9 ms·

A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game

109 points by jorde 16y ago

efields 16y ago
You know what 99designers can't do? They can't visit your clients' offices. They can't justify their decisions in realtime. They can't 'sell' their design beyond simply clicking 'upload.' Basically, they can't be convincing to the people who hold the purse strings. But you can. That's your job. You're a designer.
rgbrgb 16y ago
Or 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.
- codingthebeach 16y ago
  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.
joblessjunkie 16y ago
You 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.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Engineering, accounting, and other +regulated+ fields use social engineering to solve the problem of how to be paid handsomely. What they have done is convince society that there should only be a limited number of engineers and accountants, those that are highly trained and have passed rigorous examinations. The imbalance of supply and demand takes care of the rest. In those two fields, you can see that when supply is unfettered, compensation does fall. For example, accountants in Canada make fairly good money, but unlicensed "tax preparers" do not.
  - samdelagarza 16y ago
    I'm not sure how it is for other engineering professions, but for software engineers we have a similar competition but instead of people willing to work for free it's people willing to work for peanuts out of India.
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      But what is peanuts to you is not peanuts to them. A different thing altogether from the point of this thread. A better comparison for software engineers would be with interns working for free just to gain experience, freeware or FOSS.
  - olalonde 16y ago
    I totally agree with your reasoning although I'd say it only applies to regulated professions (accounting, construction engineering, etc.). Computer/software engineering isn't regulated.
    - paulgb 16y ago
      As a point of clarification, raganwald is from Canada where software engineering is regulated (though you don't need to be a software engineer to develop software professionally).
  - joblessjunkie 16y ago
    I'm not sure if you are just trying to make a supplemental point, but this isn't really where I was going. Either my cell phone drops its signal, or it doesn't. Either my books balance and my checks clear, or they don't. In engineering and accounting, there are absolute and obvious measures of success. When it comes to UI design, who decides when the design is successful? My boss? He approved the Pontiac Aztek. Lord help us all.
    - kaishin 16y ago
      Allow me to chime in, UI design is as methodical as engineering and accounting. There are quantitative and qualitative methods to build and evaluate interfaces. Maybe you are referring to aesthetics, but that's only a fraction of what an interface is...
- hernan7 16y ago
  What it feels like being disrupted, when you are a musician: http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2664517-Who-is-responsible-for-bands-making-peanuts&p=40701817#post40701817 http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2664517-W... This is the tale of an ex-pro cover band player finding himself out of work, and coming to grips with the realization that the amateurs are not to blame, after all.
- bigiain 16y ago
  +1. But there are also people with track records at getting it right first time. Eventually the check signers (or the check signers bosses) work that out. (Hopefully before all the talented designers go broke.) Reminds me a lot of this: http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_ne...
- skue 16y ago
  > Engineering and accounting... don't suffer this problem. Ha! You're not looking hard enough. Check out the healthcare industry to find "Developer Challenges" where companies attempt to recruit programmers to compete for tiny prizes that won't even replace their lost billable time. 1. http://health2challenge.org/ http://health2challenge.org/ 2. http://smartplatforms.org/ http://smartplatforms.org/ The second example is the funniest, given that the $5000 challenge is intended to promote a platform developed with a $60 Million grant! Bill Gates was even on hand to help kick off the challenge.
larrik 16y ago
Am 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)
- tseabrooks 16y ago
  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.
  - justinph 16y ago
    As a designer, when an org comes to me and says "we have $[laughably small amount] to spend on this website", I point them to WooThemes and tell them to pick one out. I'm happy to sit down with them for a few hours and do some basic work, but put the burden on them. It works great for me, because I get to do a little design education, still get paid, and focus my time on more lucrative projects. It also can pay dividends when clients come back to me later for more work or other design changes. To put it in a more uncouth way, 99Designs and WooThemes take the pain-in-the-ass clients and get them out of the way. I don't see it as a bad thing. I just wish I had come up with the idea first.
    - ladon86 16y ago
showerst 16y ago
What 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 =)
gavinballard 16y ago
I 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.
- lkozma 16y ago
  It's the usual lemon market argument though: clients can't discern quality reliably so they go for price only, which drives quality out of the market.
raganwald 16y ago
The 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.
- gavinballard 16y ago
  I think this is a great point, and the one that designers (and anyone feeling threatened by the evil onslaught of spec work) should be focusing on rather than the notion that the mere existence of 99designs is "insulting" to the profession. Spec work is a good way to quickly and cheaply solve a simple problem where top quality is not the primary concern. Many problems (and I would agree that the Skype UI is one of these) are more complex and require a more specialised approach. The latter is where top designers spend all of their time anyway.
benologist 16y ago
A 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.
- enra 16y ago
  Yes like there are millions of people trained to be programmers that are hungrier than people in the Valley, so everything will be outsourced via elance. (No) I think everyone can choose how they go on with their profession, so if you don't like contests, it's fine not participate in them. I've participated in contests and even won few, but usually they've been for some non-profit or small a startup looking for a sticker design. The distinction here is that 1) I don't think Skype needs my help (they could hire anyone) 2) their contest is not about some funny sticker, but the UX of their core product 3) which leads to the fact that Skype doesn't take their UX seriously. Either they're willing to let anyone to design their core product without decent brief or experience with the problems and constrains or they're fishing for some ideas, which will not be implemented. (Anyway I would be happy with a world of more designers since still most products are crap)
- bad_user 16y ago
  This "disruption" you're speaking of has been going on ever since the nineties, when the web became popular. To many companies design and UX is something that anybody can do, especially software developers and managers/customers with strong opinions, so why hire somebody that does design/UX for a living? Also many other companies hire crappy designers with 2/3 mediocre websites in their portfolio and that are listing photography as their hobby -- for cheap. The end result is something you can see for yourself -- lots of crappy designs and unusable apps out there. And crowd-sourcing is the alternative to the above. But IMHO, a good designer is more valuable to user-facing applications than a good developer, and if you want your app to kick-ass, the designer must is a crucial part of the development process. So it's nothing new really -- good designers will always be paid handsomely, bad designers will have to work harder -- isn't that the same thing happening with software developers?
olalonde 16y ago
This post is nothing more than propaganda to protect established designers from competition (those who are starting out or are just not very good at marketing their skills). Perhaps this was not the author's intention but it is the consequence of his reasoning. I don't think many designer want their profession to be protected by a trade union and this kind of mentality is what leads to it. I say, if you are not an established designer with a large base of clients, do participate in the contest!
- radley 16y ago
  I'm a very experienced designer. This has nothing to do with competition (seriously, if a contest can unravel me then I'm not really a professional). The rejection of contests has to do with wasting time on wishful thinking without even the minimum form of reward: constructive feedback. Our advice is based on actual experience. What's yours?
  - olalonde 16y ago
    This has nothing to do with competition? That's not what I get from this sentence: keep in mind that you are *betraying the design community*, and that *might harm you as designer* in the long run. That actually sounds like a threat to me.
    - kaishin 16y ago
      I didn't meant to threaten anyone in my article. It's just a way to draw attention to the seriousness of the matter. As a matter of fact I couldn't care less if there are any people who enter the contest. They are amateurs and and they will stay so until they take their profession more seriously.
      - pixelbath 16y ago
        You don't care at all if anyone enters the contest, yet felt the need to write this incendiary piece that calls on all designers (which you now deride as "amateur") not to enter this contest? You then further go on to suggest that an entrant's credibility/integrity would be compromised by doing so. So, which is it?
mgkimsal 16y ago
Caution: wild stab in the dark here. "Playing the game" isn't going to lead to $0 for the 'winner' and Skype just rolling out the submission immediately. I'd be willing to be there would be some paid consultation between the 'winner' and Skype, although they probably won't commit to a specific winning $ amount up front. I understand the basic argument of "they're getting our work for free!". Really, I do. But the notion that "hiring a professional UI designer to fix it" will cut it might not be correct. First, they've paid people to come up with the current one, so simply paying people doesn't necessarily get the best results. Second, Skype in particular is used by a huge number of people, all with various needs and experiences. Getting input from a broad range of people informed by their usage of Skype and other apps should yield a final product better than the mind of one "professional UI designer". Possibly not, but the odds are in favor of a crowdsourced approach coming up with something as good or better than pinning this all on one hand-picked by Skype with no input from the community.
radley 16y ago
Rather than putting time and effort into a "contest", these designers could be doing something more constructive like contributing to open-source projects.
mcritz 16y ago
It’s worth rereading what Mike Montiero wrote about the new Gap Logo. http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_ne...
bonch 16y ago
"Such Design competitions are a disguised form of crowdsourcing, and are extremely insulting to the design profession." Oh, come off it. Too many designers become smug asses with an unwarranted sense of importance. Competitions like this are opportunities for those just starting to get their name out in the world. You're not going to be put out on the street because Skype held a public UI contest rather than hiring your firm.
- kaishin 16y ago
  I do not run a design firm. I am just a no-name freelance designer who loves his job. If you think that I wrote the article because I am concerned about paying my bills, then you completely missed the point. It's sad to live in an era where someone who loves what he is doing for a living is called a "smug ass with an unwarranted sense of importance" ...
Terretta 16y ago
From the article: > There is no way in hell any company would launch an engineering or accounting competition. Ahem: http://www.netflixprize.com/ http://www.netflixprize.com/
- kaishin 16y ago
  Everyone seems to be pointing in the article to the Netflix prize, but hey, don't take my phrase word for word. That's actually an exception that confirms the rule... What I meant is that spec work in design is being tolerated by both companies and designers more than any other field...
  - metageek 16y ago
    >don't take my phrase word for word Say what you mean.
    - kaishin 16y ago
      My message is clear. You are free to disagree, just don't feel the need to bring down my piece sentence by sentence...
  - paulgb 16y ago
    Netflix isn't an exception anymore. Look at http://www.kaggle.com/ http://www.kaggle.com/, the Android App contest, Windows Mobile 7 app contest, etc.
  - qq66 16y ago
    Exceptions don't prove rules, they disprove them.
moeffju 16y ago
Why does nobody mention that this competition is for "chat styles"? That the content of the chat window is the only part of the new oh-so-awful Skype 5 for Mac that you can change with custom "styles", and that no matter how good the UI/UX designer, they can not fix any of the perceived problems with the Skype 5 UI by creating a "chat style"?
- aridiculous 16y ago
  True. If they're looking for a great UI designer/design, and not just a photoshop job, they have to give the UI person access to the product flow decision-making.
pixelbath 16y ago
As a designer, these pieces come off to me as whiny. I have a difficult time picturing why a designer would sit there angry at a company for crowdsourcing a design. Some 14-year-old designer is not cheapening the work we do by submitting logos for free to a bunch of companies hoping to get exposure. Out-of-work designers are not taking all the other freelance jobs because they decided to do some blog layouts at $50 a pop. Designers: get over yourselves. If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all. Also, "keep in mind that you are betraying the design community?" Design community? What design community? The design industry looks like this: 1. Top-tier ad agencies/teams like Psyop, Leo Burnett 2. Smaller ad agencies 3. Freelance designers 3a. Unemployed designers So who is our hypothetical 14-year-old logo-designing student hurting? Ad agencies. If your work is really worth that much more or is that much better, companies will pay handsomely for it. If they won't, it's you that's the problem, not the designers submitting free or near-free spec-work. Apologies for the rantiness of this comment. Edited for typos.
- kaishin 16y ago
  If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all << This is exactly why I wrote the article. You guys are talking money, I am talking ethics.
  - pixelbath 16y ago
    Fair enough, but I do think it's pretty presumptuous of you to speak for an entire industry. I do not think it is unethical, as long as the terms are clearly laid out beforehand.
    - kaishin 16y ago
      Sure, I might have gone overboard, but the basic idea is still the same: That thing needs serious design thinking, not patchwork. I consider it unethical for a company to throw a smokescreen instead of solving the real problem. And my piece was all about shedding some light on this.
kaishin 16y ago
Hi all, I have spent almost one hour reading all of your comments and replied to as many as I can. Needless to say, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Actually, I was expecting quite the opposite, if the strong tone of the article is anything to go by. Again, let me reiterate that I am NOT against design contests per se. I am against companies who take design lightly and try to patch stuff when things go astray. Do any of you think that changing the visual style of the chat pane will solve the several issues of the new UI? Folks, this is a program used by millions of people, including computer un-savvy people who are having serious problems with the new UI. Forget logos, the problems here are functional first and foremost, and it is not a design contest that will solve them. For those of you saying that this is a chance for young designers to get their name out in the world, allow me to tell you that there are hundreds of other ways to do that. Free or open source projects that need UI designers are not hard to come by. Also, I am under 25, and by no means an old timer who is trying to spoil the party. Cheers,
famousactress 16y ago
Meh. I think asking (especially young) designers to consider the value of their work before giving it away is a reasonable thing.. but to try to pseudo-unionize to prevent this from happening is silly. This happens to lots of markets, with similar complaints. It's certainly happened in photography, and the result is painful.. mostly for craftsmen in the middle of the talent & pay scale, who's overhead and value was frankly inflated by a rather narrow market channel and burden-to-entry. Both disappeared, and the market corrected. Is it sad? Sure. It's a bummer to know that in some parts of the market hard-working people were replaced by flickr searches or microstock, but there's something beautiful about it also. Either way, it's inertia. It's what happens, and what's always happened. I think the natural result can be a very positive one for the very talented. There's a sharp talent & value contrast this kind of shift causes. People in the middle need to move up or down and take advantage of the changes. Adapt or die.
alsomike 16y ago
As a designer, I'm not very concerned about spec work. The wide availability of cheap desktop publishing software could have made design as a profession vanish because it gave people the ability to do it themselves. But that didn't happen. Instead, people did try it themselves and the market was flooded with extremely poor design. Before, not having a logo at all was the floor, the absolute minimum of branding. But after DTP, the floor was raised - having a poorly-designed logo that you did yourself was the new minimum. Today, crowdsourced logo that you paid $300 for is rapidly becoming the new minimum. Nothing changes for designers, because there is no ceiling. Thinking of design in the very narrow, branding sense: it cannot be commodified, because whenever the minimum level is raised, it becomes ubiquitous and generic, and that creates the new zero point. Designers get paid to design things to stand out from what's ubiquitous, whatever that happens to be at the time.
symptic 16y ago
This game is for a young or unknown designer. It's their chance to establish themselves and build their portfolio. As a professional who makes a living in design, you are not obligated to compete. Though, you are still invited. It was Skype's choice to put on this contest, and it should be assumed they know it is possible they won't get as quality a final product as possible. There are plenty of projects out there for quality designers to work on, and it bothers me that so many designers complain that free/cheap client work is such a pain in the community's ass. Without a doubt, the type of client who wants to go that route is someone a designer of your talent wouldn't want to work with in the first place. Right?
dfischer 16y ago
All I could think of was Heroku's blog being ripped when reading this.
redler 16y ago
Skype's user experience designers -- assuming they have any -- finally have management's answer to the age old question. Yes, you are indeed chopped liver.

109 points by jorde 16y ago

You know what 99designers can't do? They can't visit your clients' offices. They can't justify their decisions in realtime. They can't 'sell' their design beyond simply clicking 'upload.' Basically, they can't be convincing to the people who hold the purse strings. But you can. That's your job. You're a designer.

rgbrgb 16y ago

Or 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.

codingthebeach 16y ago
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.

joblessjunkie 16y ago

You 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.

raganwald 16y ago
Engineering, accounting, and other +regulated+ fields use social engineering to solve the problem of how to be paid handsomely. What they have done is convince society that there should only be a limited number of engineers and accountants, those that are highly trained and have passed rigorous examinations. The imbalance of supply and demand takes care of the rest. In those two fields, you can see that when supply is unfettered, compensation does fall. For example, accountants in Canada make fairly good money, but unlicensed "tax preparers" do not.
- samdelagarza 16y ago
  I'm not sure how it is for other engineering professions, but for software engineers we have a similar competition but instead of people willing to work for free it's people willing to work for peanuts out of India.
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    But what is peanuts to you is not peanuts to them. A different thing altogether from the point of this thread. A better comparison for software engineers would be with interns working for free just to gain experience, freeware or FOSS.
- olalonde 16y ago
  I totally agree with your reasoning although I'd say it only applies to regulated professions (accounting, construction engineering, etc.). Computer/software engineering isn't regulated.
  - paulgb 16y ago
    As a point of clarification, raganwald is from Canada where software engineering is regulated (though you don't need to be a software engineer to develop software professionally).
- joblessjunkie 16y ago
  I'm not sure if you are just trying to make a supplemental point, but this isn't really where I was going. Either my cell phone drops its signal, or it doesn't. Either my books balance and my checks clear, or they don't. In engineering and accounting, there are absolute and obvious measures of success. When it comes to UI design, who decides when the design is successful? My boss? He approved the Pontiac Aztek. Lord help us all.
  - kaishin 16y ago
    Allow me to chime in, UI design is as methodical as engineering and accounting. There are quantitative and qualitative methods to build and evaluate interfaces. Maybe you are referring to aesthetics, but that's only a fraction of what an interface is...
hernan7 16y ago
What it feels like being disrupted, when you are a musician: http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2664517-Who-is-responsible-for-bands-making-peanuts&p=40701817#post40701817 http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2664517-W... This is the tale of an ex-pro cover band player finding himself out of work, and coming to grips with the realization that the amateurs are not to blame, after all.
bigiain 16y ago
+1. But there are also people with track records at getting it right first time. Eventually the check signers (or the check signers bosses) work that out. (Hopefully before all the talented designers go broke.) Reminds me a lot of this: http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_ne...
skue 16y ago
> Engineering and accounting... don't suffer this problem. Ha! You're not looking hard enough. Check out the healthcare industry to find "Developer Challenges" where companies attempt to recruit programmers to compete for tiny prizes that won't even replace their lost billable time. 1. http://health2challenge.org/ http://health2challenge.org/ 2. http://smartplatforms.org/ http://smartplatforms.org/ The second example is the funniest, given that the $5000 challenge is intended to promote a platform developed with a $60 Million grant! Bill Gates was even on hand to help kick off the challenge.

larrik 16y ago

Am 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)

tseabrooks 16y ago
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.
- justinph 16y ago
  As a designer, when an org comes to me and says "we have $[laughably small amount] to spend on this website", I point them to WooThemes and tell them to pick one out. I'm happy to sit down with them for a few hours and do some basic work, but put the burden on them. It works great for me, because I get to do a little design education, still get paid, and focus my time on more lucrative projects. It also can pay dividends when clients come back to me later for more work or other design changes. To put it in a more uncouth way, 99Designs and WooThemes take the pain-in-the-ass clients and get them out of the way. I don't see it as a bad thing. I just wish I had come up with the idea first.
  - ladon86 16y ago

showerst 16y ago

What 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 =)

gavinballard 16y ago

I 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.

lkozma 16y ago
It's the usual lemon market argument though: clients can't discern quality reliably so they go for price only, which drives quality out of the market.

raganwald 16y ago

The 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.

gavinballard 16y ago
I think this is a great point, and the one that designers (and anyone feeling threatened by the evil onslaught of spec work) should be focusing on rather than the notion that the mere existence of 99designs is "insulting" to the profession. Spec work is a good way to quickly and cheaply solve a simple problem where top quality is not the primary concern. Many problems (and I would agree that the Skype UI is one of these) are more complex and require a more specialised approach. The latter is where top designers spend all of their time anyway.

benologist 16y ago

A 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.

enra 16y ago
Yes like there are millions of people trained to be programmers that are hungrier than people in the Valley, so everything will be outsourced via elance. (No) I think everyone can choose how they go on with their profession, so if you don't like contests, it's fine not participate in them. I've participated in contests and even won few, but usually they've been for some non-profit or small a startup looking for a sticker design. The distinction here is that 1) I don't think Skype needs my help (they could hire anyone) 2) their contest is not about some funny sticker, but the UX of their core product 3) which leads to the fact that Skype doesn't take their UX seriously. Either they're willing to let anyone to design their core product without decent brief or experience with the problems and constrains or they're fishing for some ideas, which will not be implemented. (Anyway I would be happy with a world of more designers since still most products are crap)
bad_user 16y ago
This "disruption" you're speaking of has been going on ever since the nineties, when the web became popular. To many companies design and UX is something that anybody can do, especially software developers and managers/customers with strong opinions, so why hire somebody that does design/UX for a living? Also many other companies hire crappy designers with 2/3 mediocre websites in their portfolio and that are listing photography as their hobby -- for cheap. The end result is something you can see for yourself -- lots of crappy designs and unusable apps out there. And crowd-sourcing is the alternative to the above. But IMHO, a good designer is more valuable to user-facing applications than a good developer, and if you want your app to kick-ass, the designer must is a crucial part of the development process. So it's nothing new really -- good designers will always be paid handsomely, bad designers will have to work harder -- isn't that the same thing happening with software developers?

olalonde 16y ago

This post is nothing more than propaganda to protect established designers from competition (those who are starting out or are just not very good at marketing their skills). Perhaps this was not the author's intention but it is the consequence of his reasoning. I don't think many designer want their profession to be protected by a trade union and this kind of mentality is what leads to it. I say, if you are not an established designer with a large base of clients, do participate in the contest!

radley 16y ago
I'm a very experienced designer. This has nothing to do with competition (seriously, if a contest can unravel me then I'm not really a professional). The rejection of contests has to do with wasting time on wishful thinking without even the minimum form of reward: constructive feedback. Our advice is based on actual experience. What's yours?
- olalonde 16y ago
  This has nothing to do with competition? That's not what I get from this sentence: keep in mind that you are *betraying the design community*, and that *might harm you as designer* in the long run. That actually sounds like a threat to me.
  - kaishin 16y ago
    I didn't meant to threaten anyone in my article. It's just a way to draw attention to the seriousness of the matter. As a matter of fact I couldn't care less if there are any people who enter the contest. They are amateurs and and they will stay so until they take their profession more seriously.
    - pixelbath 16y ago
      You don't care at all if anyone enters the contest, yet felt the need to write this incendiary piece that calls on all designers (which you now deride as "amateur") not to enter this contest? You then further go on to suggest that an entrant's credibility/integrity would be compromised by doing so. So, which is it?

mgkimsal 16y ago

Caution: wild stab in the dark here. "Playing the game" isn't going to lead to $0 for the 'winner' and Skype just rolling out the submission immediately. I'd be willing to be there would be some paid consultation between the 'winner' and Skype, although they probably won't commit to a specific winning $ amount up front. I understand the basic argument of "they're getting our work for free!". Really, I do. But the notion that "hiring a professional UI designer to fix it" will cut it might not be correct. First, they've paid people to come up with the current one, so simply paying people doesn't necessarily get the best results. Second, Skype in particular is used by a huge number of people, all with various needs and experiences. Getting input from a broad range of people informed by their usage of Skype and other apps should yield a final product better than the mind of one "professional UI designer". Possibly not, but the odds are in favor of a crowdsourced approach coming up with something as good or better than pinning this all on one hand-picked by Skype with no input from the community.

radley 16y ago

Rather than putting time and effort into a "contest", these designers could be doing something more constructive like contributing to open-source projects.

mcritz 16y ago

It’s worth rereading what Mike Montiero wrote about the new Gap Logo. http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_ne...

bonch 16y ago

"Such Design competitions are a disguised form of crowdsourcing, and are extremely insulting to the design profession." Oh, come off it. Too many designers become smug asses with an unwarranted sense of importance. Competitions like this are opportunities for those just starting to get their name out in the world. You're not going to be put out on the street because Skype held a public UI contest rather than hiring your firm.

kaishin 16y ago
I do not run a design firm. I am just a no-name freelance designer who loves his job. If you think that I wrote the article because I am concerned about paying my bills, then you completely missed the point. It's sad to live in an era where someone who loves what he is doing for a living is called a "smug ass with an unwarranted sense of importance" ...

Terretta 16y ago

From the article: > There is no way in hell any company would launch an engineering or accounting competition. Ahem: http://www.netflixprize.com/ http://www.netflixprize.com/

kaishin 16y ago
Everyone seems to be pointing in the article to the Netflix prize, but hey, don't take my phrase word for word. That's actually an exception that confirms the rule... What I meant is that spec work in design is being tolerated by both companies and designers more than any other field...
- metageek 16y ago
  >don't take my phrase word for word Say what you mean.
  - kaishin 16y ago
    My message is clear. You are free to disagree, just don't feel the need to bring down my piece sentence by sentence...
- paulgb 16y ago
  Netflix isn't an exception anymore. Look at http://www.kaggle.com/ http://www.kaggle.com/, the Android App contest, Windows Mobile 7 app contest, etc.
- qq66 16y ago
  Exceptions don't prove rules, they disprove them.

moeffju 16y ago

Why does nobody mention that this competition is for "chat styles"? That the content of the chat window is the only part of the new oh-so-awful Skype 5 for Mac that you can change with custom "styles", and that no matter how good the UI/UX designer, they can not fix any of the perceived problems with the Skype 5 UI by creating a "chat style"?

aridiculous 16y ago
True. If they're looking for a great UI designer/design, and not just a photoshop job, they have to give the UI person access to the product flow decision-making.

pixelbath 16y ago

As a designer, these pieces come off to me as whiny. I have a difficult time picturing why a designer would sit there angry at a company for crowdsourcing a design. Some 14-year-old designer is not cheapening the work we do by submitting logos for free to a bunch of companies hoping to get exposure. Out-of-work designers are not taking all the other freelance jobs because they decided to do some blog layouts at $50 a pop. Designers: get over yourselves. If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all. Also, "keep in mind that you are betraying the design community?" Design community? What design community? The design industry looks like this: 1. Top-tier ad agencies/teams like Psyop, Leo Burnett 2. Smaller ad agencies 3. Freelance designers 3a. Unemployed designers So who is our hypothetical 14-year-old logo-designing student hurting? Ad agencies. If your work is really worth that much more or is that much better, companies will pay handsomely for it. If they won't, it's you that's the problem, not the designers submitting free or near-free spec-work. Apologies for the rantiness of this comment. Edited for typos.

kaishin 16y ago
If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all << This is exactly why I wrote the article. You guys are talking money, I am talking ethics.
- pixelbath 16y ago
  Fair enough, but I do think it's pretty presumptuous of you to speak for an entire industry. I do not think it is unethical, as long as the terms are clearly laid out beforehand.
  - kaishin 16y ago
    Sure, I might have gone overboard, but the basic idea is still the same: That thing needs serious design thinking, not patchwork. I consider it unethical for a company to throw a smokescreen instead of solving the real problem. And my piece was all about shedding some light on this.

kaishin 16y ago

Hi all, I have spent almost one hour reading all of your comments and replied to as many as I can. Needless to say, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Actually, I was expecting quite the opposite, if the strong tone of the article is anything to go by. Again, let me reiterate that I am NOT against design contests per se. I am against companies who take design lightly and try to patch stuff when things go astray. Do any of you think that changing the visual style of the chat pane will solve the several issues of the new UI? Folks, this is a program used by millions of people, including computer un-savvy people who are having serious problems with the new UI. Forget logos, the problems here are functional first and foremost, and it is not a design contest that will solve them. For those of you saying that this is a chance for young designers to get their name out in the world, allow me to tell you that there are hundreds of other ways to do that. Free or open source projects that need UI designers are not hard to come by. Also, I am under 25, and by no means an old timer who is trying to spoil the party. Cheers,

famousactress 16y ago

Meh. I think asking (especially young) designers to consider the value of their work before giving it away is a reasonable thing.. but to try to pseudo-unionize to prevent this from happening is silly. This happens to lots of markets, with similar complaints. It's certainly happened in photography, and the result is painful.. mostly for craftsmen in the middle of the talent & pay scale, who's overhead and value was frankly inflated by a rather narrow market channel and burden-to-entry. Both disappeared, and the market corrected. Is it sad? Sure. It's a bummer to know that in some parts of the market hard-working people were replaced by flickr searches or microstock, but there's something beautiful about it also. Either way, it's inertia. It's what happens, and what's always happened. I think the natural result can be a very positive one for the very talented. There's a sharp talent & value contrast this kind of shift causes. People in the middle need to move up or down and take advantage of the changes. Adapt or die.

alsomike 16y ago

As a designer, I'm not very concerned about spec work. The wide availability of cheap desktop publishing software could have made design as a profession vanish because it gave people the ability to do it themselves. But that didn't happen. Instead, people did try it themselves and the market was flooded with extremely poor design. Before, not having a logo at all was the floor, the absolute minimum of branding. But after DTP, the floor was raised - having a poorly-designed logo that you did yourself was the new minimum. Today, crowdsourced logo that you paid $300 for is rapidly becoming the new minimum. Nothing changes for designers, because there is no ceiling. Thinking of design in the very narrow, branding sense: it cannot be commodified, because whenever the minimum level is raised, it becomes ubiquitous and generic, and that creates the new zero point. Designers get paid to design things to stand out from what's ubiquitous, whatever that happens to be at the time.

symptic 16y ago

This game is for a young or unknown designer. It's their chance to establish themselves and build their portfolio. As a professional who makes a living in design, you are not obligated to compete. Though, you are still invited. It was Skype's choice to put on this contest, and it should be assumed they know it is possible they won't get as quality a final product as possible. There are plenty of projects out there for quality designers to work on, and it bothers me that so many designers complain that free/cheap client work is such a pain in the community's ass. Without a doubt, the type of client who wants to go that route is someone a designer of your talent wouldn't want to work with in the first place. Right?

dfischer 16y ago

All I could think of was Heroku's blog being ripped when reading this.

redler 16y ago

Skype's user experience designers -- assuming they have any -- finally have management's answer to the age old question. Yes, you are indeed chopped liver.