from Hacker News

Starting design work in a spreadsheet

by hazelnut-tree on 7/5/23, 9:02 PM with 34 comments

• by danielvaughn on 7/6/23, 2:37 AM

  I also use spreadsheets but not for content. Not only is it not guaranteed to be available before the design starts, but "design" is much more than just making the UI look nice. Also, applications (which is what I tend to work on) are much more than content.

  My method is meant to expose the business rules. I start out with a single column, and I list every "rule" of the application. So something like "A user cannot export their dashboard without a premium account". Once I have a complete list, I go back and tease out any significant nouns and verbs.

  So given the sentence "A user cannot export their dashboard without a premium account", the significant terms are "user", "export", "dashboard", and "premium account".

  For each of these terms, I create a separate checkbox column and mark the checkbox if the rule applies to that term.

  Once you've done this with enough rules, you'll start to see your domain model form. It exposes all sorts of inconsistencies in your rules and forces you to be very clear about how the application is expected to behave. It also forces you to clarify your language because there will be multiple terms that refer to the same concept, and part of the process is removing these duplications.

  It's a great way to get clarity around your product before you start building out the experience.

• by topspin on 7/6/23, 4:53 AM

  Learned functional programming in Excel. Or rather, I had a problem that I knew should be solved in a functional manner and I prototyped it in Excel. This was before I'd ever heard the term "functional programming."

  I translated that prototype into JavaScript to implement a somewhat complex web page that had a lot of interrelationships between inputs. This was back when "DHTML" had just become a term of art. It worked perfectly and I'll never forget when, months later in a meeting, a tester was asked if that part of the project was ready; she said "Yeah, he did it. I don't know how he did it but it works."

  I keep thinking there is a need for some sort of "next level" spreadsheet software. There are a bunch of uncoordinated ideas in my head for what that would look like, and I haven't seen anything like it emerge yet.

• by extr on 7/6/23, 1:07 AM

  Big spreadsheet advocate. I use spreadsheets for everything, basically my entire life is organized in a big excel file. All my finances, to do lists, notes, calendars, etc. Excel is flexible enough you can build almost any "app" inside it. Relevant to the OP, I'm using a CSV file right now to hold/organize the content for a website I'm building (it's highly templated, and in-framework templating seemed like a nightmare...easier to just generate the files out of a spreadsheet).

  Similarly, I have known many people who use powerpoint for design work. UI design, interior design, even blueprints/architectural drawings. It just works, everyone already has it.

• by mcdonje on 7/6/23, 2:02 AM

  I almost think the spreadsheet part of the article is a red herring. It's being used as a literary device to tie together a few useful investigatory methods in a way that puts a bit too much emphasis on the tooling at the expense of the real advice, which is to profile the project and get a good sense of what you're working with before you move on to development.

  To put it another way, if you were to boil this down to a one-liner to a colleague, "investigate before developing" is useful advice and "use spreadsheets" is not.

• by Arrath on 7/6/23, 1:36 AM

  My biggest love of designing (document layout) in a spreadsheet is that I can set oh so many format bits a certain way, say a column width and it stays the same.

  Compared to the last couple days at work, where a previously existing dynamic(ish) table of contents in a word document is driving me absolutely batty with how it tries and/or fails to format lines as I edit them to reflect further changes to the document. I want to scream and tear my hair out, good god.

• by distortionfield on 7/6/23, 5:27 AM

  “every spreadsheet is an app waiting to be born” or something.

  But seriously; I love working in a csv to start and then just parsing it into whatever go or rust or Python I’m working with when it comes times to scale it up further. A lot of MVPs would be better suited as a Google sheet shared between customers or friends.

• by dsgnr on 7/5/23, 11:39 PM

  I love spreadsheets! I start with a design doc which usually contains tables in my process: https://github.com/ryanallen/designDoc

• by pazimzadeh on 7/5/23, 11:56 PM

  I find it almost easier to go straight to interaction prototyping with some of the new tools which make it really easy, like Principle for Mac: https://principle.app/

• by efortis on 7/5/23, 10:23 PM

  Related: UI Drafter is specially designed for content design.

  https://uidrafter.com

  I look forward to hearing from you

• by endisneigh on 7/5/23, 11:36 PM

  The best design tool I’ve used is gravity sketch with the oculus quest. Generally I don’t think VR is that great but once the UI and UX are perfected designing physical things will be far superior in VR.

  With 2D things like websites I still find sketching to be the best tool.

  Ideally there would be a nice app that lets you sketch and create forks of sketches when certain things are pressed. balsamiq does this but the UX isn’t good enough imho.

• by pxc on 7/5/23, 11:14 PM

  I know someone who used Excel to design the custom pool in her backyard. It turned out great!

• by mud_dauber on 7/5/23, 10:50 PM

  I used Excel sheets with a small grid scale & cell merges to build page layout prototypes for a startup. Didn't have to climb the Figma learning curve (no disrespect to Figma, I'm sure it's great). Would do it again.

• by catchmeifyoucan on 7/5/23, 10:18 PM

  Interesting article. I think a big challenge here is crunching the data.

  I was looking to see if this scraping is a Sheets feature or something, but it's not clear if the author manually visited all of these pages and extracted all the headers.