5 non-obvious things I understood working for 10+ years as a UI/UX designer
1. You are a designer if you can show your working products.
Think about it when you are working on a concept. Remember about it when you propose the WOW feature, which is really hard to implement with the current resources. Keep the balance between reality and your “genius” ideas that finally will make you a designer with a portfolio from JPEG pictures.
2. Sometimes, unfortunately, decision-maker preferences are a bit more important than user preferences.
In 99% of cases, nobody will approve the interface if he doesn’t trust that it would work. So, it’s better to look for a way to make a solution aligned with DM requests, get approval from him and make users happier than finish with the mockup on your computer that nobody will see. They always say that designers should fight for the user’s happiness. Yes, that is true. We have to fight. But this fight shouldn’t become to that project’s death. No one user will win from that.
3. A designer, like a doctor, has to know more about his stakeholders than others.
The more you know about a person, the simpler is to explain your ideas. But there are some things people don’t like to touch. Somebody doesn’t like to be compared with competitors, other people hate the red color, interface designers feel bad when somebody compares their work with art.
So, what I mean is just to know the pain points of people you work with. If you can avoid talking about them, you will keep the communication comfortable>productive->valuable.
4. Remember about user expectations, and don’t try to “surprise” your user!
We humans in the offline World got used to some logic and stable things. The Sun is rising in the mornings; gravitation keeps us on the ground, the air covers the whole Earth, etc. We feel it like the natural order of things. But sometimes, designers miss the logical order of things when they build interfaces. As a result, it feels unnatural and makes people confused. It’s when you click on the banner with a product and price, but they redirect you to the main page of the website. So you need to use a search to find the product that took you here. When they call a button “More details”, but on click show you a contact form. But you didn’t ask for a chat. When… actually there a lot of examples. But what I ask for. Just try to take a look at the interface, and ask yourself: “When the user will interact with this element, would I propose what he really expects?”
5. There is no best and final solution.
We are growing every day, our background at the start of the project and in the end can be different. And it’s ok that now you know how to make it even nicer. But there is “Mr. Deadline” and other people waiting when you finish and they can start doing their job. So, just breathe out, and try to evaluate your genius idea. And then remind yourself about McBryan’s law: “You can’t make it better until you make it work.”
