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Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

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Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#23
What I find ironic is that when Pump was posted, the alternate to WSGI - everybody jumped on the author and trashed everything about it.

Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes.

At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending.

This is a total repeat of the American Airlines redesign thread [1], which everybody should be familiar with. Some things are the way they are for good reason, and the reasons are usually very good when you are referring to a successful product or a billion-dollar company.

[1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#24

Based on the timing, I believe he's talking about the redesign exercise Andy Rutledge did @ http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php Khoi Vinh is being a poor sport here. Criticism is an important part of the design world. In school we're taught to use criticism as another resource and learn from it. The design team at the New York Times could have learned a lot from this 'unsolicited' exercise. Instead, they chose to…

Did we read the same article? Vinh was very respectful to the alternative design.

That article you linked to contains a lot of unneeded and useless criticism of the Times that was only peripherally related to any actual design aspects of the site. When he goes off about ads, he's no longer talking about site redesign and is instead advocating that they change their business model.

He's certainly free to throw his $0.02 in along with the rest of the peanut gallery about how he thinks the newspaper industry should run their business - but it tarnishes what was supposed to be an interesting look at a web site redesign.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#25

But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. Redesigns, solicited or not, are very helpful to me. I don't care what internal politics the original product designer is grappling with. It's refres…

I thought it was very clear... Redesigns are good, but don't assume that as an outside designer that you have all of the relevant data.

I don't recall Khoi making a statement about the redesign itself, just the tone of the explanation of it. I got the impression that the choices made had valid reasoning behind them that may not be obvious to someone outside of the times. It had nothing to do with internal politics, but the realities of running a very large site. Design is great. Practical design is better.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#27
post #23

What I find ironic is that when Pump was posted, the alternate to WSGI - everybody jumped on the author and trashed everything about it. Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes. At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending. This is a total repeat of th…

Having worked for a couple billion-dollar companies, I am pretty sure you are giving them too much credit.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#28
I'm pretty sure this comment from the Pump/WSGI stuff is equally appropriate here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817995

It basically comes down to: if you think something is bad, try to understand why it was designed that way I'm the first place. You may not know all of the data or edge cases.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#29
post #11
post #5

...the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site. This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings. Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider…

It's fairly plain to see that the "redesign" completely disregards any presence of advertisement. I'd say that would be a constraint failed to be considered.

I think you're missing the part that says

Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#30

Based on the timing, I believe he's talking about the redesign exercise Andy Rutledge did @ http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php Khoi Vinh is being a poor sport here. Criticism is an important part of the design world. In school we're taught to use criticism as another resource and learn from it. The design team at the New York Times could have learned a lot from this 'unsolicited' exercise. Instead, they chose to…

Did we read the same article? Vinh was very respectful to the alternative design. That article you linked to contains a lot of unneeded and useless criticism of the Times that was only peripherally related to any actual design aspects of the site. When he goes off about ads, he's no longer talking about site redesign and is instead advocating that they change their business model. He's certainly free to throw his $0.…

If you read the first four paragraphs of Andy's article you'll realise the piece looks at digital news as a product, so it must address the business model as well as the design.
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