do — whether it’s chatting with your team, uploading a file, or posting a GIF — it always feels smooth, seamless, and even fun.

That’s the response you want to elicit from users when you create a great user experience with your product.

UX in practice: Iced coffee

There’s a great book that I recommend everyone check out, it’s called Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule. In it, the author provides a great example of what good UX looks like.

She loves iced coffee and drinks it all the time. But the thing she hates about iced coffee is the watered-down, diluted flavour as the ice cubes melt.

One day she went into a café for an iced coffee and noticed their ingenious solution. Instead of ice cubes, this particular café used frozen coffee as the ‘ice’ cubes. As the cubes of frozen coffee melted, they didn’t dilute the flavour, all while keeping the beverage nice and cold.

This is a great example of how someone recognized a problem in the user experience and came up with a creative solution. For the user, Jodie Moule enjoying her iced coffee, it just worked: it tasted great because the designers of the user experience seemingly thought of everything.

Understand your user’s needs and desires

At a very basic level, UX is about not guessing what your users might want but instead researching what they actually need throughout the design process.; Incorporating their feedback into the design so that when a new user signs up it feels as if “they thought of everything”. As simple as it sounds, most companies do not put this into practice.

Researching how people use and interact with your product, deciding what’s working and seeing where people get hung up, doesn’t require a PhD, or even college level training. All you need is a method to effectively test how your product performs in the hands of a real user.

User testing is a great way to see whether or not you’re providing a great user experience, as long as you’re doing it in a way that isn’t biased — and founders are guilty of leading the witness all the time.

They’re trying to get answers that make them feel good by asking questions that are either too vague or too specific, like “Do you like it?” or “Can you find where that green button is at the top of the screen?”, respectively.

So, what are the right questions?

It’s good to start as broad as possible. Say I’m testing the usability of my theoretical online proposal app. I’m not going to guide the user by saying ‘click the button on the top right of the screen to create a new proposal’. I’ll ask them to create a new proposal. Let them figure it out.

Then, keep asking broad questions and observe what they do. Record the screen, watch where they click. Ask them to talk aloud about questions they have, problems they run into and frustrations that arise, how they’re feeling about your product. Record that monologue, too. Take notes.

Get your science on.

The point of user testing is to gather valuable information that’s going to help guide you and make your product better. You’re not going to improve your product and the user experience by being told what you want to hear. You need to approach user testing with a clinical and scientific mind.

As your business grows, you’ll need to hire a designer, or a team of designers, to implement your UX research and come up with visual layouts and interfaces. But in the early days of your company, you can implement the basics of UX if you have a good understanding of the fundamentals of how people think and work.

Software is never finished

UX is not a one-time thing. It’s an iterative process that needs constant improvement and refining.

I sometimes hear founders talk about contracting a freelance designer to build version one of their product as a one-time project. This is an important step — especially if you’re trying to get a visually appealing minimum viable product out there into consumers’ hands — but it’s a short term solution to a long term problem.

Just remember, whatever you design, when you put it out there in the world for the first time, it’s probably going to fail.

UX is a journey, not a destination. A great user experience is the result of constant measuring, testing, and analysis of how people use your product. Talk to your users, watch how they behave, take all of their feedback into consideration and use that to guide and iterate on that initial design.

Think back again to your favourite products. No matter what they are, no matter how long they’ve been around, I guarantee you there are still teams of people out there working on it to try and figure out how to make it even better.

Anyone can learn the UX fundamentals: create and test interactive prototypes

If you’re a founder who doesn’t have access to anyone with UX knowledge or experience, you can still learn a lot yourself and get the basics down.

I’ve talked about the research component; user testing and asking the right questions. But what about actually coming up with something to test?

The great thing is that there are products out there nowadays that make coming up with a prototype easy for non-tech and non-design people.

Tools like Balsamiq and InVision allow you to design a website at a structural level — a wireframe, as it’s known in the UX field. You can use these tools to create a prototype that users actually click through and use.

Even though they’re not actually functioning on the back-end, these prototypes let you watch how someone behaves with a rudimentary version of your product.

In the UX world, they’re known as low-fidelity prototypes because they don’t look great and they certainly don’t look or function like the finished product will. But by observing someone using this prototype and using the research methods I outlined above, you can gather the valuable data you need to turn it into a great product.

Once you have a wireframe that works and functions well on a structural level, then you can hand it to a designer who can polish it up and turn it into a high-fidelity prototype, and eventually, version one of your real, functioning, revenue-generating product.

Rinse and repeat. Remember how I said this wouldn’t be a one-time thing? You’re constantly refining.

Design Patterns: be a DJ, not a composer

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when designing your early product prototypes.

I like to think a UX designer acts a lot more like a DJ than a composer. There are plenty of products out there with awesome features and interfaces that you can appropriate for your own product.

The beauty of great UX design is that you can let your experiences with awesome products inform your practice.

In UX, these reusable functions are called design patterns. We all use design patterns all the time without really realizing it.

Take a calendar app, for example. While each app is unique, they all follow the same basic design as a printed calendar (note: also called a mental model in UX, the offline/analog idea users are familiar with that inspired the digital version)

Or, when you’re scrolling through a list, that list generally works the same as other lists used by the multitudes of apps out there with a scrolling function. Other examples include search, forms, graphs, and buttons. No one is reinventing the wheel when it comes to fundamental functions. And that is a good thing on many levels.

It saves you valuable design time. And, users are comfortable with these design patterns because they’ve seen them before. It makes their experience using your app better because they don’t have to learn something new. But much like with a DJ sampling tracks, there’s still skill required in picking the right elements and executing them well.

So, while this article only scratched the surface of UX, I hope it gave you a good introduction to the basics. It’s a deep topic but it’s not a dark art and it doesn’t require years of training to figure out.

There’s a lot of good information out there; read some books, read some blogs, and educate yourself. You’ll find that you can implement a lot of the fundamental UX principles yourself and lay a foundation for a great product you can scale when you begin to hire an awesome team.

What are some stand out brands and products that offer you a great user experience?

Enjoyed this article I’d appreciate you giving it some claps. Also if you’re an entrepreneur, check out my book, Free Trials (& Tribulations): How To Build A Business While Getting Punched In The Mouth available on Amazon