Design field and where I'm at

Design field and where I'm at

Working in the Design field for more than 13 years now, I feel more and more disconnected from a lot of discussions going around our field as I'm working with my pairs.

Things started early, as I started to work with the rise of responsive and fluid design and the multiplication of screens. Still, I kept seeing designers obsessing on pixel perfect design, spending weeks slowly moving and aligning boxes, losing time when every time the implementation would then be a disaster. Hours spent on a single way of viewing the content and design totally disconnected about what was quickly becoming the reality of the web.

Working in a faster and faster environment, design also meant making compromises. Dealing with engineer limits, time constraints, decisions at every steps, design had to be faster and faster. I can't count the amount of times I've seen screens worked on for months only for them to be killed when they finally arrived (too late) to the engineering teams, after weeks of obsessing after the exact hue of blue.

I've always been more interested in human psychology and perception, more curious about testing our solutions directly in the field even if it meant those solutions weren't perfect. And no solution is perfect from the go, you gain way more by testing directly on real users than obsessing about the perfect interface. Design obsession on details should be about adjusting the solution as close as you can to your user needs, and honestly, the right grey shade ranks pretty low in this regard.

My designs aren't perfect, they aren't polished art board to be displayed in a gallery. They are shipped imperfect, sometimes incomplete, but directly in the field where we test, adjust and refine them to serve our users the best we can. They are designed to help the users solve a problem, be accessible, work on a wide range of devices, engineer and business constraints. Design as always been for me at the intersection of usability concerns, problem solving, business needs and technical constraints. S

Polishing them to a level of pixel perfection is usually something I don't have the time to do, nor will it serve any purpose apart from wowing my pairs. And I can't count the amount of designs I saw that, while they were beautiful, were a total mess in terms of usability and problems solved. Every time I wonder what was the use of all those hours spent on trying 50 shades of grey when a single exchange earlier with engineers would have more clearly defined what was possible and what wasn't.

I've been feeling quite alien within my pairs, feeling more at ease with engineers or hackers minded people, more interested into shipping things and experimenting. And I feel that a lot of the designers have lost this mindset, forced into endless process to build the perfect screens that will "wow" stakeholders. I'm slowly reaching a crossroad and I'm not sure about which path to go on, and I'm more and more convinced it's not on the design path as it has evolved right now.