On Unsolicited Redesigns

It happens when someone redesigns an existing website or product without being hired by the company behind it. Sometimes they do it to promote themselves. Sometimes they hope it will lead to work. Sometimes they do it simply to poke the people involved in the original project. If you spend enough time around blogs, you read criticism all week long. Criticizing someone’s work is not the problem, as long as the criticism is done well. The problem is doing someone else’s job in public as if those people had not already done the work themselves.

Where I come from, that is usually called an insult. And, most of the time, it creates more conflict than help for the people being criticized.

Since you clearly do not know how to do this properly, I redesigned your website in one afternoon. Here it is. You’re welcome, amateurs.

That is why unsolicited redesigns are often controversial. They usually ignore the circumstances behind the original design. And because they ignore those circumstances, they often end up feeling less like hard criticism and more like an attack. There are hundreds of stories online about the effects of unsolicited redesigns. One famous case involved Blizzard. When the company announced Diablo III, the new art direction received a flood of criticism. People went beyond simply criticizing the screenshots. They started editing them in Photoshop.

Those edits became a wave of unsolicited redesigns. Most of them had little foundation and no real understanding of whether they could work inside the actual production constraints of the game. But because they looked “cooler” to many people, a large part of the audience went from wanting the game to hating it. Eventually, the controversy contributed to the departure of Blizzard’s excellent art director.

That story, and many others like it, usually follow the same structure: someone outside the project makes the work look easy, the internet applauds, and the people who actually had to build the thing are treated as if they were incompetent.

The innocent proposal

A few days ago, I wrote about the Spanish Senate website. Some people close to the project wrote to thank me for criticizing it.

And yes, the Senate website is not exactly brilliant. It has problems. It has mistakes. It could have been done better.

But then the internet did what the internet does. Like animals spotting a wounded creature in the jungle, everyone jumped on it.

A week later, a young engineer created a clone of the Senate website in one week, using open source software. He even explained how and why he did it.

The story was presented more or less like this:

In one week, and without spending a single euro, an engineer using the pseudonym “Tijuinem” created a functional clone of the new Senate website, which had cost €437,481 in public money.

Of course, the story quickly spread through several media outlets, including 20minutos, El Confidencial, and El País.

And many people swallowed the story whole:

Wait, what? This guy did in one week what a whole team could not do in ten months? And he did it for free?

That is how a tiny, disguised fart turns into something big enough to fill a hot air balloon and lift us straight into the sky of stupidity.

This unsolicited redesign of the Senate website may have been humble in intention, but it is still absurd. It raises the wrong questions from the beginning, both from a design perspective and a technical one.

It cannot be compared to the original work because it was not created from scratch. It did not account for everything involved in the real project. It is like me rebuilding the same website as static files, plugging in Google search, using free services from the internet, and then pretending I solved the whole problem.

That is not how this works.

“This is easy”

The media framed the difference like this:

The original website, launched on November 12, cost around €450,000 and required almost a year of work by three expert teams.

This is the classic message unsolicited redesigns tend to send:

This is easy.

Or, in more local terms:

I could do this with one hand tied behind my back.

Or:

Give me WordPress and I’ll build you Amazon.com in two days.

The fantasy is tempting. One person, alone, designs and builds what an entire team could not finish properly after a year of work. It sounds like a movie plot. Maybe even an award nomination.

But reality is different.

It is easy for a designer or developer who is not working on the official project to create something “more creative” because nothing is limiting them. And when I say limitations, I mean real limitations: metrics, business requirements, browsers, technology, development teams, production environments, previous usability studies, intermediaries, politics, and, most importantly, the final client.

Many designers open Photoshop and make something beautiful without considering that their design could require thousands of changes the organization may not be able to afford. Or perhaps the design looks great in a mockup but collapses the moment it is tested with real users. Then there are engineers and engineering students who, in a humble act of ethics, rebuild the whole thing in WordPress.

I will say it again: it may be moving, but it is not smart.

These decisions are not made in a week or an afternoon. You cannot casually throw a CMS at a project and declare victory. A CMS decision depends on many variables, and those variables do not always allow you to install WordPress and call it a day. That does not mean the Senate should remain married to Oracle, for example. But it is also not fair to treat a major technology change as if it were a casual weekend decision. Do people really believe the Senate, with four million documents and files, can simply run on something like WordPress? And what about search?

This is where the answers begin to appear, and we start to see that this nice, promising clone is exactly that: an experiment. It is also a good publicity move for the engineer who copied the visible work and rebuilt a version of it in a week on a separate server.

The best way to redesign something

Not everything is bad. Unsolicited redesigns are usually more welcome when they involve open source projects. In that context, your contribution may actually fit better than it would in a commercial project. Commercial projects are different because they involve responsibility, contracts, and investment. One party pays another party to deliver a well-made product within a specific time frame. If someone outside that commitment builds something at home in two afternoons and shows it publicly, what they are really doing is calling the people involved slow, mediocre, or incompetent. They are also publicly questioning the value of that commitment.

It can be interesting to see someone’s redesign of Skype. It can be interesting to see a new version of Twitter’s homepage. But those redesigns would often work better if they were presented generically.

Instead of saying:

Hey, look, I redesigned AA.com like this.

You could say:

Hey, I designed an example airline website that could work for reasons A, B, and C.

Try to make your redesign stand on serious arguments.

A cosmetic treatment or a random CMS installation is not a major innovation. It is not enough justification. In fact, that is probably how you end up looking ridiculous.

If you are going to do this, study the real problems and present real solutions. Whenever possible, document them with numbers. Rodrigo Galindez did something closer to this with his analysis of the new Twitter.

In the past, I have shown proposed changes to standards with numbers and all the necessary context so people could evaluate the reasoning instead of just consuming a talent advertisement.

That is the difference.

Actually innovating

Unsolicited redesigns are internet gossip. They are part of the folklore now. In some cases, they have even created success stories.

As Rodrigo Galindez once wrote:

So here’s to remember me of doing these kind of things more regularly (in other words, posting!). Oh, and my eager mind repeats to me that CVs are dead — an idea I’ve been coining a while ago.

If you still want to publish an unsolicited redesign, and you do not want to follow my advice of presenting it as a generic exercise, then the key is to be as objective as possible in your analysis.

Be friendly in how you refer to the original team, directly or indirectly. Do not aim to hurt people. The work will land better if it shows detail, care, and real analysis behind it.

The worst version of this is:

I got bored one afternoon, sat down, and fixed your product.

The best version is:

I studied this problem, made assumptions clear, respected the context, and proposed an alternative.

That is the right way to build a relationship with a company if your goal is to promote your talent through unsolicited redesigns. It gives the audience something useful, gives the responsible team something fair to consider, and gives you a much better chance of receiving a positive response.