Thirded! If anyone knows what it takes to get things off the ground, it's Mr. McDowall. He's assembled a pretty interesting cross-section of the startup crowd here - keenly looking forward to reading this myself.
I'm not trying to convince anyone that they're wrong. If I was, I could have easily said "If you use Fireworks, you're a bad person." I don't care what tools you use.
What I'd like to see less of is the obsessive fascination with our tools - it's great to be using cool stuff, but that's a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.
I think the rise of the internet and the way do business thereon - fairly transparently, and socially - has made us more aware of how 'legacy' companies are behaving. Our expectations of how businesses should work has changed.
He's not slamming the entire service, he's slamming the redesign, and rightly so. The entire purpose of the site is to teach - and the changes to the design have obfuscated what course you're supposed to take next. The design is objectively not working as well as it could.
While I agree Dribbble's limited canvas doesn't really help to find 'designers' as you're defining them, to thus write off everyone on there as 'artists' seems a bit short-sighted.
I would argue that amazing UX _IS_ amazing marketing, precisely because people want to tell other people how awesome the UX is. I have a handy example: the meteoric launch of Clear.
The subtext of this headline seems to be "Why does Facebook have a secret paper fetish?" rather than "How awesome is it that Facebook has a secret paper fetish?"
Personally, I'd be far more motivated by a fantastic screen-printed poster than an 'internal memo'.
The two examples here are basically the same - a position so top-heavy with requirements and areas of expertise that they'll both be equally difficult to fill.
The fact that it's a design position in this case is not the problem - I would have railed just as hard against an overloaded dev position.
True enough. The 'build it once, sell it forever' aspect is pretty compelling - but you do need that up-front effort. Unfortunately I haven't been able to muster the extra time since then to make something new.
To everybody in this thread: I absolutely should have marketed the hell out of this thing. What was interesting to me was the uptake without putting in that effort. I agreed whole-heartedly that I would have had much better results if I had actually done things 'properly'.
It's clear once you interact with it, roll all over it, and thoroughly investigate it - all behaviours that get in the way of doing what it SHOULD be doing: showing me the data.
What is with the developer antipathy towards Wordpress? It might be ugly spaghetti code but it's fast, it works, and the plugin ecosystem means you can get pretty much any functionality under the sun for free.
The author could have had a working solution up and running in 5 minutes. I don't get it.