People in the comments are claiming it is "Feedback". How many of you would critique that presentation that way (like in the comments) to the designers in person?
There is a whole world of difference between:
"Hey, did you consider this and that." and "What you have done is rubbish. You did not think"
For heavens sake the presentation ended with "And here we stop. But, hopefully, the discussion begins." http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/
If it was that bad, then you do not upvote it. if it was good enough for a discussion (upvote), then discuss politely.
Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion. even it it was entirely different from what was proposed. It was all condemnation.
At least we can agree Wikipedia can be improved, they made a suggestion. If you cannot constructively improve on what was proposed, then you can avoid polluting it. Or better still propose your own suggestion.
If I am working with someone on a design and they bring me something as bad as that redesign, I'm going to tell them it's awful. That redesign is rubbish and it very clearly was done without thinking about what was important, and nobody benefits by pretending that's not true. As a designer, you should not be offended by people telling you things you've made don't work, so long as they're providing reasons. Those people are doing you a favor. You cannot remain emotionally attached to your own work and be a good designer.
It is far easier to work with people who are direct and harsh than the people who dance around the matter. You can never trust anything the latter group of people tell you, and so you end up wasting a tremendous amount of time because you have no idea what they actually want because they refuse to actually tell you.
(That said, there is a world of difference between "that is rubbish, you did not think" and "that is rubbish because you did not think about things X, Y and Z". The first is useless, the second is helpful.)
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Your idea that people must offer alternate suggestions before criticism is ridiculous. If you present your redesign idea to the public and it's terrible, the correct response is "that's not very good, go back and try again", not "that's not very good, therefore I will spend the months required to come up with a non-awful alternative before commenting".
This absolutely breaks rule #1 in dealing with people: "Don't criticize, condemn, or complain."
> (That said, there is a world of difference between "that is rubbish, you did not think" and "that is rubbish because you did not think about things X, Y and Z". The first is useless, the second is helpful.)
This is not true. They are both needlessly critical. You can compliment the design aspects you like, ask for issues to be addressed, and nurture ideas all without telling someone their work is rubbish. No matter what else you say, if you criticize my idea as "rubbish" I'm not going to hear anything else you say.
This "tough love" idea of telling people what they did is awful is just terrible advice and please stop spreading it. You don't win people to your way of thinking by telling them they did a bad job. It's plain false.
(And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
Environments where you can't discuss mistakes are poisonous. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. If those mistakes are not dealt with directly, they become larger mistakes, and you end up in situations where people don't take minor actions that can prevent disasters because they're afraid that somebody's feelings might be hurt.
As an example, a few years ago the college I was then attending switched from internally managed email to gmail. For a month after the switch, you could log into anyone's email account without a password. This happened in large part because there was a culture of ignoring mistakes, and people who regularly raises issues were branded as "complainers". And so when they were doing the switch, nobody was willing to stand up and say "have we done basic testing?"
There are, of course, times and places where your goal is not offending people, and criticizing them is obviously a bad idea. (Telling a VC "that investment you made a week ago was really dumb" is probably a bad way to get them to invest in your company.) But much of the time, that rule causes many more problems than it solves.
It's also worth noting that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot, and that's something that's much harder to convey in text. There's a huge difference, as I've said already, between insulting somebody and criticizing their work. The first is not productive--the second can be.
I never said anything about not discussing mistakes. I never said to not deal with issues. I said that if you call my work "rubbish", I will be resentful, not grateful. Your comments elsewhere make me think that we agree on this. When you criticize someone, their absolute first instinct is to defend themselves. Even if you're commenting on a thread on a message board on the internet on something made by someone you'll never meet, saying "it's rubbish" 1) won't get your point across (because they will resent you for saying so publicly, for giving them bad press, for insulting their work, etc) and 2) won't improve the discussion.
We agree on basically everything you said. You're 100% right that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot - which, and this is really the most important part, is exactly what the original post was trying to say. The tone and delivery of most of the comments on the original submission was just ridiculously hostile. And when you're giving someone feedback, that tone matters, whether you have to work with the person every day or it's someone you'll never meet.
Version 1: Your reply if fucking stupid, you arrogant bastard, and you successfully made an ass of yourself. Even if your example was relevant, which is not, everyone knows you can't ever get idiots in any IT department to fix something like missing password. Fuck, nobody gets a job in IT in a college department without being terminally brain-dead. You are not smart enough to realize that the right thing to do is go in the server room with an ax, and hope that when they rebuild the system they'll get a clue. Sheesh, you people are the reason we need an Internet license, to prevent folks like you from polluting the web with nonsense.
Version 2: Dear samdk, I fail to see why people would fix the email system faster if you criticize them or make them resent you. You did not provide the details of the story, but I know of a similar case where the problem was fixed in private, technical, and polite e-mails. That case involved early Sun4 systems where everybody could read anybody's screen over the network, so it was relatively critical too... All it took was showing the sysadmin's screen on mine to get things fixed rather rapidly.
> (And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
This means you write this for yourself and not to fix things. This is the reason why rule #1 is a good rule: it places the other guy in the center. Your ultimate goal in a negotiation is to get the other side to do what you want. This means they are the center of the universe at that moment. You illustrated that very well with your VC example. What makes a VC different from an IT admin? That you think they are more powerful?
Jon Kershaw, who manages killer whales for a leaving, likes to bring the point that if you try to force a killer whale to do something, you end up dead more often than you want. To bring killer whales to do what you want, you need to make them want to.
Back to the story at hand, I liked the new design, except for the J-like capital I and a few details. Yet, I would certainly have remained silent on the thread because of the vocal and needless criticism, which I find a bit low for YC.
My point is that improvement does not grow out of negative feedback. This thread is about how the original post had just a torrent of negative and hostile feedback - that kind of feedback is not useful to the submitter for a whole host of reasons that SelfishMeme covered quite adeptly above.
There's a vast difference between honest feedback and what was in that thread. Publicly taking someone to task for a design experiment is shameful behavior, especially given this community's standards of participation.
> If I am working with someone on a design and they bring me something as bad as that redesign, I'm going to tell them it's awful. That redesign is rubbish and it very clearly was done without thinking about what was important, and nobody benefits by pretending that's not true. As a designer, you should not be offended by people telling you things you've made don't work, so long as they're providing reasons. Those people are doing you a favor. You cannot remain emotionally attached to your own work and be a good designer.
I think that's a terrible and even dangerous attitude - especially when done in public - for several reasons.
Firstly, if you heavily criticize something when many people are watching, it might keep you from receiving balanced feedback. Some people probably liked some of the aspects of the redesign, but with dozens of people in the thread saying how awful it was, they will rather not speak up and talk about what they liked. If you tell a mass of people "X is rubbish and whoever came up with this is stupid", and some more people join in, the others will probably assume they are idiots for liking it and say nothing.
As an analogy: When I was younger I really liked a girl in my class but all my friends were going on about how ugly and weird she was, probably because of some kind of social feedback loop. So instead of telling her that I liked her, I started joining in with the "X is stupid" meme because I didn't want to look like a fool in front of my friends. Had they not talked about it in such an extreme way, things might have went differently, but because of the situation, I lost all my courage to admit it to her and my friends.
Secondly, if you mix valid criticism with being a dick about it, people will more likely think that your criticism is less valid since it's easier to just assume you are an asshole.
Most people are emotionally attached to their work. If they weren't, their work would probably suck. They'll learn how to handle criticism, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt or demotivate them if you tell them it's rubbish.
Thirdly, there is absolutely no need to ever mention that it's rubbish or awful. All you need to do is to list the points where they failed and maybe give advice on how to improve it.
Calling their work rubbish helps nobody and makes you feel smarter and more powerful than you actually are. If you treat people like this, their work will become worse, not better, and at the same time they will probably stop asking you for advice because you can't stop being a dick about it instead of just encouraging them to improve on what they did by giving valid advice.
People aren't just machines that you can tell "this is all awful, throw it away and start over" without hurting their feelings in at least some way.
You should learn to use these emotions to steer them in the right direction, not condemn them and call people who express them unprofessional.
You'll get a lot further by nicely packaging your criticism.
"X is rubbish and whoever came up with this is stupid"
To be clear, I agree that this is awful feedback. It contains no useful information and personally insults the creator, both of which are bad. There is a world of difference between saying "this design is bad" and "you are a bad designer". Even good designers come up with truly terrible ideas constantly--it's part of the process. (I certainly have more than my share!)
Obviously people get emotionally attached to their work. I certainly do. But you have to be able to let go of that while you're receiving feedback, or there's no point in you getting any.
Again, to be clear, I would not say "this is rubbish" or "this is awful" while critiquing a design. I would say "this is not working at all because you're ignoring considerations A and B". There are many, many design ideas that just do not work. As a designer, you are much better served by someone telling you "this is not working at all, you need an entirely different approach" than you are by someone trying to hint you towards evolving a design that's based on a faulty premise.
"How many of you would critique that presentation that way (like in the comments) to the designers in person?"
All other things equal I think internet interactions are "weaker" and carry less weight that regular in-person interactions. If I come to your desk and say "good job" or "I think what you did is terribly lame", I'm sure it won't have the same impact that if I wrote it as a comment in some website. I think that's why internet interactions tend to be more polarizing. So I don't think your question is appropriate.
Besides, for many articles linked on HN we don't know whether the creators are ever going to read our comments. I might be a little more gentle and diplomat in a "Show HN" post than in a regular "look what I found in the internet" post.
But all other things aren't equal- this is HN, not the rest of the internet. I think one of the draws of the HN community is that interactions often carry more weight than your typical comment section on a blog.
According to the authors of that terrible design, they spent two months on it.
"Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion."
The onus isn't on us to spend two months coming up with an alternative suggestion, when we can clearly compare the existing design with their proposal.
If I'd personally spent two months trying to re-invisage Wikipedia, I would certainly have brought that up.
A lot of the heat in the critiques comes from the fact that it is not a real redesign project. If that firm had actually been hired by the Wikimedia Foundation, or even better, actually engaged with the volunteer leadership to work on implementable design improvements, you would not see such anger.
But the firm did not do that, which gives the "project" the hallmarks of a pure PR exercise for the firm (which is what it obviously is).
The reason this matters is that design is very hard to do because of the real constraints that must be met, in terms of existing technology, limited budget, limited time, internal politics, etc. Pretending constraints don't exist can offend people who spend a lot of their (frustrating, hard working) time actually dealing with them.
But a post on hacker news is not a comment to the designers in person.
Compare with book or movie reviews published in newspapers. They frequently give very harsh and sarcastic criticism, and this is considered fair game. The standards of politeness for face-to-face conversations and public commentary are different.
> If it was that bad, then you do not upvote it. if it was good enough for a discussion (upvote), then discuss politely.
Why can only goodness be cause for discussion? The top comment by tptacek actually goes into a lot of detail about what's wrong with this. That's useful discussion. It's not positive, but I thought his comment was very high-quality discussion, even if the tone was not positive and happy.
Wikipedia don't need to be cool. It just need to be simple and clear. It don't need a better logo or anything. Wikipedia is content and people who are building it. You design is ok for a design brand or a contemporary art stuff but not for the worldwide encycopedia.
There is a whole world of difference between:
"Hey, did you consider this and that." and "What you have done is rubbish. You did not think"
For heavens sake the presentation ended with "And here we stop. But, hopefully, the discussion begins." http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/
If it was that bad, then you do not upvote it. if it was good enough for a discussion (upvote), then discuss politely.
Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion. even it it was entirely different from what was proposed. It was all condemnation.
At least we can agree Wikipedia can be improved, they made a suggestion. If you cannot constructively improve on what was proposed, then you can avoid polluting it. Or better still propose your own suggestion.