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8 years ago from Patrick Wong, Design Manager @ Lyft
This is an interesting post, especially with the edited-in-disclaimer being bigger than the original blurb :)
I think it's our jobs as designers to - when we put up a piece of work - take the interpretations other people present to us and try to empathize, but not over-react.
As such, I think your initial comment was spot on, and your edit more so still. And together they present what the thought process should be for anyone that receives critique.
This reminds me of Henry Ford's "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Not in the sense that people don't know what they want, but that you should take any comments within the context of what these people represent. Do they represent someone who's informed about the subject matter? Are they highly critical of said matter, or fans of everything related to it? Or are they random passer-bys that have no clue what you're talking about?
Empathy is our superpower... and the occasional grain of salt our secret weapon ;)
I can't upvote this enough. Thanks for coming out and saying that, Dirk. I completely agree with you. There's an old model of communication that goes something like:
Sender -> encoding -> message -> decoding -> recipient
As designers, our job is not only to encode products so that the our users have as little to decode as possible, but also to do reverse. Decoding the user feedback is also hugely important.
I think your comment is spot on, even without the apologising edit. We as a design community are far too easily satisfied with a thing looking nice these days. Too often I see us just patting our backs, after looking on projects through design-tinted glasses. The design should be transparent and serve the content, not come before it and steal the thunder.
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So yeah, looks cool, but it's really confusing with all of these visual items going on, I'm not sure what is clickable and what is mere eye candy. Also, none of the nav items work.
Edit: After reading my initial post I'm afraid it came off a bit elitist and overly critical. I do think it's a superbly designed and developed site. The typography is gorgeous, the logo illustration is fresh, and the parallax effect is a nice touch. My point was I thought some of the design choices made the site confusing, though the target audience will likely "get" the site without issue.