UI Design for Startups - Monthly Service | Hacker News Reader

UI Design for Startups - Monthly Service

fairpixels.pro

19 pointsjimres11 comments

Voting rings are not ok here.

Quite right, I did wonder how this post had shot so far up the home page so quickly when it's clearly marketing a service.

I don't think this can work. The idea is nice but usually you want someone "inhouse" that knows about the business, the customers and can craft a solution for them.

Additionally I think this is very overpriced. I mean "(Without having to pay $6,000/mo+ for an in-house UI designer)" is completely absurd. Here in Germany a proper designer will be happy with a 3k/mo salary, since there are so many and the market is competitive and crowded with good designers... so I would rather bring someone on board full-time than paying nearly the same amount to a external firm, where you never know what happens.

Also oftentimes you need something "fast", so a 3-4 days wait time is not working most of the time.

So I'm in the market for a service like this, but the presentation/pricing is a little bit wrong for me. I'd rather have less "unlimited" access and more speed when I do need service. I'd also like to see more examples and more about the designers. The design challenge we have is maintaining consistency across different interfaces, so having a designer on retainer is appealing. But I could probably accomplish the same thing for 1/2 the price on an outsourcing site.

Also, the headers and site payment buttons are broken on Safari.

This is an interesting idea for companies that just want a cookie-cutter product design for your MVP. Past that, good product design requires a level of business/user problem solving that no service like this could possibility fulfill.

In my experience "cookie-cutter" (in other words "consistent") UI is more effective than custom UI most of the time.

Absent A/B testing - which isn't part of most product design processes - there's no utility gained from deviating from conventional UI for common elements like dropdowns, buttons, lists, links, and the like. In my anecdotal experience there's more often a negative impact on the utility of custom or unconventional UI design, usually because the user is confused or not familiar with novel UI design.

Put simply, is it effective to reinvent web forms for every product? I don't think so.

Not the first time I've seen a service like this. Main site design itself doesn't resonate with me, although the multiple sample images do.

Some nitpicks/thoughts:

* I would have to have a Mac and Sketch to use this. Not unheard of that people will be using other types of services (why not provide me actual web assets?)

* pricing - $2k/month is... it's not unreasonable but for 4 day turnaround time, I may not actually get as much values as working with a local freelancer who has a more transparent workload (and maybe has references I trust).

* Arguing against "on-staff $80k/year designer", then charging $5k/month for 24hr turnaround... it's not a huge savings. Benefit may be I can switch designers from FPP - to get different styles/abilities, but that's not made obvious anywhere I can see. We don't all live in SV, and many areas you can find a reasonably priced designer who you can meet in person for less than $5k/month (I've worked with some).

Not sure who the target audience is here - the unfunded startups I've worked with would not spend $5k/month, and would even balk at $2k/month for a 4 day turnaround time. The funded startups I know would just hire someone, because that's what the funding was for (hiring a team).

I'm pretty skeptical of design work that doesn't involve close dev interaction/iteration.

And especially for mobile apps there are things that are outside of just 'design' and I feel they would introduce a lot of variability in the amount of work involved per-project. How does a flat fee take that into account? Things like:

- responsive design: scaling to different phone/tablet sizes

- aligning to Android/iOS conventions (e.g. should not allow swipe-from-bottom on iOS)

- animations

- sound

- theming

Does this all come with every project as part of the fee for, example, the 'Startup' package? If none of this comes with any of the packages then I think the prices for each package should definitely be lower.

I like the idea though - the unlimited revisions part was pleasantly surprising. I'm not sure how that would scale for the business but it sounds nice :)

Their own website ist not even properly responsive so I wouldn't expect too much.

I hope this works. I would love to offer something web development wise but packaging those services this way probably doesn't make sense.

looks broken https://imgur.com/a/Ndm5z

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