Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Serah

Self-admiration kills good design.

It breeds complacency. It fosters arrogance.

When we’re complacent, we tend to overlook the important things in design. When we’re arrogant, we think our design is the best.

It was the mistake I made.

Three weeks ago, I found Briefbox. I was excited to find a website with practice briefs for me to practice UI design! After scrolling through the options, I settled on a brief to design a chat app.

Based on their brief, ‘Hey Chat’ (as they call it) is a unique app that combines both traditional messaging with suggested interest groups based on what a user’s discussions are about.

The deliverables were 1) a main landing page layout and 2) dashboard view showing a users chat box and recommended groups to explore.

I came up with this:

My “awesome” design.

I was satisfied with my work.

In fact, overly-satisfied. Maybe because this was the first app UI that I have done. Everything seemed right! I’ve got a nice landing page layout and the chat design is clean. I saved the file, submitted to Briefbox and went for a good night’s sleep, thinking that I had created a wonderful work.

A few weeks later, when I opened the file again, I felt that something was wrong. Really wrong.

The time stamp for the chats were missing.

What happened?

Time stamps are crucial elements of chat design. They tell users when a message was sent.

So, how is the user of my app design going to know when the messages were sent/received?

Answer: I don’t know, because I’ve never thought about it. I was more concerned about the aesthetics and how the design felt to me.

Because of my self-admiration, I disregarded the more important questions. How would the design feel to the user? Would they be able to find the information that they want easily? If this app was real, it wouldn’t have been user-friendly.

Self-admiration kills good design.

At the end of the day, a design created with arrogance will be an art, but not a design. It would satisfy the designer, but not solve a user’s problem.

Designers are not artists. We do not create artwork or design solely for our pleasure. We could derive pleasure from creating the artwork, but we must not lose focus. Our designs primarily serves our client’s/user’s needs. If we are too obsessed with creating a “nice” design, then we’re making a big mistake.

This small discovery is a big reminder for me: Don’t be over-obsessed with the aesthetics. Focus on the users, and the rest will follow.

It’s time to put self-admiration aside, be humble, and start creating good designs.

Thank you for reading!

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

The danger of complacency in design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The danger of complacency in design

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