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0 pointsctvo3y ago0 comments

> "These were already signed off/approved/whatever".

> "But... you ONLY did a wireframe of 3 screens, for iPhone 13 only, in portrait, and ... we already have to support desktop/tablet/mobile."

> "Stop deviating - we already interviewed customers!"

> "But... you don't actually show what should happen in various hover/transition states. You haven't accounted for multiple lines of text in these screens. You haven't accounted for different font sizes... etc"

> "Stop deviating".

I've worked with a lot of designers in my career. It has never gone the way your examples went.

A conversation between colleagues with context provided is enough to allow us to work through differences. Explaining that the animation they're suggesting is bespoke, requiring more work across different browsers to ensure behavior and performance is what we want is enough to move us to something more simple, for example.

What I do run into often is developers without an eye for detail, who don't understand things like white space, padding, colors, and assume they're unimportant who then are told they're not and get upset that they need to go back and fix CSS and layout.

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jacobyoder3y ago

I'm not saying every interaction has gone this way, but it's happened more than a couple times (over the course of... 15+ years).

The last interaction I had like this was a few years ago - someone had done lots of mockups in... figma (but it wasn't figma - I can't remember the tool, but it was relatively well-known). I had 100+ "screens" with example text/input/labels on every screen.

These were done by an agency, then handed off, and... there were multiple people who had worked on it. Screens/slides 1-40 had some font label in 12px, slides 41-95 were at 13px, and the rest were at 14px.

I pointed this out, and kept getting told "stop deviating - we've already approved these - we've spent weeks going over all of these - stop thinking you know better than an award-winning design agency!"

Making screen 41 and 40 look the same was "deviating" because someone reviewing "41" against the mockup was 'wrong'. So... I made each screen with same fonts as the mockups.

Two weeks later, in some review, someone 'complained' because jumping through all the screens, the font sizes kept changing. I pointed out this was exactly the same behaviour as jumping through all the mockups, sequentially. It was obvious, but ... it was only getting reviewed holistically weeks after everything was 'approved'.

Probably the worse 'designer-led' experience I've had, but a couple others have come close (just not as stretched out). But it reinforced that the 'design' portion really needs to be involved and iterative (and... they need to be open to feedback just as much as I have to be).