Dribbble is just one approach to the feedback web app “genre”; I’ve noticed that they’re making it easier than ever to receive and leave feedback on designs, as you’ll discover when you go down this list:
Usabilla
Usabilla has the most features out of the lot, letting you test both images and live websites with click markers, notes, and heatmaps. There’s a free plan but you’ll enjoy more test participants and pages with the premium plans.
ConceptFeedback
ConceptFeedback anchors on a thriving community and and offers special perks for both individual designers and businesses, including compensation for giving feedback. Not only can you get reviews for your current work and inspiration for your next one, your profile, design, or product can get featured to earn better exposure and business—but you need to jump in with both feet and register.
fivesecondtest
As the name implies, fivesecondtest focuses on first impressions as a test-takers look at designs for no more than five seconds and answer custom questions from test-makers. This means judgments can be rash, but the barrier to entry is very encouraging. For extra good measure, the app runs on a karma system where the more tests you do, the more test results you can make.
FineTuna
The Flash-based FineTuna creates a link for every image you upload, which you can send to specific people for feedback. That link is a space where one can insert notes and doodle on the image. You won’t have a community of users at your disposal, but you have complete control and privacy over the feedback process. It’s also available as a Firefox add-on.
CritiqueTheSite
CritiqueTheSite uses hackable URLs, iframes, and JS-Kit’s Echo to let visitors leave comments on a currently loaded site. Append a URL of any website (like Aviary Screen Capture does) after the slash and it loads that site, ready for critique. Public, no-registration-necessary feedback makes the service prone to abuse, but it also means it has a low barrier to entry.
No clear winner here!
If you want a more detailed level of testing, Usabilla is the way to go; if you need something lighter and more accessible, the likes of CritiqueTheSite, FineTuna, and fivesecondtest may be better for you. If you’re all about building your reputation and relationships as an added bonus, pick ConceptFeedback. Or why not use all of them? Using all these tools for online critiquing lets you reap the unique benefits for each.
Check out the more colorful, animated visualization of browser support for the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features based on data from When can I use… Inspired by a General Dynamics postcard and an infographic on America’s wealthiest religions, this single-serving site is quite literally a rainbow that’s painting optimism for the future of web standards.
Each ray represents a feature, and the different bands of color represent the leading browsers, IE6 excluded (finally). More under the hood details here, praising the virtues of Sass and Photoshop-less, in-browser design. Kudos to Paul Irish (again!) and Divya Manian.
Remember my complaint about all the CSS3 syntaxes differing from one browser to another? It’s now addressed with CSS3 Please, a jQuery-based, in-browser editor that replaces multiple attribute values of the more complicated CSS3 syntaxes (from border-radius to rgba to @font-face) all at the same time, so you don’t have to.
In addition to syncing and normalizing changes across the necessary properties, it also sneaks in IE support for a few features via IE filters. Right now it helps you write the rules for: border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation and @font-face. A few more transforms like skew and scale are on their way, stay tuned.
You can preview your code on the box at the right side by toggling it on and off. When you’re done, click on the clipboard icon to copy the code.
This is a smart solution to a growing problem. However, even though I’m thoroughly grateful for this tool, I still want to axe the real problem, which is the inconsistent browser syntax. It’s unreasonable for a programming language to have redundant code, and while CSS isn’t really one, it’s still code. We’re still supposed to pride ourselves with efficiency, conciseness, and standards with any kind of code. We like to kick IE for constantly breaking standards; should we tolerate the same thing for other browsers just because they’re implementing cutting edge features?
No, this is not about plagiarism.
Imagine my surprise when Jeffrey Zeldman blogged about a list of 60 WordPress themes. A few minutes before that, I found Douglas Bowman bookmarking another list, also from Smashing Magazine. It’s like my feed reader was trying to tell me something: yes, a list article can bring an interesting discussion if you’ll just let it.
Back to Zeldman’s post, which started a discussion on whether you should use existing themes for your own design:
…Even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.
Every once in a while I get clients that specifically want existing themes to be customized instead of starting from scratch, so clearly there is a demand for the practice. If clients have enough initiative to choose it as a solution, then why not? Does it take more effort to find and customize than start from scratch? Depends on how comfortable you are with someone else’s code, how much you trust the other designer’s expertise, and how much you need to customize.
The bulk of the debate will probably lie mostly in this situation, but to me it boils down to don’t reinvent the wheel, but don’t get complacent either. While it is a shortcut for building a website, it is not a shortcut for conceptualizing the website.
So the other situation is this: Sometimes I envy all the beautiful themes and templates out there because I don’t really get an opportunity to use them for myself. Does choosing to use someone else’s work for a web designer’s own website make sense? It seems counterintuitive but a real problem: sometimes we barely have time to dedicate to our own projects. Sometimes we just want to use something ready-made and have fun with it.
Although there are frameworks for practically level of development these days, from CSS to JS to PHP to whole themes, they are created specifically as tools for designers; they aren’t really products for designers as consumers. What I’m talking about are the real themes that are smart enough, beautifully-designed enough to meet your discerning needs. It could be as stark as Cutline or as detailed as WordFolio: compare this and this. (Now that would be good idea for a list article: websites that are highly customized versions of existing themes. Not to mention a good source of inspiration. A niche gallery, even!)
We could probably exclude portfolio sites since web designers would prefer to show off their skills on them—but even that argument can be ruled out if the customization is custom enough. Take blogs, tumblelogs, and other secondary sites that still belong to a web designer but don’t necessarily need a design from scratch. The issues with the client scenario website still apply, but there’s the added pressure of being your own worst critic.
Would you be confident enough to use one, or would you lose sleep at night without customizing at least some bit of it to keep your design cred intact? It doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it could be a different type of challenge.
What’s the hottest thing on the Web right now? Twitter, and a host of other dead-simple, single serving websites. If you plan on making a new web app, make it as simple as possible, if not simpler. Take Aviary’s Screen Capture service.
Just a short background: Aviary is a suite of web-based graphics applications, all named after birds. The branding concept is fantastic, if I do say so myself. The fact that they run on Flash and are essentially competing against the very maker of said platform—Adobe—is a very interesting feat in itself. It is, however, a bit premature as Flash remains hardware-intensive.
Screencapped Google.com because the doodle today looks extra-nice.
So, back to the dead-simple part. All you have to do is enter the URL of a website you want to screencap after Aviary.com and wait a few moments until Falcon, the simplified image markup editor, loads the image up. Crop, resize, add a few scribbles, and save your screenshot. Done!
Of course some people will need options, which the Capture page and the Talon Firefox add-on can provide. But that isn’t really Aviary’s achievement here. It managed to create a screenshot tool that requires nothing but entering a URL in the browser address bar. No need to wait for the app to start up, no need to remember special conventions to make sure the thing works properly.
Simple, elegant, brilliant. We will always have huge, complicated methods that will get the job done, but most of the time it’s the leaner, less intimidating tools that win us over.
