I suck at design.
I am reading through Hello Web Design, a book by Tracy Osborn that goes over basics on web design. For hopeless software engineers like me.
Honestly, I have a confession. I thought less of designers. I thought I was higher in intellectual flexing power than designers. I thought they were people who just caused more problems. Created more issues. Had fixation issues on pixel-level things which didn’t seem any addition to overall value.
Emphasis on past tense!
Throughout the startup I was in - in which I was trained by fire, raised by the darkness, I finally got it through grinding my code across sandpaper daily. Metaphorically speaking.
My CTO at the time insisted on good design and finally at one point I finally got past my arrogant self and finally understood why design is the king of all.
You take any crappy code and logic and even business flow - design can actually mask all of that.
Add any spiffy UI with smooth designs and groovy animations, then it becomes something that one can sell to their managers and stand out of the competition. Even if it still has the same crappy gunk as any other product.
Now have a spiffy good product, AND THEN add a squeaky span design - woah there. That will set the product up to be evergreen popular. You make it rainnnnnnn.
But still, for a guy like me who did his last web-design anything in 2000’s, with based web design (circa tail end of Web 1.0), even though I might say I can pick it up again.. I can’t.
I must learn. Break out every notion I’m good at it. Or at least I can do some because I worked with good designers as a frontend engineer (and I worked with one of the best designers I know for two companies - shout out to Ben Ho!).
So here I am. Busy being a one-man dude, wholly underestimating what it takes to build an online food ordering/prep/delivery solution, …. now trying to enter into the actual design phase.
Up until now I was busy trying to build up the core feature of the app, just riffing on design based on frontend experiences I had, building components. I relied heavily on templates that were available and just standard CSS - based themes made available for TailwindCSS.
And here is the result: https://chefshop.coramsoftware.com/
But I punted far enough and I have nothing else crucial to build up.
Sure I still have to build:
- Kitchen view: simulating how kitchen will see uncoming orders (like the kitchen receipt rack metaphor or the overhead display)
- POC mobile app for drivers, and do it in Flutter because I can use this as a chance to learn Flutter (already done React Native at work and I hate it)
But now I really have to do design. Have to learn design. Indiehackers like me don’t have the luxury to team up and I don’t want to just yet. As a founder I need to know design - it’s one of the core pillars imho, like finances, basic leadership, sales, marketing.
So as much as I am apprehensive, I should still try everyday. Maybe if I show up I’ll get a little bit of learning done.
In the book, there is a chapter in how to do prototyping and research. Prototyping is not something I think I’ll have the most ROI - for me the scrappy way is to see what’s out there and how it’s done.
I looked at few restaurants I do order from: KFC, Chipotle, and El Pollo Loco.
And then after many screenshot - saving, hemming and hawing, I began to see some similarities!!!! A pattern emerged.
Chipotle and El Pollo Loco have similar ordering patterns.
- Right side shopping cart pane which shows what is selected
- Main page still shows available menus to choose from
- Pop up of Credit Card info entering field
- Confirmation page + email
I made a flow diagram of El Pollo Loco:
Compare that with what I have:
And you’ll now see what kind of work I have for me. I need to figure out. Sigh. But here we go!!