Shaking up rigid thinking

This week I was reminded how important it is to stay flexible as a designer.

I was creating a bunch of pages for a complex flow intended for a business type of user. I’d gone over the flow numerous times, buttoned up the pages, and tried to make sure it was clear how the user could move from the first part of the design to the last.

Then I realized I’d missed several importance pieces, and had to figure out how to fit them into the flow that I’d so meticulously created.

At one point a colleague (rightly) challenged a particular part of the screen, and I noticed myself getting defensive. Not so much because I thought them wrong, but because I wasn’t wanting to rework the screen anymore.

I’d put just enough time into it to become precious about it.

That is never a good place to be as a designer.

It’s a position I’ve pushed against for years, forcing myself to sketch out designs by hand so that I’d always keep the user’s needs first.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t stand your ground and argue for principles in design—I love to do that. But it’s easy to say no to an idea because it goes against the time you’ve spent, not because it’s wrong.

I should have gone back to basics.

I know to do it, but sometimes I hesitate because of my perfectionist instincts. This is something I’ve written about often and feel in my bones, that it’s critical to stay fluid, to keep an open mind, and be willing to adjust based on new data.

That was one time I didn’t switch back to my iPad, and later I regretted it. I’d gotten stuck in one way of thinking.

It was a wonderful reminder of the importance of flexibility and trying new ideas.

When I work on complex problems—such as this system of pages linking together—I try to understand how a button or section fits into the whole.

This is fun.

It also requires a great deal of thinking, challenging assumptions, and looking for ways to break the logic that’s been laid out.

My goal is to see if the whole thing works well enough for the use case we envision, and to bring fresh eyes each moment to clear out the chaos and offer clarity.

This kind of work, at least until it’s replaced by AI, is my favorite thing to do as a designer.

It’s why I pushed into this particular industry, as opposed to staying in more visual areas of design—which I still love, but weren’t offering the same type of challenges—and it’s the kind of work that I feel is worth deep work.

When I’m constructing a complex design like this, my first goal is to simplify things. Try and clear up the complexity and make it obvious how a user can proceed. That’s not an easy thing, and sometimes the simplest designs required the most thinking ahead of time.

As a designer it’s important to have ebb and flow in your work. There’s times to diverge into a bunch of ideas, and then there’s times to converge back into a limited set of constraints. For me that means switching between Figma and Freeform. Moving from high fidelity to low fidelity, a constant rhythm of moving components within auto layout and sketching pieces out by hand.

This forced rotation of tools gets me thinking new ideas, quickly allows pivoting on concepts, and ultimately creates better work. Also, it’s just plain fun. Allowing myself the use of multiple tools inside a problem space gives me multiple ways to play with the design.

Now, with all that said, sometimes you just need to ship. You can’t continue to tweak a thing forever. Get it to good enough, then see what the world says.

Though I love the back and forth, moving from low to high fidelity, and often with quick detours back into sketching, at some point it’s crucial to cut the features and see whether users actually benefit from the work.

No amount of tweaking, even given infinite time horizons, will create a perfect design. There’s only good enough for what we know, and then there’s diminishing returns after that.

So yes, we tweak, iterate, get feedback, but we also learn from the real world and see what kind of impact our design is having. I’ve created the most beautiful flows and layouts, only to find they couldn’t beat the baseline of a years old haphazardly hacked together set of buttons.

I hope these kinds of challenges persist forever. And I hope I keep learning from them.