Commandment #6: Do not mistake “great execution” for great product

Many designers, including me, are guilty of spicing up their proposals with beautifully laid out content comprising attractive people, stunning photography and super interesting content, all of the above packaged into slick videos and polished prototypes. Everything looks perfect leaving all the stakeholders wowed by the stunning nature of the presentation! The accompanying wave of compliments brings a sense of confidence and excitement — an adrenaline rush — that all of us designers strive for.

Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this approach. When something looks so good, all stakeholders blindly jump on board leaving out a lot of necessary introspection regarding all the necessary ingredients required for the product to work well. For instance, what we often see in “awesome” design executions are high-res photos, pixel-perfect rich content and slick animations without any consideration for reality of actual content comprising low-quality photos without the perfect shadows or users not having state-of-the-art hardware to support all the richness in content?

One of my big pet peeves is seeing lorem ipsum dummy text in design proposals — an antiquated form of design-first web design that puts the emphasis on the colors and structure with no regard to the customer experience (or their needs or getting them to convert). If we continue to show apps and websites in this manner where content is retrofitted into design prototypes, you’ll have key content like headlines, sub-heads and descriptions being truncated just to “fit” into existing, pre-approved designs. Worse when a layout has sections but there is no content to fit into said areas, we end up fabricating content to mash into a design because it’s “pretty” and — more importantly — has been approved by the client.

So while a great execution generates excitement, it shouldn’t sell a product by itself. There is a second crucial aspect to be considered here — how efficiently can our users complete their tasks? Is it a nice and easy experience for them, or do we leave them frustrated? There also needs to be deep discussion and understanding of the technical, content, or other constraints that might get in the way of the idea working in an idealized way.