Blog of Much Holding

You can’t do everything.

If you work as a designer of anything – software, advertising, product packaging, what have you – you’ll learn that it is always a team effort, where if everything goes right the sum will be the greater than it’s parts. If everything goes right.

Which usually doesn’t happen.

I design stuff that, in the end, I don’t own. Others have to take over, and what I did becomes someone else’s to Implement and Execute. I don’t have the Steve Jobs advantage of being able to kill something that doesn’t match my vision of how Things Should Be. What I designed and what ends up being implemented is often, to put it mildly, different.

So, I’ve learned, grudgingly, to let go.

The problem, of course, is I care, because what I do – trying to design the best online experience for users as possible – is important. It matters. If I save people time, and reduce the frustration level that the people who use my design would have otherwise… Well, that is definitely good karma. It’s what keeps me excited about what I do.

So letting go, ’tis hard. But I have to, because in the end you can’t prevent changes. The nature of Ui design is that that the optimal experience will never be possible because A. You can never design the complete experience, because you can never full account for all the “mental baggage” and attitudes that users bring to your design and B. Technology has it’s limits – no matter how “blue sky” you want to make the design, the tech will always confine your vision (yes, even if you’re Stcve Jobs).

So, I let go… And I use a mental “trick” to help me do so. I always look at any design I do as being like movie screenplays, usually a solitary effort and a singular vision of the story that is being told. The design, implemented, is like a movie production – lots of people working together, and sometimes the end-product is one that does not match the original vision.

And sometimes, it sucks. Which you have to accept, and live with.

In the end, you can only hope that you have a project sponsor (“director”) that shares you vision (and the technology in play supports it). But you should always keep in mind the famous quote that James M. Cain, the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice said, when asked what he thought of the movie “ruining” his book.

“What do you mean, ruin it?” he said, looking at his bookshelf, “it’s still there, nothing happened to it.”