“Will this bring us money right away?” versus “Is this an excellent product?”
One of the ongoing challenges between UI design, and the business world is the tension between cost and excellence. Most times the “money right away” wins the debate.
“We only have 6 customer contracts for this product we cannot justify the effort to put resources toward enhancements, responsive design, deferred bugs, vulnerabilities, accessibility features, etc.”
Here is where the UI/UX designer or contractor enters, faced with the task of do not spend too much time, either theirs or the developers, and do not change the product too much.
This can be pretty off-putting to the UI designer, who wants to make the “best ever” product and to have pride in their work. But a professional designer recognizes it as a business reality, and works to turn the limitations into opportunities. Opportunities to create the highest impact changes in the UI, with minimal impact on the code and underlying databases.
The UI designer should focus their time to understand how the tool works, and in addition what the underlying data looks like. Make it a priority to understand both pieces of information. The final results are very much worth that time spent.
Recommendations: prioritize the effort to make the user interface operate more easily and quickly, with fewer clicks. Allocate less time to the visual extras, and more time on how to make this function to make it easy to use. Let the user get in, do the task, and go on to the rest of their day. Visual enhancement is great and fun to do. Once a user sees a visual enhancement three times, they stop looking at it, and just want to get the work done.
UI design mantra: Make it Easy, Make it Fast, Make it Intuitive.