UX Planet — Medium | Dmitriy Chuta

My name is Dmitry Chuta. Several years ago I established Chapps, during of its work the company has grown and achieved great results. For the past 4 years, Dribbble and Behance have been our only source of clients, aside from word of mouth.

This gave us the possibility to study the platforms closely and we came to the conclusion, that today both of these resources are not suitable for product designers of mobile interfaces.

This is our personal experience and the results are based on 4 months of research, analysis and surveys of designers/companies from different countries before we started developing Screens Today.

Behance

This platform cultivates the decoration and dressing up of your design work: the longer the portfolio, the more attention it gets. Frequently in such presentations, the designers show irrelevant things and implements additional elements while preparing the presentation, trying to make the project more attractive.

To be honest, it really feels like designers try to please other designers, and they forget about the very existence of customers.

The client does not care what font is chosen, if the interface doesn’t bring money to the business. In most cases experienced designers and art directors usually evaluate only the tasks that the interface should actually be solving.

We all need to understand that a cool presentation or an expensive high-quality mockup of a brand new iPhone is just an accessory, and not the main point of product design presentation.

So, the presentation isn’t really needed at all?

Oh yes. It’s needed, but only if it helps your client’s business. We’ve done some research on this topic 👉 Why designers rarely update their profile?

Dribbble

Are you aware of the purposes Dribbble was created? Upon developing Dribbble the main idea was to create a private platform for the best designers. Wherein said designers could show, in contrast to Behance, only a portion of the screen or design process in order to get feedback from other designers. Without realizing it, the founders created a base of excellent designers, and users began using the platform as a portfolio.

Yet the process, or just a part of the interface was at a loss against the final creation since this was attracting ever more attention, likes and new offers. This was especially true if this work where to hit the main page.

That moment began to be the start of preparing and adorning the presentation of the final work. For example, the photo shot of the interface taken with a professional camera instantly was gaining quite a few views⚡️. This problem has been discussed many times on the Internet and on Dribbble itself: http://ift.tt/2sdjHdY. One of the strongest arguments at that time, was the need to show the design in the actual environment. Today, this is superfluous since everyone knows how applications and smartphones should look. However, over the past 6–8 years, a whole lot of things has changed.

Why has Dribbble become so popular?

Speed — what distinguishes any successful startup today. Anyone who can save the users’ time and in addition solve their problems — wins everytime.

In comparison with Behance, the designer had to do only one successful shot (400x300px) and after a couple of hours he was getting tons of letters with new projects and offers. Today, displaying a shot on Dribbble became too time consuming and here are some points explaining the reason why:

Format 400х300

PhotoLife Onboarding by Chapps Digital Agency

Have you ever wondered why the mobile interface used to be displayed in tilted format? The reason is that on the small screen with format 400×300 you could show more details of the app screen which guaranteed more transitions and views.

Today, mobile interfaces are presented on Dribbble differently, but due to the inconvenient format, designers have to fill the void left/right to improve the overall work appearance and therefore in almost all cases the app screen itself suffers.

Take a closer look: the most important shot, for that we come to Dribbble, is an actual app screen which takes in the best case scenario, only 30% of the total presentation screen space.

Nowadays the community is pretty spoiled due to all the fancy presentations, and designers have switched the focus from work improvements to decorating the design presentation.

Showing a great interface is not enough to get your work noticed and acknowledged by others. This is because you need to come up with unique animations, an unusual pitch on a quality phone mockup and other additional manipulations in order to make the shot gain popularity.

We’re convinced: the designer shouldn’t waste time on decorating the work, and the format of publication should be the size of the screen. By the way, we at Screens Today developed plugins for Sketch & Photoshop for publishing the screen in one click.

Shot on Dribbble — Pieter van Est

Animation

It’s very important to show the dynamics of the interface. Behance allows for inserting video, such as via Vimeo or Youtube, but for showing your interactive design app, Dribbble allows you to use only GIF format, which is far outdated and more than 30 years old! 30 years, by golly! Due to the color limitations of the GIF format, the quality of presentation is really poor in addition, designers are limited by the animation duration. Yes, you can upload the video and add it to attached files, but we all know that the number of views is significantly lower than on the main image.

A modern designer should instantly upload his animation interface, which he, for example, did in Principle. In Screens Today we solved this problem and added many more additional formats (mov, mp4, webM, etc.) with automatic optimization.

Invitation system

Dribbble doesn’t have any specific invitation system. Absolutely any user can get several invitations in a random order. Due to this fact, there is a pretty high chance that a bad designer will invite another bad designer. Thus, the quality of the over all works is trending downward, especially when bad designers manage to popularize bad short-term fads, such as LongShadow. More info: http://ift.tt/2qTMf8b

Within our product, we decided to completely change the mechanisms for publication and the overall invitation system. Yet, even without getting an invite, users will be able to work with Screens Today.

Common problems

Work Quality and its ranking.

Do you remember these cool, stunning, works that were on the main page of Dribbble Popular 4 years ago? Today it’s quite difficult to find a decent and high-quality interface, even after spending a few minutes searching.

Due to the existing of the ranking system, a designer with a large number of followers can afford publishing low quality design work, and his followers will help pushing this work up, so that it quickly gets to the top. Such a system is unfair to talented designers who are just starting their career.

We believe that the designer should focus on his work, and its promotion should be a task for the platform.

Can a “like” from a product designer from Google, with a decade of experience, be the same as a “like” from a designer which just started getting into the design profession? Specifically, while thinking over this question we have started developing the unique ranking method for designers and their works. From now on, the number of publications and the reaction of other designers to these takes on an important role in ranking.

Everything except the design, and the pursuit of more followers

Through these services, designers began promoting products, selling icons, drawing mockups, selling ui kits, raffling invitations, advertising their articles and redirecting traffic to their sites and blogs. Instead of the creative works, that we all came to see, we see a sloppy gobbly-gook mess of different content.

Frankly speaking, I don’t want to blame the users, because we used to do the same thing. The current community forces us to abide by these rules in order to promote our accounts. Multiple articles on the Internet serve as guides about self-promotion, and are recommending all these methods.

In Screens Today, we do our best to keep and highlight the most important thing — design.

Constructive comments

If you open several of yours own or other designers’ projects, you will see the following: Almost all comments are the same like “Awesome!” “Please check my work” and more. Even the appearance of resources like http://commments.com/ that ridiculed it, did not change the situation.

The main purpose of such comments is simple: the author wants his profile to be viewed and followed as well.

Without constructive feedback the designer doesn’t understand which steps he should be taking for improvements, and this is one of the main reasons for a community to exist: to share experience, feedback and improve our skills accordingly.

We decided to completely reimagine the approach to comments. If the comment is constructive, then it will be published and assigned to the work. At the same time, our algorithm recognizes the messages of the same type: “Awesome shot”, “Nice work” and shows them to the user such information in infographics form, without reference to any specific profiles. In this way, we want to gently push users to write constructively.

Terrible tools for collecting ideas

Like other agencies, we at Chapps usually use Dribbble and Behance for inspiration. Upon creation of the moodboard for the project, or for that portion of the work, the art director sends out tons of links with comments to the designers via Slack. I’m guessing you know what I mean, here…

Third-party solutions don’t work for us all that much, so we came to the conclusion that we need a simple service for this purpose inside the platform.

While developing and designing an internal tool for collecting moodboards we drew inspiration from the real needs that we face every day through our work.

We really like the Pinterest function for analog searching, and we’re going to implement something pretty similar for mobile interfaces.

Have you noticed that you started receiving significantly less letters from potential customers?

The issue is not in the decrease in number of potential customers, but the main reason is in the increasing amount of designers on a daily basis. Even if you’re a talented designer, it’s hard to get noticed and acknowledged due to the sheer number of competitors of different skill levels.

Which criteria determines a designer to be a good one? This is of interest for both the novice designers and customers alike. If the user does not have any expertise and experience he definitely looks at those at the top.

I’ve trained a number of designers, and one of the methods I use, is to redraw good interfaces 1 to 1 pixel. Well, to explain in layman’s terms, it’s like teaching something to develop a sense of taste, in addition to basic theory and fundamental knowledge. The main question remains the same — how to find a good interface?

The improved results can be reached quickly, if you know what you should be focus on. Previously, many interface designers were using Dribbble for this purpose, but from now on it’s going to be Screens Today

The Daily UI Design Challenge kills the industry and hammers down community

The initial point of this challenge is excellent, no doubt. I always encourage novice designers to think of a task for themselves, or to take a well-known application, and try to on improve it. What actually does a Daily UI Design Challenge do and what do we get out of it? We get a huge amount of the same looking works, that clutter up the community. The idea behind it is good, but it needs improvement or a separate platform. Being a person who’s worked his whole life with real product design, I cannot even look at it without grimacing.

We would like to kill two birds with one stone by adding competitions that will be held by large and well known companies, and by setting up realistic challenges for designers on Screens Today.

Even if your idea is not followed up on, for example on Skype, maybe your approach and style will be noticed by a new startup that develops a messenger for the next generation. Did you get the point?:) You fill your profile with real projects, rather than with the same looking interfaces.

You choose the competitions for the companies you want to participate in, and possibly get employed at, and we guarantee that your works will be seen by the important guys from these same companies.

If this article is being read by a company representative, please shoot us an email at [email protected]. We are engaged in active discussions with the leading brands in several different countries.

Screens Today Manifest

Our main goal: create equal conditions for all. Large companies and cool beginner designers should compete at the same field and level. We want you to just do your job. Publish screens and if you’ve created an outstanding one — we will send you the best requests and offers. We’re completely sure that the time has come for changes in the global design community and the only thing we need is you! You’re the one who’s created and formed this!

Why Dribbble & Behance Are No Longer Suitable for Product Designers was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.