“Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on – but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.”

I’ve been enjoying Ed Catmull’s book about managing feature animation, Creativity, Inc.  I learned that I share something in common with Dr. Catmull: our first jobs out of university were at New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab.  Except that he was hired as President of the experimental computer graphics research and production facility, and I was an entry level image compositor and frame recorder who got the chance to play with state of the art 3D animation tools that hardly anyone else in the world had access to in 1983 .

Creativity, Inc. is  filled with terrific insights, lessons Ed learned when confronted with the high stakes of creating box office successful animated features.  He advises that all babies, early project concept mockups, are “truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing – in the form of time and patience – in order to grow.”

Another very good observation, and I’ve seen this first hand:

“Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on – but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.”

This leads me to listing a number of similar assessments from a Quora forum question about UX design “sins” commonly made.

Brian O’Niell: Here are five I have seen:

• Focusing too heavily on running with solutions without identifying the real problems to solve.
• Seeing the Designer’s role as one in which they “work for product managers,” instead of “with” them
• Debating minor visual design details when the big picture is wrong or off.
• Going for consistency for consistency’s sake.
• Giving users what they asked for instead of what they need (or letting a Stakeholder do the same) in the name of “research”

Rob Goris: Spending too much time in the requirements phase and waiting too long before producing tangible design work. A designer needs to know just enough to get started and fills in the gaps while designing, reviewing and iterating.

Sjur O. Sundin: Failure to validate your design with actual users. You often learn more from a 20 minute user testing session than you do from fiddling with the design by yourself for 2 weeks.

To paraphrase the old saying, “Don’t throw out your ugly baby with the bath water.”  With agile care and attention that baby has a good chance to mature into a big, beautiful hero.