1) You mention "iPhone" at the top. Sorry, I've already clicked "Back"--I'm an Android user. Except Pebble is the first thing I've ever funded via Kickstarter, and I'm ridiculously excited about it, so I'm clearly in their target market.
2) I don't get the "Beam your music, Scotty." part--it's not the biggest draw for me (and I'm not a Star Wars/Trek person, despite being a huge geek!) My biggest interest in Pebble? It's a watch that lets ME do what I want with it--I can display the time in weird fonts, or make it say:
seven
thirty
THREE
...or any of those other cool things. In other words, it's the design and flexibility that interest me more than the features.
Pebble lets me be crafty...with my WATCH. That is freakin' awesome. It is SO awesome that I will be wearing a watch for the first time in years. And that's exciting. I feel like this page misses that genuine excitement that got me to buy a Pebble and tell all my friends about it.
What you are doing is really dangerous. "In an effort to refine my design skills, I’ve decided each week or so to redesign the landing page of a YC company I dig and whose website I don’t feel so similarly about."
Doing a facelift on just the landing page, or rearranging elements around a page is not design. It's a subset of design. What's worse, is that these redesigns you offer gives zero context, no interaction, no brief, no reasoning. It's purely visual reformatting. Every placement of content, layout has a reason – you need to provide those in order for us, the reader, to understand your thought process and why you did the things you did.
I'd suggest taking it a step further to give more 'meat' to your posts. Use services like Invisionapp to create clickable hotspots to allow users to explore the redesigned site. Offer your thoughts as you go through the process.
A simple image with a few words on the product and why it's awesome doesn't really tell us anything about your process.
(Design is about solving problems – you also need to identify what is wrong with the original design, then offer your solution and explain why they are better)
I've seen three of these redo's on HackerNews and each time the redesign is aesthetically much nicer. Sure there are some things that could be better if he understood the market or product context at a deeper level, but each service looked more professional/desirable.
I manage a team of designers and these would be great deliverables if the goal was to help establish a style guide for a brand. After this round, I would have a PM and a marketer work with the designer to optimize flow/content, but this is exactly what I'd expect from a visual designer.
I can see what you are saying here, but at the same time you are proposing something very difficult for this designer. In my past, whenever I have been in a debate over design decisions, there is no objective criticism involved. Even if I've done extensive research beforehand and am citing what I imagine users will do and artistic theory that backs the decisions I made, it can always be disagreed with. "Yeah that might be the case, but it doesn't look as good." or "No, users would do this instead, and want this." Yes, surprisingly that flies in design debates.
I don't think that Kyro should attempt this unless he is going to run A/B tests so that he has actual data to back his reasons. Debate based solely upon opinion are fruitless, never-ending, and are bound to come up all the time in such a public and critical forum as hacker news.
That being said, I don't even think that he should be running A/B tests, and shouldn't need to provide any additional justification. Not only is this a ton of work for something he is doing for personal practice in his free time, but it's often a waste of time. A good designer must be trusted. You hire a designer if you like his work and trust his design decisions, not if you are going to nitpick and tell him to justify and test every shade of color he has used.
I think the most famous case of this happening is with with Douglas Bowman quitting at google to move to twitter as the lead visual designer. Mr. Bowman is quite clearly one of the best design and ux guys out there, and is widely respected. This article provides a lot of insight into his decision, and it came down to them questioning his decisions and asking him to prove everything, which was in the end a waste of time.
http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
I think it would be worth it to the designer to justify the decisions to himself, and let us try to tear them down, as that will further his learning. I'm assuming that by doing these exercises, he's trying to grow, and that puts him in an entirely different situation than with Bowman.
The flip side of that coin is that no design is proven until it's A/B tested. You can have awards for the site's beauty, but if a significantly uglier design increases sales, then you've lost the plot. Keats writes really great poetry. The writing is beautiful. I would no sooner put a Keats poem as my website copy than I would an Ansel Adams photograph as my website's visual design.
This is why website design is harder than people think. This is what separates the good from the great.
The designer is of course under no obligation to us to do this, but it may help himself. Even if he doesn't bother to justify things out loud, sometimes the act of thinking through justification in your head is enough to solidify (or compel change to) a design decision.
I think all OP is saying is "beware, you're only getting the aesthetic practice, and in design it turns out thats really a very minor part of what's important."
They do a pretty nice job of explaining why and what they did - might be a nice framework if you're planning on justifying your decisions.
I personally find these designs more "fun to look at" than anything - it's always cool to see what and how someone who isn't a part of the day to day sees a product as. To me, these designs are just a super detailed pieces of user feedback. Keep going at it!
The "Quickstart" link was removed, a menu was created below the main graphic with various uses described, applications (and their practicality) were featured much more clearly than in the previous design. All the changes I noticed seemed thoughtful and intentional, both from a design as well as a marketing perspective.
So sure, an explanation would certainly add to the post and spur more discussion. However, the author has demonstrated that they know what they're doing and should be spared a lecture on what design is or isn't.
In this case he is turning out several designs a week. This would be impossible if he were diving in completely on each one to understand the problem perfectly. Instead he's making some assumptions about each company and executing against those assumptions.
Perhaps you're just arguing that it is more important to practice the skill of understanding a project instead of the skill of executing a design. I don't really have an opinion on that, but I hardly think this project is dangerous. If anything, internalizing design execution skills will free his mind to think about design projects on a higher level.
Take a step back and understand the OP's original intention – he wants to improve and showcase his work, he posts on HN for feedback, he wants to strike conversations with those companies.
Will he have a higher chance to achieve those goals if he included his thought process? By including his process (which is something he already done, just needs to upload them), his case would be that much more convincing and impressive – won't that improve the probability of snagging the attention of those he intended?
It's hard to start a conversation with just an image and people going "Oh, looks pretty." It's much more compelling to to take it a step further and include the process, not just for his benefit, but the readers too.
If you wanted to let the product speak for itself, I would have drawn inspiration from Flipboard or Path. Both of these sites heavily rely a clean design coupled with custom typography and a well integrated video.
Confusing.
There are some really good points about not highlighting both iOS & Android as supported platforms (Android has a much larger user base). One of the really cool things about the Pebble, is that you can grab apps for it or build your own and this is really lost in the design you have.
I love that you are taking on these types of projects/exercises! Don't get caught up in all the negative bias, you'll never please everyone... Would love to see an update to this design, to see how you execute with this type of feedback. Keep it Up!
I mean really. Why are we left to assume that it's a bluetooth watch? Why can't they just come out and say it? Are they shy or something? Do they themselves secretly believe that by stating that it is a bluetooth device that they some how lower the watch?
Why do they insult their ostensibly budding (zomg! rockstar ninja!11one) "hacker" community with stupid diagrams like this?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getinpulse
Really push the boundary of the design to stand out from the rest.
Also don't take this as all web 2.0 sites are similar, or you can't pull inspiration from them. Just something refreshing to break the mold of mundane would be nice.
