fairpx

I work On UI/UX for B2B software businesses and the reason Isee for the problem is that the web is built by engineers. There has been a big focus on code quality, best practices, frameworks etc. But the majority of these engineers didn’t spend time on UI. This is definitely changing. 95% of our customers are great engineers that are seeing the value good UI/UX can add to their product and help deliver a better experience to their user. We’re in the early stages of this shift, but forward thinking engineers are already paving the way.

http://fairpixels.pro

Just as a side note: not every search engine is a direct competitor to Google. You can have vertical search engines serving a specific purpose. These can do very well by executing on a narrow use case. Something the Googles can’t do.

Background: I’ve been working with B2B SaaS companies for over 9 years now, helping mostly with product design.

Observation: One thing most companies seem to mean by ‘growing’ is getting more traffic. The big advantage of B2B software is that you can do very very well with very very small amounts of potential users flowing through your funnel.

Solution: The biggest thing I’ve seen contribute to B2B product growth is by far a focus on increasing conversion rate (instead of traffic generation). UX design plays a central part of this (Full disclosure, I run http://fairpixels.pro - a design firm for software products in this space, so I might be biased, but the data I see every day backs this claim up). Stating the obvious, but it’s a lot better to have 50 people visiting your website every day, and get 5 of those to subscribe to your annual plan, vs driving 200 people to your website but only having 2 or 3 join.

Map out your user flow. Where does your lead come from? When on your website, what does he/she see & do? What’s the one CTA you present them? Is your value prop clear? Does your CTA have the right color and is the placement right? Does the look & feel of your website communicate professionalism, trustworthiness, etc.

It’s sexy to think about driving thousands of users to your platform, but it’s more practical, useful and valuable to focus on those questions.

It would be great if all these new regulations only applied to companies of X size. Scrappy startups with no access to good lawyers and understanding of these regulations are more likely to suffer vs the big guys who were the cause of all of these changes in the first place.

I wish there was a way to have less tabs open. This will probably just encourage my bad habits of having too my stuff open

Not sure what to think of this. Google & FB have internal frameworks and/or hackathons to encourage their own people to come up with ideas. After all the failed attempts of Snap (glasses, the redesign etc) to come up with some key new ideas, poor IPO, layoffs and other bad news, this seems to be a clear signal that screams: “we don’t have the smartest people working at our company. We need your ideas to save our future.”

I’ve been interested in watch OSystems for some time. Would LOVE to collaborate with someone who wants to work on a sideproject. I run a UI/UX firm and want to contribute with design. Feel free to reach out if interested. Details in my profile.

For us (http://fairpixels.pro) it’s actually the off-work connectivity. Slack, email, todo lists and all of the other tools make us pretty effecient and productive. But I’d love to see how I can boost social connectivity outside of ‘work’.

PS. We are hiring

“In general” this would be something Zuck’s team can look at.

Wonderful article and inspiring person!

I recently came across this talk of her, and highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ she explains a bit about the history of her work.

One of the main reasons I find her so inspiring is that her work clearly shows why adding a great designer to a great team of engineers can result in ever lasting impact.

As a designer myself, I work with teams of engineers (mostly in the B2B SaaS Space [1]) who write great software but don't have the skills to design a delightful experience for their users. It's a shame there are still too many teams of talented engineers out there who don't see the importance of great design.

[1] http://fairpixels.pro

It should be available world wide

Was wondering the same thing. tnx for the perspective

Audiobooks. For me there's no better way to take my mind off the journey than that. Mostly on the topic of business or what ever specific thing I'm working on at that moment. Audiobooks and a notebook to scribble down ideas and learning is such a brain booster.

Actually the core of what I was trying to say is not about learning styles at all. You can use a real-world editor and a completely different learning style to create a real world application (by following along tutorials for example). The big difference, and that was the point I was trying to make, is that in a real code editor, you're learning while building in a real-world environment. Even if you stop in the middle of your journey, you will have built something that you can share with friends. Whereas these types of apps will take you through a journey which is great, but I wonder how many take the step of going to their computers, opening an editor and building their first real application.

I'm torn about all of these types of apps. On one hand, I think it's great to invite people into the world of coding and doing so in a user friendly matter. No doubt Grasshopper and a handful of similar apps are well designed, but is it really the right way to go about things?

I remember vividly learning to code at age 11. I had an old computer, windows would constantly crash and the only thing I could access really was QBASIC.

Alongside a book with code snippets, I would simply write a line of code, hit run and see what happens. Then, go back to the code and 'go rogue' (meaning: change the numbers a bit and make the line 5pixels instead of 2 for example). This is where the magic happened, because I actually coded something. It wasn't part of an educational application, it was the real deal inside the real editor with a real output.

The learning always came from trial and error and in a way is very similar to how I still code things (when I'm not designing SaaS products for awesome B2B companies)

The book might be replaced with Google & Stackoverflow, but the principles are the same.

The magic of coding, I believe is in writing something that is real.

This. I've been a multitasker most of my life, but the moment you organise task one after the other, and keep your focus, you'll just get so much more done. Uni-tasking gets you more done than multi-tasking, no matter how counterintuitive that may sound.

From what I've seen work, most of the OSS projects make money off of 'convenience'. This can be split up in many different tactical things, from consulting to charging for hosting, support, etc.

Time is the only healing factor in these situations. No matter how you bring the news, it'll take some time for everything to settle.

Tnx, pinging a teammate.

Chiming in after seeing us get mentioned here (context: lead designer @ http://Fairpixels.pro)

Working with engineers of b2b saas companies every day, for more than a year and having analysed all the best SaaS companies who have 10+ internal designers, I found a couple of principles that anyone can apply to make their website look decent:

* Consistency - One practical example: If you use a 4px border-radius, use a 4px radius everywhere. It may sound small, but having a consistent experience across your application makes the product feel so much more polished to your users. Don't use multiple fonts, different navigation menus etc. Keep it consistent.

* Reduction - If anything, design isn't about adding more things to make it 'look nice'. Try to remove as many things as you can. If something doesn't serve a specific function, then remove it. Every pixel should make sense. The more you put in front of your users, the more brain power it'll require to process.

* Divide - This is mostly UX, but one thing I see so many get wrong. A lot of SaaS apps overwhelm their users. They present them with all the features upfront. Whether it's a long onboarding form, or a dashboard with 50 actions one could take. By splitting up things in different ways, you can guide the user through the experience. Your signup process for example (that might be a big block in conversion) might be made so much better if you ask for certain types of information later on in the process.

If done well (long way to go still) there will be less traffic accidents, less traffic jams, etc.

Autopilot tech in general should be open and shared among ccompanies and universities. The more brains we can put on this the better imho. If these things happen too often, Im afraid regulators will start making laws that prevent the use of this tech, which I believe has the potential to really make life better for all... one day.

This is genius! As a designer & storyteller I love this and I’d like to support you guys with my team’s UI design power (we occasionally help open source or charity projects for free). Reach out if you guys could need some UI design help. Details in my bio.

Of you need help with your UI (and you do...) check out: http://fairpixels.pro

It’s not about making just look nicer. But the product needs to be at the very least understandable. Simplicity is hard, but core to succeed.

Love to learn what you used it for and what went wrong.

Many of those I know very well because the founders contacted me with questions before launching a cheaper competitor. In all honesty I don't think about them at all. Our goal isn't to build a $1B company and have this complete monopoly position. The opposite is true. We deliberately stay small, work only with a few companies and basically do work that we really really love. The reason all the great companies have big in-house design teams is that design is about more than cheaply moving pixels from one person to the other. Because we go deep with each startup, we learn a lot about everything what works and what doesn't. In other words, we learn about how our design decisions impact business. How they increase conversion, profits, etc. And so this deeper level of involvement allows us to use that knowledge and expertise with the next startup. For many startups, just having something that looks ok is enough, and for those, the cheaper competitors are the way to go. For others who want to build a great product for their customers.. those who care about details and using design to grow their business, those are the only companies we work with.

Every time that problem occurs, we hire new people. The model basically funds its own growth, so when scaling issues rattle the system, we can hire people with the cashflow that's already there.

I used to think social login were a must. But email login still seems to be very popular. Many users told me they wouldnt sign up unless there was an email option

I started http://fairpixels.pro - ui design firm for startups, for less than $100. Before we had a website, we were profitable and quickly grew to $10k/mo in a few weeks. like mentioned in the article, cashflow is key here. It allows you to reinvest earned money and keep growing. Startups shouldnt raise IMHO before reaching product market fit. Ive made that mistake in the past myself. Having a lot of VC money in your bank that you can burn through while looking for a business model sounds fun, but isn't.

When lawyers set these things up, they tend to keep things as broad as possible. In practice this means that they can show how cool their technology is in a commercial, while showcasing your app without necessarily your approval. Obviously it would be absurd to make money of your content and not cut you in, since those types of actions ripple very quickly in dev communities.