DesignRant

Note: DesignRant is currently no longer maintained and the site is not live. You can still check out the code on GitHub and please get in touch if you would like to get involved with maintaining this project!

DesignRant was a side project built over a couple of weeks with Sam Larsen Disney and Ryan Gregory. The premise was simple: Short, sharp, user experience complaints.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: short - capped at 1000 word - rants about our experiences on the internet. What started as a place for us to rant about questionable user experience decisions, quickly evolved into a much larger project. We had a vision to make it the perfect place for young UX designers and developers to share their rants, their critiques, and their visions for the user experiences and user interfaces that live on the web.

The project now lives as an open source organization on GitHub that will continue to grow and the site will officially launch later this week, with more than 300 sign ups before the site even launched.

A key element of DesignRant - the caveat - is that while many of the posts are often critical, and sometimes even controversial, you can be as negative as you like so long as you propose a solution.

How does the old adage go? It's easy to complain…but it's a lot harder to pick out the limitations of current designs and propose alternatives that could potentially improve experiences for users. I think it was something like that. 🤔

This will hopefully help with making our users and readers more aware of the importance of considering usability, accessibility and design at every step of the development process.

The large number of reader sign-ups on the site before it even launched, suggests it will be a great place for developers and designers to get exposure.

Every author has an author page and bio with links to their social media and a place to “buy them a coffee.” If this sounds like you or you know someone who might be interested, please do share and get involved.