I am not surprised by this. I am sure Lyft is just among a list of threats to Uber and we are only seeing a small part of that strategy.
Its ethically not good but I think it would be wrong to say that we penalized many other companies that make similar plays or resort to tactics that are just as ruthless. It doesn't seem illegal just mean and aggressive.
Honestly, it kinda seems like something they would do.
This feels unnecessary. Everyone gets it: you can't actually redesign a website with a few random mock-ups and visual updates. That so often is not the point of an unsolicited redesign.
Most of these people are young designers looking to practice, have fun or create something tangible to demonstrate some of their skills. Its clear that changing a button or making a visual change doesn't equate to UX expertise. However, for a lot of designers this material gets them attention and gives potential employers common context to evaluate them and maybe they are a UI designer who wants to display their visual skills. There are a lot of reasons to take it too seriously but I encourage young designers to do it. A redesign can help me evaluate certain skills in a junior candidate and they are fun to look at. Redesigning stuff is fun, who cares if you want enjoy yourself.
So, I'm not sure who this for. Convincing a designer not to do a redesign of a website and post it on their blog? What's the harm? These redesigns don't actually change the industry understanding or perception enough to matter. We need to calm down and just enjoy these redesigns for what they are.
There's no real harm, except potentially to the up-and-coming designer, who is signaling something about their design process by writing something like this. Wikipedia has a lot of design constraints that other sites don't have. A big part of the job of being a professional designer is discovering and navigating design constraints. So when you pick Wikipedia as your "bucket list" portfolio spec design example, you might want to be careful that you're not communicating something about your process (specifically: obliviousness) that you don't mean to communicate.
Spec designs are fun to read and while I'm not a designer and have no business offering career advice to one, I'm happy to encourage people to keep doing them so I can keep reading and snipping at them. But there are safer targets to pick than Wikipedia.
I have to agree that Wikipedia is not a good target for a redesign. Also, I don't think its on every designer's bucket list. But, Its fair to assume that a lot of people select Wikipedia specifically because it has such an uncommon set of constraints.
To make assumptions about design process based on something like the choice to do a "redesign" of Wikipedia sounds generally useless : Especially coming from a junior designer who I guarantee is not thinking that hard about it.
I am just saying : Everyone is getting way too serious about unsolicited redesigns. I think the article makes valid points about what design is and what defines user experience but It feels mean-spirited and the targeting at redesigns is mis-directed.
The real problem with Wikipedia redesigns is that they don't address their real issue: editing. Wikipedia have serious considerations encouraging a wider audience of editors, and to do so in a verifiable and generally professional manner. Show me a good means of encouraging people to edit and use Mediawiki, then I'd be interested.
I'm not sure who is changing the industry understanding or perception, but showpieces definitely have impact. Redesign rants probably do more good than the redesigns themselves, because they can stop imitation.
That said, I feel L&F mockups are to be encouraged, except with the understanding that they should be multitudinous.
I am not here to say that web designers should create PSDs and just throw them over the fence.
But, I don't think most web designers really agree with this. I think this philosophy really tries to downplay visual style to practical problem solving and I believe they are both essential.
I can write competent HTML/CSS/JS, Frameworks etc. At least, I know enough to work with engineers and work effectively in my projects. For me using Photoshop isn't just about what browsers can and can not do. Its certainly, not just about pixel perfection or making a design ready to code.
Working with HTML is just clunky. Working with paper is too loose. I can think about how to build a design, plan it on paper but exploring visually is actually quite constrained by trying to do it with markup or just paper/wireframes. Photoshop represents an open environment where I can create anything I need from an illustration to a button and its powerfully close to what it will really look like. To some people that might sound like a clunky or wasteful step but I think it really helps.
For sure, I think Nick makes some great and valid points here. I agree, there are problems with the PSD process but direct prototyping and CSS frameworks just don't solve those problems.
I don't know, I feel like if in reality everyone used HTML to design, everything would look like Bootstrap and that would be acceptable.
Isn't this just subtle confirmation bias? The favorite is basically the old logo with some things pushed around. Show someone 30 logos , they will subconsciously like the one that triggers a familiar pattern.
"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out."
For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?
In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on.
I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.
I think the point remains though. The average consumer doesn't know the difference between a "major" airline and a "regional" one and shouldn't need to. Their safety record is just as applicable. Its not as if a consumer will see a regional affiliate and change their reservation because of it; its effectively the same experience.
To be fair, the post is titled "My start-up is Microsoft-based..." not "Here's why your start-up should be..." I feel like he just wanted to make a fair case that Microsoft isn't impossible to deploy as a viable solution for a start-up. In start-ups versus say...a corporation , there is a write-off of Microsoft pretty much out of the gate. I agree with most companies, there are certainly a stack of reason why not to use it. But, its nice to see someone putting some personal reasons out there why Microsoft tech isn't useless to a new, fledgling company.
Overall, the core of flat UI which is : solid shapes, contours and hierarchy are good elements to have. But, its an extreme. Gradients, shadows, highlights,etc... give UI elements dimension and help them to occupy space, there has to be some of those pieces to help users distinguish between different types of elements.
I am personally not a fan of this trend either. But, I consider it a trend of extreme minimalism with no middle ground which will not work well in the wild. If you look at it, very few products or companies are able to utilize it successfully.
I kinda agree, it makes some sense. Its easy in an office environment to forget about remote employees even if they do a lot of work. Out of sight , out of mind is quite real. It seems to matter less if you don't have a strong team dynamic; such as teams that are pieced together from contractors or work that is done mostly alone.
I am aware of this sort of stuff that goes on, generally though I think of it as a management problem. But let me explain why I think that.
So perhaps "Bob" in our example really does have a job which allows him to work as effectively[1] at home as he can at work. Bob should also be aware of the schedule. So when the meeting comes up, Bob should be ready for it. And I've known folks working remotely who where chilling on the conference line waiting for the rest of the meeting to show up. But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem.
[1] First tip is that a manager needs to have a way of evaluating their teams effectiveness, if they don't then they can't really say if Bob is or is not as effective as others in his position.
I've worked on a lot of distributed teams. For an actual team (not just subcontractors) every place has had some level of "office hours". Normally a ~4+ hour block every day that you are expected to be "in office" and available for calls/chat. Some places do hardcore 9-5, even for remote workers. When teams have different time zones in play, normally everyone tries to have atleast a 2 hour overlap during a normal work day. It's during the office hours of someone the manager knows they are available for ad-hoc meetings etc.
Perhaps a more important note is that, in my experience, most distributed teams have /way/ less meetings than an in person teams. A lot of things are done informally over IRC/chat. I say informal, but since IRC is usually logged, if someone is not involved in the informal discussion at the time it takes place, they can just read it to catch up on why the decisions were made.
"But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem."
I agree with you, except for that part. For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
Your main point still stands - Bob needs to be available during office hours, even if he's at home.
>For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
No, it's not.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
In the typical corporate environment where employees are just expected to implement ideas handed down by management, there's no value in these unplanned discussions. However, if you're looking for creativity and organic development, then there's value in those sort of random encounters. That doesn't mean remote can't work. It does give it a different feel. But I strongly disagree that there's zero value to unplanned discussion.
>Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
That's totally orthogonal to "hallway" meetings.
To put it another way, if you can't do the above over IM/Skype/email/etc, you're doing it wrong.
I put "hallway" in quotes because it doesn't have to be a literal hallway. I agree that IM/Skype/email/etc is fine for them (and even better, in many ways).
"Don't bother. I just called him and he's at his kids swim lesson"
There are issues with telecommuting that are difficult to overcome, but this one is ridiculously simple.
The solution (well, a solution) is to have business hours during which everybody needs to be available. I have an arrangement like that with my employer - between 9 and 5, even if I'm working at home, my manager needs to be able to pick up his phone and have me be instantly available.
At first, he was a little doubtful, but he soon realized that he can actually get a hold of me more quickly this way when compared with walking across the building from his office to mine. (And no, he doesn't abuse this... haha) :)
It gets slightly trickier when people are in different time zones, but nothing that can't be overcome. People need predictable office hours; there can't ever be a "Bob's at his kids' swim practice" moment. Barring emergency, of course.
"I hate that stupid Bob and his kid's swimming lessons! Bob should be made to be like us and spend 9-5 in useless meetings and develop products for 13 minutes a day rather than be like dumb old Bob and spend the day with family and then work from 7pm to 3am in a solid sprint, coding."
What a ridiculous argument. You are talking about behavioural issues i.e. not being available for scheduled meetings not something inherent to working remotely. Or to put it more simply:
Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's outside having a coffee and cigarette with Jane.
Definitely, as long as persons performance is measured in their outcomes and not in the number of meetings they attend to or the "butt hours" they make, working from home is as productive as working in the office.
I think the sweet spot is when it is a combination of both.
Doing good work does not compensate for being allowed to blow off meetings at will, allowing such behavior decreases morale among the group and can lower productivity as a whole.
One thing that can help with this is to have an open "informal" chatroom for all your employees (or for teams). Now if the person is completely silent, well, that's another issue.
Its ethically not good but I think it would be wrong to say that we penalized many other companies that make similar plays or resort to tactics that are just as ruthless. It doesn't seem illegal just mean and aggressive.
Honestly, it kinda seems like something they would do.