Don’t make it too personal
Do you really believe that users are paying attention to gradients you made? or did they notice that one line stroke you made for couple hours?
When designing something, it’s easy to get drowned into the process itself, complexing the solution with ego, you get obsessed with details, because the details matters. You put so much care on every pixels you’ve drawn, you nit picky margin between elements and white space around texts. You probably thought, that this design is a representation of yourself, you made it soo personal or maybe way too personal. Take the ownership they said, but is this ownership really a good thing?
You were in the designer’s high until you bring your work in front of fellow designers, get it out the door to testers and within seconds you realised things are started to fall apart. Your designer friend was asking the reasoning behind location of shiny glossy button you couldn’t answer. Even worse, testers couldn’t figured out how to use your design. It supposed to be a solution but they are confused instead.
It hurts. I know. Things that you put so much time and care are not going to work. You made this design your medal not their solution—that’s why. Design is always evolving and meant to be fail. If you realised this from the start, everything could be easier, it’s not going to be that hurt. You know, sometimes perfect is evil.
Design at some level would already met its objective if you focus on workflow, figure how it plays into their situation. Don’t push it too high in early stage. Don’t make it personal, it makes you blind. Crappy visual that works is still way better than unusable shiny thing. Pause some time, take your breath and while looking to the screen, ask: “Is it really what they want?” “Is it really what they need?” and “Is it really solved their problem?”
70% of software design is probably about how it works instead of how it looks. The appearance at some degree will reach its peak no matter how good it is.
When you said, “No, it’s not enough” — is it your designer’s mind that speak? would you ever imagine what the actual user would say? it might be “No, It’s enough”. Remember, it’s not for yourself, you are designing for people out there. And If the solution is already there, make it stay, don’t stretch it out until proven otherwise.
Hard work is not solely about dwelling with design to make PIXEL PERFECTION. It’s about knowing what happens with your design, EVERYDAY. Is it working? is it failing? what could be improved? If you stop on pixel perfection, well, you are not closing the loop. Measure twice, cut once. Repeat. Be a designer that can close that loop faster and effectively.