29
voreny
8y

Yesterday I completed a transactions module that used an external payment processor, similar to PayPal. It was hard, but after few hours of trying out different options I finally managed to get it to work.

I decided to create a simple prototype UI without any styling just to show my progress to the manager and let him know that it's working.

His response? "yeah, that seems to work, but that UI is terrible and not appealing at all. Change that immediately and try to add more thought into your design"

I guess I won't be making prototypes any time soon

Comments
  • 6
    Yeah i find they tend to say this even when they themselves have said specifically to not waste time with the ui as it is POC...whacha gonna do...
  • 1
    @lemonthinking yeah, pretty much... Never gonna appeal to them unless it's perfect right away
  • 2
    @voreny Use a big disclaimer banner at the top of the page stating the bloody obvious for people who need the bloody obvious stated.
  • 2
    @pixeltherapy With liberal use of color #ff00ff. Guaranteed: no one will take the design seriously.
  • 2
    I did a poc for a unit test tool once and I used materialize css just to sugar the ui before showing it to management. I added a lot of modals and some tooltips, and the chiefs were baffled. It took me no more than 3h to get it done.

    Maybe you should try something similar. We need to be good at writing code, no doubt, but sometimes we need to be good at selling our ideas as well, and that means forgetting about what matters to us and focus on what matters to the user.
  • 0
    Small trick I learned: Create a test that mocks data and just show your results on the console. The Pm will ask for a prototype ui and you can tell him that that needs an extra task if it should look nice. The result is most of the time a backlog entry telling you to construct a basic, ugly ui.
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