Design should make it easier to ship

I read Sean Goedecke’s Working with designers and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. He clearly enjoys what designers bring to a product, whilst being fairly fed up with some of what comes along with it. Repeated changes, disagreements, and design systems that make the thing you’re trying to build harder to build. I think designers should be interested in that combination. Someone can value our contribution and still find working with us unnecessarily difficult. From our side, it’s easy to judge a design by how much better it makes the product look or feel. And that matters, obviously. But we also make decisions that create work for other people, sometimes quite a lot of it, and I think that cost belongs in our assessment of whether the design is any good. Say I propose a new layout that means rebuilding a bunch of an existing interface. There might be a really good reason to do that. People might be struggling to find something, or the current structure might make a simple task…

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