I try to remain a positive person but being English, I occassionally need to complain. I wanted a place to vent about some of the user interfaces and experiences that drive me insane on a daily basis.

I initially intended this to be a place for me and a few friends to write. But, as I saw more and more signups, it suddenly occurred to me that this could be the perfect place to promote UX designers and developers early in their careers. In order to that best, I have designed DesignRant to put the Authors first.

Our Content

In order to keep content “short & sharp” there is a limit of 1000 words per post. When writing authors have one rule:

“You can be as negative as you like as long as you propose a solution”.

Without the solution, I thought the site may become a rather monotonous experience for the reader. It’s also good to propose solutions that might help the reader make better design decisions in their own work. I’m also hoping that this platform may help draw attention to UX and help us all be more conscious of the usability, accessibility, and design choices we embed in our products.

Our Authors

DesignRant has no ads or sponsors. In fact it costs me money to host the site. As a result I cannot pay authors for their content, but I do want to help promote them in any way that I can. One way I thought I could do this is with author pages.

Each author has a dedicated page that is linked to at every oppurtunity. On this page, the link to your personal site and your sponsorship pages are the only primary call to actions. We currently have support for your twitter handle, personal site link, ko-fi and buymeacoffee with more coming soon. I am also open to suggestions on what we should add to author profiles so do let me know.

While we as authors might be quite negative here, I also think that there are plenty of examples out there where people have built awesome, friendly and beautiful user interfaces. Perhaps in the future I will build a site dedicated to these too.

One Last Thing

I encourage everyone to contribute. Whether you’re a student, UX developer, designer, engineer or just interested in the subject. Together let’s improve the UX around us.

Come write “short & sharp” UX complaints or help code our site that puts authors first.