Let’s start with an example of communication skills: they are important for any profession, and you expect any professional to have a decent level. However, excellent communication skills won’t make up for the lack of core expertise. Imagine a plumber who is a great communicator (just look at his sense of humor!), would you still hire him if he was a terrible plumber? Nope.

让我们从一个沟通技巧的例子开始：它们对任何职业都很重要，并且您希望任何一个职业都具有体面的水平。 但是，出色的沟通能力无法弥补核心专业知识的不足。 想象一下一个管道工，他是一个出色的交流者(看看他的幽默感！)，如果他是一个糟糕的管道工，您还会雇用他吗？ 不。

The same goes for software and visual design — it’s good to have your app looking great, but it won’t make up for the lack of core functionality or bad experience. If I’m comparing two products that are otherwise almost identical, I’ll go with the one that has a better design. But visual design is not a silver bullet — if a product doesn’t function properly, not usable or even worse, does something no one cares about, no amount of special effects will save it.

软件和视觉设计也是如此-让您的应用看起来很棒是很好的，但不能弥补缺乏核心功能或糟糕的体验。 如果要比较在其他方面几乎相同的两种产品，那么我将选择设计更好的产品。 但是视觉设计不是灵丹妙药 -如果一种产品无法正常运行，无法使用甚至更糟，并且做了没人关心的事情，那么没有多少特殊效果可以节省下来。

It sounds obvious yet gets ignored a lot — with stakeholders expecting all product problems to be solved with a nice animation, and designers spending hours refining line thickness. What are we not usually talking about?

听起来似乎很明显，却被很多人忽略了-利益相关者期望所有产品问题都可以通过精美的动画来解决，而设计师则花费数小时来精炼线条粗细。 我们通常不谈论什么？

用户界面上花费的时间收益递减 (Diminishing returns on time spend on UI)

Once you’ve covered all the basics, investing time further will bring less and less tangible benefits. You can be surprised how little users pay attention to a detail you just spent 3 hours refining.

掌握了所有基本知识后，进一步投资时间将带来越来越少的切实利益。 您可能会惊讶于很少有用户注意到您刚刚花费了3个小时进行细化的细节。

To make it worse, visual design is a common topic for bikeshedding which makes it likely that more than one person was involved in a one-hour decision neither business nor user would care about.

更糟的是，视觉设计是自行车棚的一个常见主题，这可能导致一个小时的决策中涉及多个人，而业务和用户都不关心。

视觉设计不能解决所有问题 (Visual design doesn’t solve all the problems)

There’s a myth about visual design making everything better (just “make it wow!”). In some cases, the product improvements lie in different areas, and visual design won’t make any difference or will make a very limited impact. A real-life example:

视觉设计有一个神话，它可以使一切变得更好(只是“哇哇！”)。 在某些情况下，产品的改进位于不同的领域，视觉设计不会产生任何变化或产生非常有限的影响。 一个真实的例子：

Form with 80 fields — no one is going to use it no matter how delightful the UI is. You need to review your data requirements and see what data can be obtained automagically.

具有80个字段的表单-无论用户界面多么令人愉悦，都不会使用它。 您需要查看数据要求，并查看可以自动获取哪些数据。

因此，您应该在UI上花费更多时间吗？ (So, should you spend more time on your UI?)

Does the UI enable the product to function well and serve the purpose?The function is clear for each element, there’s enough contrast, the interface is predictable, hierarchy is clear etc.

UI是否使产品正常运行并达到目的？ 该功能对于每个元素都是清晰的，具有足够的对比度，界面是可预测的，层次结构清晰等。

Does it properly communicate emotions/tone?What would you like your users to feel? How would your product appear for them — friendly, badass, strict and professional?

它能正确传达情绪/语气吗？ 您希望用户感觉如何？ 您的产品对他们来说将如何出现-友好，坏蛋，严格和专业？

Is it reasonably aligned with the brandHow much personality does it need to have?

是否与品牌合理地结合在一起 ？它需要多少个性？

Will it scale?Would your current choices restrict you in the future?

会缩放吗？ 您当前的选择会在将来限制您吗？

Is there anything else you want to achieve“Make it pretty” doesn’t count, “explore” does

您是否还想实现 “让它变得漂亮”不重要，而“探索”却没有

Are there other priorities?Is there something more impactful you can use your time and energy for?

还有其他优先事项吗？ 您可以用时间和精力来做一些更有影响力的事情吗？

(How to find something more impactful to work on? here’s a cheat-sheet of relatively fast and easy discovery methods/data sources)

(如何找到更有效的方法来工作？这是相对快速简便的发现方法/数据源的备忘单 )

你为什么要在乎？ (Why would you care?)

• Knowing when to stop will free up your time and your brain to work on something impactful知道什么时候停下来可以腾出您的时间和精力去做一些有影响力的事情
• Wasting man-hours on insignificant detail will diminish design community effort to be taken seriously by business and “having a seat at the table”将时间浪费在微不足道的细节上将减少设计界的工作量，这些工作需要企业认真对待并“坐到桌旁”

At the end of the day, if you improved your UI, but no one noticed,did you improve your UI?

归根结底，如果您改进了UI，但没有人注意到，您是否改进了UI？