Brad Frost’s article on the Techcrunch redesign is a great case study of a modern responsive design process. A few things stood out for me, and remain open questions that I wish I could ask Brad about.

First, there is no mention of user research. There was a kick-off meeting, with some Design Studio work, but how did they identify user needs, and why was there no user testing on their prototypes? That’s a bit perplexing.

Second, it’s really nice to see Brad take a more nuanced stance on the whole Post-PSD Era thing, and admit that comps can be useful under the right circumstances:

Believe it or not, we did indeed create a few full comps. Gasp! Horror!

But the difference between this and all the other projects I’ve ever worked on is that we didn’t lead with the comps. By the time Dan made some comps (for the homepage and featured article page), we had established many of our key molecules and organisms, and had an understanding of the systematic nature of our design.

That’s how we do it in our agency as well, so I’m glad to find out that we’re not completely insane.

And lastly, it would’ve been great to get a little more detail on how much backend developers were involved through the process. Brad mentions it briefly:

From the design end of things, Dan went through and created an incredibly detailed list of minor design tweaks that tightened things up and got things ready for final delivery to be implemented into their WordPress backend by the fine folks at 10up (who by the way were involved throughout the course of this process).

“Final delivery” and “were involved throughout” are two phrases that don’t sit very well together, so I wonder how that worked practically.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a great process, and they obviously got some impressive results. These are just some things I wondered about as I read through the case study.