Neil Cocker
@neilcocker · Founder
We actually see a lot of traffic to our site from a bunch of these sites (mainly in China), and also from Upwork etc (people asking for people to copy our design/UI). I see it as flattery, rather than copying! ;-) I realise I'm generalising somewhat, but I'm assuming that it's because these parts of the world don't have particularly well developed design communities where inspiration and insight is swapped locally, and so they have to use these sights as their primary inspiration? Any thoughts or insight on this?
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Joe Tannorella
@joetannorella · Developer & Marketer
@neilcocker That’s really interesting! I’d not really considered it before to be honest. It’s pretty funny that you can see the traffic from UpWork… Can you see the full referring URL, or is it obfuscated by their exit page (“your are now leaving UpWork…”)? Would love to make some content out of this stuff - perhaps a side-by-side comparison of the ‘copied’ site next to the deliverable of the site aiming to copy it as created by UpWorkers. Thinking about it, I may implement this as a fun piece of content for UIDB - i.e. pay someone on UpWork to copy another site and see what the quality of the delivery is like.
The localised design communities aspect is an interesting one too… I suppose the ability to design, and get inspiration online, is not limited to any localised region. I.e. a Welsh designer might look at the same sites for inspiration as an American and a Nigerian, for example. There aren’t any real “barriers to copying” online (with the exception of “the great firewall of China” and similar). I’m kinda guessing here, but I’d say the difference in designs between broad regions is down to localised expectations, styles and trends. What looks good (or even works good in terms of UX) to a Chinese designer will likely be different to that of a British designer.
I recently wrote an article on how to get design inspiration (http://uidb.io/blog/quick-easy-w...), and in it I suggest looking outside of your vertical to see how other industries do things. I.e. search filtering UI might differ between real-estate and automotive, for example. But at the same time, it’s always a good idea to look within your vertical but in different markets. For example, the US real-estate industry online tends to have more forward thinking design and functionality than the UK real-estate scene (big fan of http://www.trulia.com). I've just had a quick look at some Chinese ecommerce stores, and while they're not a million miles away from their Western counterparts, there are some fairly different design patterns being used (e.g. http://www.dangdang.com/ vs. http://www.amazon.com).
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