By Nishant Kothary CHAPTER 12what you can learn from even the best observations and discussions about
other people. As the old proverb goes, “Nothing ever becomes real until it
is experienced.” Sure, we’ve used the word we throughout this discussion,
implying that we — you and I — are prone to fall prey to all of the same
psychological traps. But let’s admit it, we aren’t as cuckoo as others. Right?
You may want to refill that drink before you proceed.
Designing for Designers
A few years ago I co-founded a little community website for Web designers
and developers. Our community published articles by invited guests (not
unlike Smashing Magazine) about everything from UX strategy and the
Web design process to management and philosophy. We also built open
source software and shared it on a section of our community site.
Over time, the website gained some popularity with the Web
community. The incoming traffic was enough for our team to consider
redesigning the website to better handle our future plans. The original
website was something I’d designed and coded over a couple of weekends.
It wasn’t very maintainable, and in the first year of running the website,
we’d learned much more about our own brand, goals and identity. So, we
set a deadline for ourselves, and I agreed to lead the redesign project. We
shall dub it Project Redo.
I determined pretty quickly that I needed some help for this project. I
had many other responsibilities at my job; the website redesign was simply
one of them. But, I wasn’t about to hand over my baby to just anyone. I
needed someone I could trust, someone who’d give their life before letting
my baby get hurt.
I reached out to a friend and local designer who fit the bill. Let’s call
him Dave. I called him on the phone and we chatted about the goals of the
project. The stakes were high, I told him. “You have an incredible amount
of freedom on this project. I am, after all, the only stakeholder. I want you
to pretend like you’re redesigning your own personal website. I want that