Taking inspiration from other industries prevents you from reinventing the wheel

TL;DR I write code, I'm not a designer (but love the concept), so I'm trying to make Fubolista look good by taking inspiration from the best. See progress.

I always had a curious mind when it comes to things that fascinate me. My mom told me that as a young child, I would often take my toys apart (and sometimes the TV remote control 😬) because I was curious to know what was inside.

I think it was a way for me to try to understand what made it work. I've always had this behaviour when something fascinated me.

My dad gave me one of his old computers when I was around 5 years old. All I would do was open Microsoft Word and type "Franck et Lenita" over and over.

Lenita is my sister btw 🙂 also, I made this picture using this cool website I found.

I always wondered what inside this box makes images move like that on a screen. That eventually led me to study software engineering actually.

When I was around 11 though, the profession that interested me the most was architecture. I've always loved the idea of a great design and user experience.

I was told you have to be good at math and drawing. I knew I could figure out the first part, but the second part felt like a big obstacle.

In fact, take a look at the amazing design I made for the Fubolista page editor.

(forgive the bad handwritting but shout-out to Mars Simpson, my girlfriend's family cat 🐈‍⬛)

Anyway, I quickly understood that I was not meant to become a designer. But I still appreciated great design!

Making software easy to use is HARD

When I built FreeFooty, I put a lot of effort into custom designs and interactions even though I knew nothing about it.

It was a passion project, so I put a lot of pride into it. It looked good in my opinion, but there were some downsides.

Design is not my background, meaning it took me more time than a designer would. Also, it took a lot of effort to make it easy to use. And it may still not be easy to use.

There are a lot of big companies out there making billions on products that look unappealing and are hard to use.

This is a story for another time, but if your product is hard to use and people still use it, it means they NEED your solution and will use it regardless.

My next project was Ottleti and I got great compliments on how it looks.

But I did not have enough user feedback to learn whether it was easy to use.

Finally, ilufy.io also looks good but has issues.

From talking to clients, I was able to figure out that some design decisions I made were not the best. But it gets the job done, which is why I have clients in the first place.

User experience research (UX research)

The process of making software easy to use is called UX research.

It's a fancy term meaning you design something that you think makes sense, show it to people you built it for and realize they are confused.

You go back and make the design more clear, show it to somebody else and they are confused about something else. You go back and repeat this process until there are fewer confused people.

I remember one time when I was attending the University of Ottawa, I saw a poster. It said I could make $20 for an hour of my time participating in a research experiment.

I did not understand what this was about. However, they clearly explained that all you needed to do was sit in front of a computer and answer some questions about the university website.

I thought: free lunch 🤩 and maybe in exchange, I'm taking an exam? 🤷🏿‍♂️ Thought it was a good deal because students usually pay to take exams.

So I went in and I was all nervous. I sat in front of the computer and they gave me some tasks to do while they were watching me:

"Task: You are a new student and you want to see the list of programs the university offers. Navigate the website to find the list of programs. Don't worry, there are no wrong answers."

I thought it was a test because they were recording how long it took me and they were taking notes 😰

But at the end, they didn't give me any feedback at all. I got my $20 and went straight to buy shawarma poutine.

Fast forward to today, I now understand they were testing how easy it was for students to use their website. It's a process that never ends because you can always improve things.

How to easily design easy to use software

I think the easiest way is probably to hire someone who knows what they are doing. But like I explained before, that comes with a few headaches.

The cheapest way is to build it yourself because you know what you want and you don't have to pay someone to do it. But what if like me, design is not your background?

Even though you may not have the background, you do have tastes.

The fastest technique I found is to take inspiration from a design you like. Though, you need to be careful about copyright.

If you start to make money from your software, you don't want to go bankrupt because some big company sued you and you spent all your money paying lawyers.

Though, if you use those designs as a starting point and then modify it later to suit your needs, it may be fine.

Also remember that at the beginning, nobody knows you, so people in a position to sue you won't care about you.

Another technique is to teake inspiration from more than one place. For example, my starting point was Komi's website presentation but I tailored it to my industry, which is essentially soccer resumés.

I also stole from one of my favourite platforms for building my online presence: LinkedIn. What I love about it is the ease of use of the page editor.

This is week 2 and I've never designed software this quickly. Taking inspiration from these other platforms allowed me to move fast and focus on getting the idea validated.

As opposed to spending months before ending up realizing people may not need your product that badly.

It would have been nice to design from scratch, but I think the advantage here is that people will be more familiar with this interface because I'm re-using the UX research work from well-known companies.

Once I validate my idea, I can always go back and change everything.

But at first, it is important to eliminate all the reasons someone may close your website or delete your app the first time they open it.

The most important part is to show it to many people and filter the feedback. I welcome anyone's feedback. However, it's best to collect feedback from the right people.

These are typically the people you are building for (soccer players in my case).

When it comes to ease-of-use though, the perfect scenario is that your parents or grandparents understand how to navigate your software.

This will be my next focus along with making the website actually save information once you click save.