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Re:A Product Design Question a Day: Introducing Tavern by rglover on Tuesday July 01, 2014 @04:04PM (#7973158)
I love Zurb but this is dangerous in a not-so-great-for-design sort of way: "Make a statement with your design opinion." Everything is becoming about someone else's opinion as opposed to actually solving a design problem. Honestly, I don't care about Joe Smith's opinion as much as I do about his feedback on the solution.

We should be looking to get to: "Does this effectively communicate the value of Product A. If not, what's unclear for you? Can you give a use case where this solution might fail with a certain group of users?" The feedback I get from a question like that should present objective advice, not a subjective opinion.

Looking at the homepage for Tavern, I see a fairly meaningless question in the example screenshot: "UX designer, UI designer, or Product Designer – do titles really matter?" That's a boatload of navel gazing. Debating professional titles is not a design problem. It's training young designers to wax poetic about their meaning as opposed to teaching them how to improve their craft and help others.

I don't say any of this to be mean or to look down upon the efforts of Zurb. They're a really brilliant group of people. But this is a murky path to head down in respect to turning people into better designers. I really hope the actual product will offer up more meaningful conversation.

Re:A Product Design Question a Day: Introducing Tavern by Smudge on Tuesday July 01, 2014 @04:43PM (#7973398)
> That's a boatload of navel gazing.

I had to chuckle, but that's a good way of putting it. Does the design community really need more introspection? My answer would be a resounding 'No', but maybe Zurb feels differently.

Regardless, Tavern is far from what Forrst once was. I'm glad they're at least changing the name, but I fail to understand why they're even associating the two products, aside from the fact that one is launching at the same time the other is being shuttered.