A Product Design Question a Day: Introducing Tavern

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.

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.

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.

Really excited to see the full release!