Design your way

Friday, May 30, 2014

Every so often, a designer posts a personal redesign of a popular site or product. These are generally called unsolicited designs because they are done on the designer’s own volition and outside of a professional contract or arrangement.

There are several reasons why designers redesign popular web sites. Mainly because some of the very popular and familiar sites have interfaces and layouts which everyone can remember easily. All such sites are constantly being redesigned or improved and this naturally represents a challenge to designers.

However, the designers of unsolicited designs are not working to the same conditions as the official designers are. They cannot possibly know the project parameters, its goals and constraints, which the site’s owners gave to the contracted designers.

The designers posting unsolicited designs have to consider the site’s users and their experience in using the site, but they can’t do that due to the fact that they don’t have insights of the site usage.

It is very unfair to post an unsolicited design, which took one week, of a huge and popular site such as Facebook, for example, and compare it with work that has taken the contracted designers and developers years.

Design is about results, not just visuals

When designers create a web site, they do so to meet the customer’s objectives. The web site has to do a job and not just look pretty. Usually the customer requires the designer to concentrate on increasing the web site’s conversion rates.

Designers of unsolicited redesigns often build their redesigns with only the simplest understanding of the commercial problem. The designer cannot know the project’s restraints and requirements, the business negotiations, legislative requirements etc. At the very best, an unsolicited re-designer can only build his or her design using best practice guidelines and visual design aesthetics.

Yet, many unsolicited redesigns show that a great deal of thought has been put into feature placement. However, one ignored factor is that the design is untested by users and until end users have thoroughly tested a particular design and their test results and experiences have been properly recorded, no one can judge whether it works in the real world.

Unsolicited redesigns of existing popular web sites make fun projects for designers, but design in real life circumstances is more than a surface veneer. Design has many levels, and how a site looks is merely one small consideration.

For example, how users actually interact with or use the site or application is a vitally important part of any site redesign. Understanding how design affects usability requires that thorough real life testing be part of the redesign process.

Conclusion

Designers tempted to post redesigns should think about the hard work that the contracted designers of the real life site did. They should think about the endless user experience studies and all the factors involved in designing a large scale web site.

If they are still minded to do such a redesign, they should do so as a skills test experiment or a new approach rather than because they believe their design to be better than the original. Popular sites produce millions and they do so because they have great usability and not necessarily great design.

Although looking at a few unsolicited redesigns with a totally different look to the original site can inspire designers, however they should always remember that a more creative design is not necessarily a better design.