Weekly Links (Defensible visual design, taste, customer interview questions and more!)
Tuesday, March 26 2024
Searching for Quality
Searching for Quality is a weekly publication about design, building ideas and crafting high quality products that upgrade people’s lives.
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A useful and often necessary method for improving a visual design is putting it in front of people and getting their feedback. The people that give you feedback can be customers, team members, other stakeholders or really anyone else.
Sometimes the specific feedback people give you is incredibly useful and practical, though many times it isn’t. But even if that is the case, the act of putting your designs in front of people is still a super worthwhile exercise.
The main reason for this is that getting other people to look at your work is often an extremely effective forcing function for more rigorous thinking with respect to what you’ve designed.
Something weird happens when other people put their eyes on your work. Regardless of how long you’ve been working on something, you suddenly see obviously necessary changes that need to be made in your design that you didn’t see before. In a lot of cases, this happens even before your audience gives you any feedback.
On top of that, the questions, curiosities and confusion of the people you’re showing a design to is also very informative. If you hear things that you were anticipating, then you’ve probably already designed for it or have intentionally chosen not to. If you hear things that are surprising, you can choose to resolve for those and refine your work.
Either way, making your design more defensible usually means thinking more critically about you’ve made, which in turn helps you improve it.
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