@neilcocker Hi Neil, thanks for asking.
One of my frustrations with 'similar' sites (e.g. Dribbble) is that many UI designs posted are simply concepts, and haven't actually been built / can't be visited. As pretty as these concepts are, they're just concepts and as such not as useful (IMO) as being able to actually visit and click around said UI. All examples on UIDB are live when posted and can be visited.
I am looking at the possibility of automatically grabbing a screenshot of the URL posted via an API (for mobile/tablet/desktop), and including that on each single UI example page. That’d kind give it a ‘live preview’ feel, but is a way off yet! Also potential to iframe the URL from within UIDB, but again, that’s a way off :-)
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@joetannorella@neilcocker just a quick tip on the API thing. Programmable web as all the APIs directory you will need just Google it
@neilcocker Good question :-). Right now I’m concentrating on getting the product where I want it to be (you can see the dev roadmap here: http://uidb.io/blog/roadmap-2016/). At the same time, I’m also trying to write, and successfully distribute/outreach, as many quality articles on the blog as possible (alongside various other marketing).
At the moment I’m working on UIDB (e.g. all dev, design, marketing, biz dev, etc.) on my own alongside my full-time job, which means that I could easily start spreading myself too thin and lose focus. My dev/marketing split currently is probably something like 95% dev 5% marketing/other. Once I’m happy with the product and infrastructure etc, I’d like this to be more like 20% dev 80% marketing/other. As part of this 20/80 phase I will then begin to focus my attention on monetisation/partnerships, and hopefully once I have a good amount of users, the inevitable “what next” (acquisition would be great ;)).
Right now though, I just want to build something that people love to use - for me that is much more rewarding than a few advertising dollars every month, so I’m putting that at the back of my mind for now (though you’ll notice there is one small banner ad on each UI example page).
In the medium-term I will likely be looking at the obvious things like ad display networks (e.g. Carbon), sponsored articles/guest posts, sponsored newsletters, etc. There is also a big opportunity for some product-specific monetisation - I really like the idea of having a paid option to post a design request, and have the community respond with their own take on the brief (kinda like 99Designs but for landing pages).
Tl:dr; I’m doubling down on creating a great product right now, with no real focus on monetisation - will cross that bridge when myself and UIDB’s users happy with the product. Will likely have ads and sponsored articles/newsletters/etc in the short-mid term, though.
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Nice have been working on the onboarding aspect of my project and this as some good UI example. Ome thing though there is no way to select UI style from flat to material design and minimal. Would love that
@basictechy Good idea! An additional filter for design type (flat / material / etc) would be really nice - I'll add it to the backlog! You'll notice that currently there is only one search bar and no other filtering mechanisms right now. This will change going forward.
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@joetannorella cool check out list.js when ever you want to add that feature.
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?
@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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Would be great if this covered mobile UI as well as web. Err, actually, does it?
@steve1215 Hi Steve. I'm focussing on desktop for now, because that's where I find most of my inspiration and therefore post the most examples from. Having said that, it completely makes sense to have mobile UI examples too, particularly since, relatively speaking, mobile design is pretty much uncharted territory compared to desktop design. Anyone can post examples of mobile UI and tag it as such right now - but there's no built-in UI mechanism to filter between mobile/non-mobile. This is definitely in the pipeline for the future though - I'll give you a shout when it's built (a few months time).
Quick shout out to Crayon.co's @jonahlopin and team for their work with mobile/tablet/desktop UI examples. Definitely worth checking them out as another source of UI inspiration.
Not seeing a focus on truly radical UX design particularly, but looks to be an awesome glimpse at the live state of ux standard practice - nice! @UIDB_io@erictwillis
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