It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.

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 :)

https://brynet.ca/

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.

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.

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!

"You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."

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.

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!

This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.

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.

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.

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.

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.