I think it's a valid to have never found value in the app. I've just never found a reason to use it.

I really want this card. It's gorgeous.

But like all credit/debit cards, it's on your person most days, is swiped, inserted, dropped, etc… I wonder if it'll age in a wonderful wabi sabi way, or just look bad. Hoping for wabi.

Hell, why validate anything! Just ask this guy.

Some teams unfortunately can't get things like that built. So the rule to avoid modal logins is good advice for those types of teams.

Slack has the magic link — but some sites send you a one-time code you have to paste. Sort of forced two-factor authentication. It's definitely tedious, but I imagine ultimately more secure. I'd put up with it for my bank, but not for some things.

How about Zeplin? or Axure?

We use both extensively on our design teams.

If you have two products that are identical in features, but one is designed better, the designed one is significantly more valuable, and this isn't obvious to most business owners.

In some markets I think this is correct, in others not.

For your thesis, I think it's important to clearly define what you mean by "designed better" — are we talking looks? style? functionality? UX?

Design can mean a lot of things to a lot of companies. In general, I agree that 'design' is a value add.

But it's important to consider a product's function, its audience, and the market it lives in. Some sites like Amazon or Craigslist are targets of young designers' unsolicited design projects because they aren't pretty. But adding a polish of visual design may not be worth the effort (if it were, they'd have done it). For some companies, it just won't have the ROI.

Design can also be low in priority for a young business. Spending a dollar on engineering or development early on may have a higher ROI than spending that dollar on design.

Again, it depends on the business. Some new companies use design as a differentiator. In other markets, it'd be wasted money.

I think your examples are designing for designers, where this does have a clear value-add. But I don't think it's enough to make a blanket statement that it's always worth paying for.

I'll just echo the usability of the app overall — the lack of labels is really inhibiting my ability to understand what I'm filling out. Combined with the center alignment, it's just very unusual.

In that same vein, on Tasks & Costs while adding a task I had no idea how to actually add it. There's no button or anything to tell me how to stop typing and add it. I tried hitting Enter, and that worked, but you need a button here. Hitting enter is nice to have, but it can't be the primary and only way to do this. There's also no apparent way to remove a task after I've added one.

On the date picker, the current day looks selected as my start date, so I click my end date and no, that wasn't selected, so now I've designated my end date as a start date and have to start over.

By accident, I discovered the black dots were dropdown menus to select other colors. This needs a label.

Clicking on the W logo should take me back to the home page of the calculator, but it takes me to a different website.

Overall it looks nice — but usability is seriously lacking — which is why I want to abandon Excel in the first place, right? Looking forward to where this tool goes, because it could be really useful. Cheers!

I agree some validation of many of these viewpoints would be useful. A few in particular (form placeholders) run counter to some research done by folks like NNGroup, etc.

I'd also like to see things judged in more quantitative terms than "professional" which is used a few times. We can judge professionalism in different ways, but legibility can be measured.

I agree with a lot of what you said, Ethan. I think a key point of Jason's piece is that designers should hold themselves to a different standard when commenting on new work. Users can point and laugh, but designers should hold themselves to higher standard.

The cannibalistic energy of the design community is troubling.

It's a respect thing. Respect for the amount of work involved. Respect for unseen constraints like: business goals for the project, team politics, CEO whims, company direction & pipeline, investor pressure, and other stuff.

It's OK to offer critique. Bad work should not be praised, even it was a lot of work. But low effort jabs at work should be left to users. If we expect great feedback from our clients, we should be willing to give it to each other. We can all do better in this regard (myself especially included). Cheers.