Data can tell us everything; except why we love, yearn, wonder, imagine, grow, need, live, and die.
The major problem with unsolicited redesigns is that they’re by nature uninformed. Without having access to the same user data as Facebook, how could you properly redesign Facebook? Without knowing Facebook’s goals and objectives, how can you design towards them?
Much like wood, I believe screens have grain: a certain way they’ve grown and matured that describes how they want to be treated. The grain is what gives the material its identity and tells you the best way to use it. Figure out the grain, and you know how to natively design for screens.
It’s a software world. And because of software, it’s a soft world in a different sense, in the original sense of the word: it changes its shape easily.
The accuser is also failing to recognize that there is, in all likelihood, a finite number of ways to “solve” any given task. Is it so completely unbelievable to assume that another talented individual happened to arrive at a similar conclusion as themselves? It’s just as easy to give someone the benefit of the doubt as it is to assume the worst of them.