Is better UI/UX good enough?
I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on whether or not building a start up / product based off of a better UI/UX than your competitor, is enough of a reason to validate your idea.
I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on whether or not building a start up / product based off of a better UI/UX than your competitor, is enough of a reason to validate your idea.
Designer of 6 years here.
It can be if you get to the market at the right time.
If you're planning on going into a crowded industry with nothing but a 'better design' I'd be willing to bet money your site would be cloned by your competitors before you acquired your tenth customer.
Good UX can sometimes mean challenging the status quo, and in which case you can stumble upon a novel user experience for something that sets it apart... For example: Tinder's slick UX made it viral. It meant that people who wanted to date didn't have to fill out endless profile info and intentionally sit down at their computers, which was convention at the time. Now they could just swipe left or right and it was out of sight and mind.
More examples include:
Xero is clearly designed accountancy software that is immensely successful (B2B).
Monzo is a much better mobile banking experience (B2C/B2B).
TransferWise had a better UX for transferring money internationally (B2B/B2C).
I guess the TLDR is yes, but good design isn't just your app's look and its flows. Good design is your customers getting what problems they have solved as fast and gracefully as possible.
If you're reskinning another product, you have no defensibility and you'll be acquiring your customers manually for as long as you don't have a marketing budget.
It completely depends on the market..
As mentioned by one of the other commenters here, Craigslist has an awful design by any reasonable person's judgement. However, its early-mover advantage and network effects are incredibly powerful. Many, many companies have died trying to build a prettier Craigslist (one of my own projects included).
Is your target audience frustrated by their current solutions? Do they find them hard to use? Are their existing solutions difficult to setup/comprehend? If yes, then perhaps a more intuitive UI will give you better chances against your competition. But remember, there's no such thing certainty (especially certainty of success).
Despite being a great bunch of people, we here on IndieHackers won't be able to give you real validation in this thread. The only thing that can do that is (multiple) honest conversations with your target customers.
Many entrenched businesses plan to compete primarily on UX. As a new entrant, you can probably improve on the existing solutions and compete but you'll have an uphill battle. Personally, I'd only go after the opportunity if I think our UX could be 10X better.
I see a lot of people in the comments confusing the design area that you mention with visuals.
Good design is good business, there’s a reason tech companies have product designers.
Design also guides your product decisions and strategy: what to launch first, how to make this feature work with the current tech stack, how to prototype something just to see if it works. And so on.
No. Craiglist is awful. But it's amazing.
Be 10x better than anyone else. Sure UI/UX might be one of the things that adds to your overall success.
Airbnb was made by designers but the first website looks awful now by comparision.
Hipmunk was supposed to be the best UI of travel apps.... it shutdown.
You may have examples of where design won out too.. But I'd probably look deeper into those and my hypothesis is that the product itself is just better. The attention to detail and UI/UX is one factor that shines above the competition but in reality the thought process and execution of the team drives everything better.
While I generally agree with Andrew, I would add that there are probably some cases where UI/UX is enough, and that is when UI/UX is both incredibly important/valuable to the customer AND when the existing competition is doing a poor job for whatever reason.
Take for example Superhuman, the email client. I would argue that all of Superhuman's value is in UI/UX. As far as I can tell there are no innovations beyond what existing email clients provide. However, they focus on speed and keyboard shortcuts which are valued by professionals who are flooded with hundreds of emails every day.
Note that 99% of email users don't care about these things, or at least not enough to pay. But if you're a CEO or VC and you spend three hours a day on email and Superhuman can save you 30 minutes to an hour each day and also help you run your business better by making you more responsive to emails, then maybe it's worth $30 a month to you.
Also note that while UI/UX is the key differentiator for Superhuman, it's not the only thing that they're doing. Their marketing strategy of targeting VCs and power users and creating an "exclusive club" feel to their product has also been key to their success so far.
Superhuman is an interesting choice. There's a hell of a lot under the hood. The founder is from Rapportive. and there too, a lot of tech behind the scenes. For what it's worth, the best parts of Superhuman that journalists have fawned over is the Customer Experience, not the UI/UX of the app itself.
I don't know too much about it other than what I've read in the press, and I'm definitely not trying to diminish what they've built. I think your point on customer experience is a good one, though I don't think that's scaleable. My interpretation is that they're using white-glove service as a way to talk to customers and get feedback.
It's also probably premature to call it a "success" – just success in raising VC.
BTW, this is a pretty good read:
https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
The "is it scalable" question comes up every time...
here's the answer:
Every account manager can do 40 on-boarding calls a week. Each account manager adds $14,400 to the total revenue a week.
$30 * 12 months * 40 customers = $14,440
Each person could have a month of vacation and still add $691,200 to the balance sheet each year.
That's scalable.
Ok, makes sense. Thanks for laying out the math 👍
I completely get what you are saying. At the end of the day, its the actual product & how it works, the value it provides to the customer that wins.
But wouldn't you say that your examples that you've provided, don't paint the full picture?
For Craigslist, it was pretty much the first to market, and that is a huge advantage. It was one of the very first general directories, and its been around since the 90's.
For Airbnb, the original site looks awful compared to now, but isn't that because it's an MVP? I'm sure if Airbnb didn't update their design, a competitor with a similar value proposition but better UI/UX, would be up there.
In fact, I'd say you'll win in the long run if your UI is terrible and ppl still want to use your product. You found something ppl want.
If people are using your product in spite of terrible UI and UX.. you can easily improve it.
If users are using your product because it's shiny, new, and nice to look at. You'll find they leave for the next shiny object, much easier.
First to market is hardly ever an advantage at all. In fact, it’s typically a huge disadvantage. Early adopters notwithstanding, innovation wins the long-term game. With Craigslist as an example, newspaper classifieds existed several hundred years before that ‘innovation’.
Hey! Thanks for the input.
Hm, it's hard to believe that first to market is not an advantage. I mean, look at AWS. First to market in providing cloud solutions to businesses of all scale, and look how much market share they have. They don't just have the majority of the market share - they are completely dominating it.
Surely first to market is more of an advantage than a disadvantage?
No prob!
AWS seems to be more of an exception than a rule. Check this out:
Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004)...
MPMan (1997), iPod (2001)...
Archie (1990), Lycos/Infoseek/Yahoo (mid-90's), Google (1998)...
Pebble (2012), Apple Watch (2015)...
IBM SPC (1994), BlackBerry (2002), iPhone (2007)...
First to market with the right product is an advantage. Many first to market companies didn't really nail it.
Google had plenty of search engines before it.
Facebook had plenty of social networks before it.
Everyone wrote off Dropbox because so many prior companies "proved" that no one really cared about cloud syncing.
But each of these companies was the first to really nail the product.
Once you nail the product, the first to market is an advantage in that it gives you a head start. And in certain industries where "winner takes all," that head start can be insurmountable.
@stevenkkim, I agree with you, mostly. Sometimes, the products are great, but the environment/infrastructure/public just isn't there yet. Releasing 'ahead of it's time' is also a major reason why many first-to-market products fail.
True, that's a good point.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago