

A Product Design Question a Day: Introducing Tavern - jacobwg
http://zurb.com/article/1327/a-product-design-question-a-day-introduci

======
Smudge
I have yet to actually see Tavern, but I doubt I'll find it all that useful.

What made Forrst so awesome (early on at least) was how easy it was to get
feedback on your personal work. The site's guidelines and standards required a
lot of upkeep by Kyle (Forrst's founder), but in turn enabled the growth of a
community of learners and teachers. As the individuals learned and grew, so
did the community.

Unfortunately, keeping those incentives aligned proved to be too difficult to
sustain. After Kyle left, Forrst slowly evolved into a platform for
experienced designers to simply promote their work. The more inexperienced
members stopped receiving feedback because nobody saw their posts, and in turn
people stopped even posting unless they had an ulterior motive (e.g. go view
my portfolio, or download this freebie and promote my work).

Zurb correctly recognized that the "Dribblification" of Forrst led to its
downfall, but Tavern essentially ignores the original problem. The problem
wasn't that we needed help answering the big questions (like "are designers
too isolated from the consequences of their work"), but that we all wanted
help with the small, day-to-day questions (like "how do I improve the layout
on this page" or "what color should this be"). The focus wasn't on the
_industry_ growth, but on the _personal_ growth.

Of course, the bigger industry questions and trends naturally grew from the
sum of the community's posts and responses. Meta-questions were fun when they
came up, but they were only popular because there was an existing community
there to read them. They certainly weren't the focus of the site, and I'm not
convinced they'll be enough to sustain this new version.

------
rglover
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.

~~~
Smudge
> 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.

------
GregorStocks
What's the advantage of only letting in 100 people at a time instead of making
it publicly available? Personally, I'm not inclined to give you my email
address without at least some sample content.

~~~
ryanriddle
The private release is a chance to get feedback from the community so we can
refine Tavern before we release it fully in the wild. There's some sample
content highlighted on this page:
[http://zurb.com/tavern](http://zurb.com/tavern)

------
kerikeri
Really excited to see the full release!

