I’ve been building on Bubble.io with no technical experience for over six months and I have found that the back-end logic comes more naturally for me, but the design has been a grind.
To help with product feedback, I hired a fiverr website freelancer on a monthly basis to review and give suggestions on UX. Thing is that I would get it “working” and leave the design really raw to just give the value of the product as quickly as possible.
But now I have a clear vision for the product and I don’t want to learning another added six months developing the skill of my design eye. Which will likely be more frustrating and not be satisfied showing the MVP to customers…
With all that said, I just don’t want to spend 6+ months on a “okay” design if it is not going to be marketable and end of hiring. Or even worse undo all of my back-end work because of the poor UX/UI.
Advice, resources or direction would be greatly appreciated.
I’m like you. I prefer to focus on getting the UI correct last.
Though its important to note that UX is affected by both your UI and back-end. Especially in Bubble where things like speed and UI snappiness relys on managing data loads. For example you might need to break a datatype into parts or create link table datatypes to optimize.
Hence it’s best to keep to what your doing but put the user experience at the forefront. The nitty gritty UI stuff can come in later.
We’ve created and iterated on our Bubble Dev training course over the last 5 years, so it’s something I’ve thought a lot about (https://momentumacademy.tech).
My advice to anyone in your situation is that to build a great app on Bubble, you need basic / survival level skills in Product Management, User Interface Design, User Experience design and responsive design.
UI and UX design in particular are not so much art as science. Have a look at the curriculum we have for these modules, and if you don’t take our course, at least go and read up on:
UX research i.e. competitor analysis, IA, user flows, wire-framing, prototyping and usability testing.
UI design tools and process i.e. finding a mood, design systems, colour, typography, spacing, responsive layouts, mid and hifi wire framing
While commercial validation must come before graphic design or “making it pretty” - UX/UI as a discipline is more focused on function and creating digital products that people can use intuitively. It is never something that should be treated as an “add on” for later.
Without these skills, many apps I’ve seen turn out like a huge mess that no one would want to use. We’ve taken an 80/20 approach to capture the 20% of things you need to get you 80% of the way there in these areas.
I’m the same in that design doesn’t come naturally. I find it helpful to use existing systems.
In addition, tools like mobbin.com are good because they include real examples from large companies that have already invested lots of money into working out the best way to do things. Just copy them.
You can have a look at this topic to find more Bubble component libraries that will help you speed up your UI/UX dev process.
Also, I’ve found Refero to be a nice free repository of UX flows, aside from individual UI components, if you don’t feel like paying yet for Mobbin or Pageflows.
