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.
I think this applies to everyone. There's a lot of ego and pride that people can't shake.
Usually, the copy and structure of a landing page is dictated by founders or marketing folks. Sales people also make this mistake on their slides. They have too many slides about a fancy team, fancy product, and fancy features -- then maybe they show a tailored use case or two.
I highly recommend Donald Miller's Marketing Made Simple as an antidote.
Yep. I've learned that lesson more than once. Maybe one of these days it'll stick... :p
Specifically, I'm not a "designer", but I regularly end up making/changing UIs (mobile apps, web apps/pages, etc). When it comes to design, it really matters who the target audience is.
If you're creating a UI for "mass market", you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances what your average user expects, generally, from UI/UX, and the more you ask them to "invest", the worse you're going to do. On the other hand, if you're making a tool for a B2B (business-to-business) product, you have more freedom to set baseline expectations of what the end user needs to be able to do and understand. You can also expose more powerful options, etc. You can sometimes end up going in very different directions. Even error handling and logging can sometimes be handled differently, depending on the context.
Ignoring the fact that sometimes founders feel the need to put their stamp on everything, for startups and scaleups that haven't progressed to corporate slog, I think it's near impossible for even the best staff designer in the world to arrive at the optimum website/deck/infographic/widget without founder or leader feedback.
The key ingredient is their insight. That's what sets any startup apart. Otherwise the designer would be the founder.
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
Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot
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.
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.
Why do people pay so much money for reports from dubious firms like Gartner?
The game they are playing is almost like a coin toss. If you look at the Gartner reports that become publicly visible, they are often wrong.
So why do reports from companies like Gartner still sell?
Because they reduce the anxiety of the owner or decision-maker.
Business is complex. Even a bad product can succeed because of advertising. Exaggerated marketing, fraud, timing, distribution, and luck all exist, and they can all produce success. UX is an ideal. But in practice, developers often have to satisfy OX: owner experience.
Companies appear to pursue profit because most owners like money. But in reality, many companies are closer to the realization of the owner’s ideology, taste, and worldview.
So what matters?
For a developer, it becomes important to judge how closely the owner’s taste aligns with the public, and with the target audience. That is why developers often end up flattering the owner: not merely because of hierarchy, but because the owner’s taste is frequently the actual operating system of the business.
How does this generalize to firms with more than one stakeholder/owner? I don't see how it does without some magic where we assume that all members of e.g. the C-suite have similar, model-able reasoning.
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 :-)
> 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 :)
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!
Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also.
You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
I remember p2hari commenting on one of my "What are you working on" comments, so maybe they got it from there. Anyway, here's the link: https://kavla.dev/
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
Yeah I think the whole "the website is to help the user do a job" mostly exists to give people who do UX a position of authority. The user needs to do a job; we can't pre-specify that job entirely; users who are frustrated in their job will leave with it incomplete. Those three things are totally true, but they are often used to justify a third thing: input on website design should be driven by user feedback, filtered through UX research. A refusal of the third thing is where you get design like HN. You can do UX research; everyone should. But if it is more than merely an input into design, you become rudderless.
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.
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.
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.
perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances require, not to mention _taste_.
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
This is true but the common implication, "UX research knows your customer" is horseapples. I will point out we allow ourselves to believe that UX research knows the customer because we train like the above. We tell our engineers they don't know what the customer wants and when it comes time to put a foot down, they have nowhere firm to stand.
I _think_ it's the best we have right now, right? Excellent UX research speaks for itself, there's just not much of it. As an industry, we've done a realllllly good job of devaluing high-quality UX research and those who do it for a living.
This writing was effective, clear, to the point, and revealed a human perspective. I can sense the frustrated professional going behind the curtain and tidying up his reservations about dealing with his clients.
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.
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.
I think this applies to everyone. There's a lot of ego and pride that people can't shake.
Usually, the copy and structure of a landing page is dictated by founders or marketing folks. Sales people also make this mistake on their slides. They have too many slides about a fancy team, fancy product, and fancy features -- then maybe they show a tailored use case or two.
I highly recommend Donald Miller's Marketing Made Simple as an antidote.
Absolutely correct - as with so many things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's too easy to think "I'm right and you're wrong".
Yep. I've learned that lesson more than once. Maybe one of these days it'll stick... :p
Specifically, I'm not a "designer", but I regularly end up making/changing UIs (mobile apps, web apps/pages, etc). When it comes to design, it really matters who the target audience is.
If you're creating a UI for "mass market", you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances what your average user expects, generally, from UI/UX, and the more you ask them to "invest", the worse you're going to do. On the other hand, if you're making a tool for a B2B (business-to-business) product, you have more freedom to set baseline expectations of what the end user needs to be able to do and understand. You can also expose more powerful options, etc. You can sometimes end up going in very different directions. Even error handling and logging can sometimes be handled differently, depending on the context.
100%.
Ignoring the fact that sometimes founders feel the need to put their stamp on everything, for startups and scaleups that haven't progressed to corporate slog, I think it's near impossible for even the best staff designer in the world to arrive at the optimum website/deck/infographic/widget without founder or leader feedback.
The key ingredient is their insight. That's what sets any startup apart. Otherwise the designer would be the founder.
Sounds like the founder as well as the customers are who the designer should be gathering data points from.
I think anything where a surprise is presented (in design or otherwise) means some missed communication.
This.
Most designers are designing for their customer, their customer is the one paying their salary/commission/contract.
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
But that isn’t the point at all.
For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot
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.
I think it's implicit...
It is, but not until you actually get into the article.
I also assumed the article would be about personal websites until I read it.
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.
Why do people pay so much money for reports from dubious firms like Gartner?
The game they are playing is almost like a coin toss. If you look at the Gartner reports that become publicly visible, they are often wrong.
So why do reports from companies like Gartner still sell?
Because they reduce the anxiety of the owner or decision-maker.
Business is complex. Even a bad product can succeed because of advertising. Exaggerated marketing, fraud, timing, distribution, and luck all exist, and they can all produce success. UX is an ideal. But in practice, developers often have to satisfy OX: owner experience.
Companies appear to pursue profit because most owners like money. But in reality, many companies are closer to the realization of the owner’s ideology, taste, and worldview.
So what matters?
For a developer, it becomes important to judge how closely the owner’s taste aligns with the public, and with the target audience. That is why developers often end up flattering the owner: not merely because of hierarchy, but because the owner’s taste is frequently the actual operating system of the business.
How does this generalize to firms with more than one stakeholder/owner? I don't see how it does without some magic where we assume that all members of e.g. the C-suite have similar, model-able reasoning.
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 :-)
> 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 :)
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!
Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also. You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
How do you know what his side project is? I couldn’t find a link.
It's listed in his HN profile: https://kavla.dev/
Along with his personal website: https://dahl.dev/
I remember p2hari commenting on one of my "What are you working on" comments, so maybe they got it from there. Anyway, here's the link: https://kavla.dev/
Thank you! :-)
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.
No, my website is for me and not everything is a product
I had the same knee jerk reaction but after reading the article I think it is clear they are talking about company websites
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.
"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!
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!
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.
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.
“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.
Yeah I think the whole "the website is to help the user do a job" mostly exists to give people who do UX a position of authority. The user needs to do a job; we can't pre-specify that job entirely; users who are frustrated in their job will leave with it incomplete. Those three things are totally true, but they are often used to justify a third thing: input on website design should be driven by user feedback, filtered through UX research. A refusal of the third thing is where you get design like HN. You can do UX research; everyone should. But if it is more than merely an input into design, you become rudderless.
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.
Beware of the HIPPO! (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
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.
I get why a design studio would think this way, but in many cases it is for me.
Yes, it’s for agents traversing the web universe like photons.
oh, okay then.. you can have it
https://brynet.ca/
How dare you run a website without some sort of React framework.
React wouldn't be an improvement. But adding max-width: 1200px; margin: auto; to the body sure would.
That does look nicer, thanks!
sorry
Your commercial website is not for you. Would be a better title.
Or non-personal.
There are non-commercial websites such as Government that put a lot of effort into focussing on the user.
Some of the Gov design systems are well worth looking at.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
https://designsystem.digital.gov/
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.
Counterpoint: yes it is.
Time for my favourite old man yells at cloud opinion.
The internet was a far better place when websites were created by individuals mainly for themselves. And probably hosted for free on Geocities.
perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances require, not to mention _taste_.
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
...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."
This is true but the common implication, "UX research knows your customer" is horseapples. I will point out we allow ourselves to believe that UX research knows the customer because we train like the above. We tell our engineers they don't know what the customer wants and when it comes time to put a foot down, they have nowhere firm to stand.
I _think_ it's the best we have right now, right? Excellent UX research speaks for itself, there's just not much of it. As an industry, we've done a realllllly good job of devaluing high-quality UX research and those who do it for a living.
"Can I get the icon in cornflower blue."
This writing was effective, clear, to the point, and revealed a human perspective. I can sense the frustrated professional going behind the curtain and tidying up his reservations about dealing with his clients.
It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.
very Nice Blog its Really Correct That The Website is Not for You