UX is crucial for early stage products.

In my 7-year product design journey I often encountered software engineers who wanted to launch their side projects, and one thing I keep noticing is how they are mainly concerned about APIs, deployment, front end frameworks and other technical matters they’re more expert about–which is completely understandable.

However, good UX is generally overlooked, as it’s an attribute that doesn’t represent an actual blocker when launching an MVP. Still, it’s arguably one of the keys of success for your product, especially at the early stage.

Isn’t a good UI kit all that I need to apply good UX to my product anyways?

The short answer is no.

The thing is, those tools are useful and they look great, but they won’t magically apply good UX to your product. They make you feel empowered at first by providing hundreds of components, but then you’re left pretty much on your own in figuring out how and when to use them to really bring value to your project.

UX has little to do with code.

If you tried to build your product from scratch and you understand the importance of a smooth user experience, you’ve likely encountered several design challenges that cannot be solved with good front end code.

Or better, you definitely need to write code to implement them, but you need a good strategy first.

• How many links go in the main nav? In which order?
• When should I use a table to display lists? When should I use cards?
• How much information is too much? How much is too little?
• How do I figure out user management flows?
• Do I need to implement in-app notifications?

Knowing good UI/UX design principles can help you answer those and many other questions, which will have a very diverse range of answers depending on the type of product, audience, industry and many other factors.

Without further ado…

#ux #solopreneur #product-development #product #mvp