A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
kaishinlab.com
A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#2Or you could redesign Skype and probably get a job out of it or at least an amazing project to put in your portfolio. This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#3Or you could redesign Skype and probably get a job out of it or at least an amazing project to put in your portfolio. This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished.
Completely agree, this author apparently, potentially, lives in a sort of cloud society where every designer is paid handsomely for his work and you don't have to scrape and beg and plead and bleed and tactically position yourself in order to make it. A winning Skype redesign would be life-changing for anybody with the time to submit to such a contest, by definition.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#4You are trapped in the same Hell as other creative types, such as musicians: there are countless young aspirants who are willing to do this work for free just for a shot at "making it", but precious few people who sign checks who are able to discriminate the quality of the work.
Engineering and accounting, your two comparison fields, don't suffer this problem.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#5Am I the only one who thinks there's way too much similarity between the the RIAA's "Save the artists" screeching, and the "design industry's" "Save the artists" screeching?
Your existing business model is disappearing, and your cartel isn't going to stop it. Sucks for you.
(BTW, my wife is a graphic designer, so make of that what you will)
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#6What we do, as UI/UX people, will become a commodity. It's already happened with design and simple web programming, but the quality is very poor right now. Basic economics suggests that it will improve.
You can sit and whine about it, or you can make sure that your product is so vastly better than the competition that anyone who knows better will pay for it.
We're already a step up the value chain from pure designers or pure web coders, but as long as there are more people willing to do the job than there are jobs, you'd better be good =)
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#7Am I the only one who thinks there's way too much similarity between the the RIAA's "Save the artists" screeching, and the "design industry's" "Save the artists" screeching? Your existing business model is disappearing, and your cartel isn't going to stop it. Sucks for you. (BTW, my wife is a graphic designer, so make of that what you will)
This was kind of my thinking regarding sites like eLance and 99designs. When I first saw them I thought they were a great way to connect with designers that have more modest salary expectations. Though there are a handful of problems with these services, you just have to decide if the problems are worth the savings.
But I've been really disappointed by the huge backlash against these types of sites from the designers. There have been a few anti-99designs articles on HN recently and the attitude is like the massive IT outsourcing panics from a while back. The outsourcing came it changed some things but talented people still have jobs. Designers just have to realize the people working for free, or the outsourced design work, aren't their competition. It isn't work they are losing out on, rather it's work they would never have gotten because some people have small budgets, and that's fine. I think there is plenty of work for everyone without crapping on the design outsourcing (crowdsourcing) industry.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#8I agree with the author's overall thrust: that the new Skype UI for Mac is horrid and that a large company with lots of cash should generally pay quality, full-time designers who can spend a lot of time understanding the product and producing an interface that gels with the user.
What I do take issue with (Edit: and what it seems that others have taken issue with since I started writing this reply) is the following sentiment:
> "Such Design competitions are a disguised form of crowdsourcing, and are extremely insulting to the design profession."
Aside from the point that there's nothing 'disguised' about this being a crowdsourcing exercise, I've seen the similar view asserted around the place that designers should somehow be exempt from market forces. If you can't compete on price (which you can't if that price is free), then do what most of the designers that complain about this stuff can (or at least should be able to) compete on - quality and experience.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#9The question of free or cheap is important, but not why I would not submit a design to a competition like this. (I'm not a "designer," so what follows are simply general remarks about my personal experience with things like this.)
Software design of all types, including UX, is an attempt to solve a problem given a set of constraints. There are thus three things involved: 1) solving, 2) the problem, and 3) the constraints.
Crowdsourcing solutions emphasizes the solving part while glossing over the problem and the constraints. Even if the "client" (in this case Skype) articulates the problem and the constraints clearly, why do we assume they are doing a good job of understanding what they want? As Einstein put it, we cannot solve a problem using the thinking that got us into it in the first place.
A big part of "creativity" is being able to redefine the problem or to play with the constraints in a novel way. This is not going to happen simply by submitting a solution to a different problem and expecting the client to say, "Aha! We were trying to solve the wrong problem!!" Humans being humans, you need to go through a process of discovery together and see if you can come up with new ways to reframe the existing problem. This cannot be done in a dictatorial fashion by the "client," nor can it be done in a dictatorial fashion by the designer, it must be done collaboratively.
Imagine Skype asked for keyboard bindings to make managing multiple chats easier. How would you go about submitting a design that used Kinect to implement a 3D gestural interface so that users could manage multiple conversations in 3D space using a different part of their brain to keep track of who is having each conversation?
This might not be a good idea, but if it was a good idea, you can't get there through a design competition, you get there through interviewing the Skype stakeholders and investigating what problem they're really trying to solve.
So coming back to this design competition, if I were a designer I would pass. Not because I'd be giving away my work for free, but because I wouldn't be able to do my best work, which consistes of investigating all the problem and the constraints before trying to solve the problem.
NOTE: This has nothing to do with free vs. expensive. A handsomely paid gig to design the best solution to the wrong problem is not interesting to me. I would trot out this exact same reasoning to a client that came to me with a "spec" or set of "requirements" and who offered to start paying me immediately to code a solution.
Re: A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
#10A Call to All UI Designers: You're being disrupted.
There's millions of amateurs and pros moonlighting for extra cash all over the world, and they're all hungrier, cheaper, and want to work whether it's for fun or for money.
For every established designer who sneers at Skype's competition there'll be 1000 who submit and cross their fingers hoping a) their work reaches 10s of millions of people and b) Skype or others give them a job.