Perfectionist?

So how can you tell when your perfectionist traits, which in many ways have aided your creative prowess, have gone too far? If you’re prone to obsession, especially when it comes to work, there’s always a way to justify why it’s worth the agony. But, as Siqi, renald and Pablo attest, getting bogged down in detail might be limiting you overall.

When perfectionism makes you a better creative, and when it doesn’t

I’d like to see a little more perfectionism, I think.

At the risk of making every last damn thing about AI, I will here. I’ve seen, I think, more than my fair share of AI-generated UI. I’m more sick of it than I was of Bootstrap or Tailwind UI in their respective eras. I feel like there is an awful lot of one-shotting UIs (or minimal asks of AI to improve designs) out there, and while the tech doing it is impressive, I like seeing UI/UX that goes that extra mile (or extra 100 miles) to be, ya know, actually good.

Even these trends from last year, I’m not even close to sick of. I’ll hang out in your neobrutalism, bring it on. Honestly, I don’t even think AI does simplicity all that well. I think it would rather show off. Not that you can’t reign it in and make it do what you want, but AI probably isn’t that useful in true simplicity. The perfect typeface, the perfect line-length, the perfect line-height, the perfect font-size, the perfect hierarchy. That’s going to require your taste, even for just a page of only type. Charlie Deets reflects on the true purpose of all that:

Maybe simple design is valuable for intangible reasons. There is an art to simplicity. There is a beauty to simplicity. A user can see more of the product’s intentionality. 

I like that. Simplicity isn’t just inherently good; it’s to showcase intentionality.

That reminds me of how Matt Ström-Awn thinks that UIs have become less dense. A subjective thing, to some degree, but I feel it’s related to showcasing intentionality. We don’t show 100 buttons on a page anymore, not because they aren’t useful, but because we’re smart enough to know that most users only need 3, and we can organize the others so they are still perfectly findable and usable for those who need the other 97.

Density, like simplicity, isn’t inherently good or bad, though.

In the end, though, making a UI dense in time and space is just a means to an end. No UI is valuable because of the way it looks. Interfaces are valuable in the outcomes they enable — whether directly associated with some dollar value, in the case of business software, or tied to some intangible value like entertainment or education.

I’ve certainly been in meetings where we’re trying to figure out ways not to have settings, for example. Most users never change them. The defaults matter several orders of magnitude more than what settings might enable.

And yet!

A great intro paragraph from Marcin Wichary:

As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.

I tend to think all this stuff can be true. Take care in your designs. Maybe too much care. Make them simple, but only when the simplicity serves as an underline to the most important functions. Make your designs breathe, but not at the cost of usability. Get those defaults right, but give your power users something to poke at.