• DESIGN FOR FOUNDERS · 05
Your users get an experience on day one, whether you designed it or not
Abhinav Dhankar · 3 min read
“We'll fix the UX after launch.” I hear some version of this a lot, and I understand where it comes from. Time is short, the team is small, and the product has to work before it can feel good. Getting it to work feels like the real job, and the experience feels like something you add on top once there is time.
But is the experience really something you add? Or is it something that happens anyway?
There is no such thing as no experience
The moment a user signs up, she has an experience. If nobody designed it, she still has one. It is just an accidental one, put together by whatever the developer had time for, whatever the default error message says and whatever the empty screen happens to show.
A designed experience and an accidental experience can run on the exact same code. The difference is whether someone decided what the user should feel and do in those first minutes, or left it to chance.
And those first minutes carry more weight than any other part of the product. If the first run feels slow, unclear or risky, trust is lost before your best feature is even reached. If it feels simple and reliable, the user starts to build momentum, and she will forgive rough edges further in.
Fixing it later costs more than it looks
The “later” in “we'll fix it later” rarely comes on its own. Once a flow is live, other things get built on top of it, customers learn its quirks and support writes articles around them. Changing it then means undoing all of that. The same decision made before launch would have been a conversation and a sketch.
You don't need a big process for this. Small loops are enough: take the one flow that matters most, put it in front of a handful of real users, fix what they stumble on, and repeat. Small, frequent checks find most of the problems faster than one big study at the end.
• TRY THIS ON YOUR OWN PRODUCT THIS WEEK
Run a first-use check on your own product, as a new user:
- Open your homepage, note what it promises, then sign up. Does the first screen after signup deliver on that promise, or does it start asking for things?
- Look at every empty screen a new user sees. Does it tell her what to do next, or is it just blank?
- Make one mistake on purpose, a wrong format or a missed field. Does the error message tell you how to fix it, and is your work still there?
Each “no” is a decision nobody made yet. Make it before your next user meets it.
UX is not a phase. It is how product decisions get made every week. Design it early, or the experience will design itself.