A beautiful interface is the easy part. A useful one is the work.
The trap
Polished mockups make stakeholders happy. They also hide problems that only surface once real users meet the product: information that's hard to scan, flows that branch when they shouldn't, copy that explains nothing.
What we look at instead
We pressure-test interfaces against three questions:
- Can someone unfamiliar with this product complete the primary task in under a minute?
- Does the visual hierarchy match the decision hierarchy?
- If we removed the styling entirely, would the page still make sense?
Aesthetics earn their place when the answer to all three is yes.
