Breathing with Both Lungs
The 2014 Gittip Redesign Project
We’re going to redesign www.gittip.com in 2014. We built a strong developer team in 2013, and in 2014 we’re going to learn how to design, so we can build a truly world-class product. We’re going to breathe with both lungs.
This document starts with a brief history of Gittip’s design, and then we define the goals and deliverables of our redesign project, ending with pointers to get involved.
History
Gittip launched in June, 2012, and grew exponentially in 2013, doubling three times. Here in May 2014 we’re continuing to grow, though our pace has slowed somewhat as we transition from a part-time team to a full-time team. Sorting out product design is a big part of that transition.
When Gittip launched it looked like this (courtesy of Ryan Deussing):
Pretty bare bones. After six months we landed our first redesign, in January of 2013. The design was contributed by Damon Chin of our close partner company Balanced Payments, with Nick Sergeant and myself implementing the design in markup. Here’s what the site looks like now:
Along with the January, 2013 redesign we also started building the Gittip team in earnest, with a blog post about hiring in general, and another one reaching out to the design community in particular. We succeeded in building a part-time developer team over the course of the year, with 20 people attending the Gittip company retreat in early January, 2014. Now in 2014 we’re building a full-time team with a strong design focus, so that we can “breath with both lungs,” and deliver a world-class product.
Goals
[This section was contributed by Karolina Szczur—ed.]
Here is what I’d like to achieve with the redesign:
- brand and design consistency across the product
- ease of use
- clarity of product’s purpose and call to actions
- voice and tone incorporated into visuals and copy
- full-on responsiveness
These are, so to say, top-level goals. More specifically:
- optimization for HiDPI displays (using SVGs, improving font rendering)
- better typography and thus, hierarchy
- more white space
- less patterns, more distinction of call to actions (more leading the user kind of thing)
Deliverables
Design from the outside in, build from the inside out.
Low-level implementation decisions need to be informed by a higher-level understanding of what we’re building. Therefore the first deliverable for the redesign project is a website called Building Gittip. Building Gittip starts with our mission and zooms in progressively through process, brand guidelines, audience, product overview, and information architecture. From there we can start talking about the system architecture for the software necessary to deliver the experience we want to deliver, and on down to specific libraries and tools.
The second deliverable will be a redesigned www.gittip.com. But there’s not a neat and tidy division between high-level definition on Building Gittip and low-level implementation on Gittip itself. Instead, there’s a dialectic. It’s not like we’ll write Building Gittip, and then build Gittip. No: the Building Gittip website will evolve as a snapshot of the Gittip team’s collective self-understanding, achieved in the actual building of Gittip.
Want to help? Read Building Gittip and jump in on the building.gittip.com repo to participate in high-level discussions. Jump in on the www.gittip.com repo and other repos to participate in implementation.
This post started out as a Google Doc and then migrated to Building Gittip itself before landing here in the Building Gittip collection on Medium.
