alt Hacker NewsYour Website Is Not for You
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My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.)
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.
I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here
A website is a compromise between three parties.
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.
Perhaps better stated: Your company's website isn't for you, it's to pursue the agenda of your company. Your personal homepage is for you, if you can free yourself from view count as a success metric.
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board.
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 :)
No one reads my tech blog, it absolutely is for me.
I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are.
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!
The ones who treat a website as their personal taste vehicle are the designers! Over and over I see tiny illegible fonts and gray-on-gray buttons being defended by the designer who made it.
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.
Yes, it is.
I remember regularly scrambling to redesign our marketing site, because the CEO was going to start speaking to investors in less than a week. So we'd always end up with a homepage that represented a new narrative the CEO was trying out, often at the expense of current customers being able to find what they were looking for (our homepage was also our primary entry point into the onboarding funnel).
had this exact fight. founder wanted it more corporate, designer had the research, designer won.
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.
Very true. I did over 300 product marketing website reviews and the most common thing I would see is a generic description of this big aspirational vision of the company and none of the specifics of what a company actually does. If you’re into see what great websites do the YouTube playlist with the top sites is at http://goatedguild.com
I feel like I finally get to feel the designer’s pain when people arrive with their vibe-coded pile of garbage and I have to explain why it can’t just slide into the product.
It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?
I’ve found that the larger the company, the less this is a problem. At smaller orgs, it’s common for the owner or leader to have their personal identity tied up in the brand, sometimes a bit too much, which leads to hyper-involvement.
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.
The problem is that user research and competitive research are also not the truth. I prefer to ship something I know I like than what someone else thinks a third abstract person might like.
Case in point - My first webdev job was producing a site for the city library. My boss explained to them when going through their sitemap that they should to rename their planned section from "Lending" to "Borrowing".
Interesting post. It pairs well with this other one^1 I bookmarked just yesterday about the way business websites' home pages so often suffer from lack of ownership (a la "tragedy of the commons"). In both cases, I'm reminded of Julie Zhuo's awesome "How to be Strategic" post^2 which emphasizes being crystal clear on WHOSE problem you're trying to solve.
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.
> It's for the person you've never met
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.
When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise.
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.
This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals.
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!
Yes, the website is for prospective (and current) clients.
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 :-)
I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
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.
If you're in this comment section, consider play-testing your website. Find someone who has never used it and watch them explore it for the first time, while they think out loud, without giving them any help. My personal website had links to GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. on the home page, and the first thing my brother in law did was leave the site, without ever looking at any of my posts, which were indexed on another page.
This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.
Beware of the HIPPO! (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
Sorry to be frank and for the upcoming rant as your site is mostly fine, but looking at most websites I visite these days be it from a company, a service, a webshop, an open source project, a forum, a blog, a newspaper or almost any form of social media. I'd say I do not know for whom anyone is designing those sites, but I can clearly say it is not for me (as a human user and/or customer).
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
“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.”
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.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of designers are simply not that good at what they do
True website is not for you and in the age for AI is not even for people. Its for AI agents reading your website and deciding what to do with it: recommend it, skip it, integrate with it, etc.
This applies to pretty much every situation. It is not just about visual things, it is more about things that are easy to have an opinion on. Its similar concept to bike shedding, but with the added emphasis of the decision maker. Though the very fact we even call them that kind of implies that they should have a say right? I guess we object to the kind of say that they have. Should a decision maker just make binary decisions? Yes to this, no to that.
"Listen to the customer/research."
Ah the customer isn't in the room? Well, too bad, now you have to listen to the author. How convenient!
Ironic that the site has a clock in the corner which is the site owner's current time.
Yes, it’s for agents traversing the web universe like photons.
That website was not for me.
I get why a design studio would think this way, but in many cases it is for me.
Your commercial website is not for you. Would be a better title.
I find that I am AMAZED at how few customer-facing sites have failed to even consider the basic idea of "why is someone on our site?"
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.
Government websites are often particular bad this way. Nobody cares who the head of the agency is or wants to read their newest blog post. Most people don’t need to know that the new records department opened in Des Moines. They need to know what programs they qualify for and how to get benefits.
Relevant comic:
Many CEOs are pricks. Many UX experts are too.
Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer
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.
...and now it's for AI to "consoom"...
This is a distillation of what we used to (still do?) teach junior SWEs.
"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."
And why did you put a clock in your website? lol
Except when your website is for you. That being the case where you aren't just making it because someone else is paying you or you think you might get hired because of it. Those websites aren't yours, obviously.
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.
"Can I get the icon in cornflower blue."
[flagged]
The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time.
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.