Designers pour themselves into their craft but often skimp on aligning with their users' values, or they ignore the technical feasibility of their ideas. I've seen incredible visions fail to gain traction or remain trapped inside artboards because they clashed with mental models, were impossible to build or simply cost prohibitive.
A great teacher of mine said that design must be used. A glorious concept serves no one if it won't be adopted or can't be built in the first place.
Design is the art form that isn't realized until it is used.
I follow a process of immersion, synthesis and visionary stages of work before starting design production. Downstream design decisions aren't arbitrary or "taste based" when time is invested upstream in developing an informed point of view. This is why I suspect Dribbble is bad for the design industry.
Figma has solved redlines, Lottie has solved self-contained animation, but motion design is UX design, and motion is still a difficult thing to spec for developers. This inspired me to build a custom motion spec sheet.
These spec sheets take all the guess work out of bringing complex sequences into production.
This flow chart shows methods of propagating design work in user testing, iteration and development handoff. With the right set of plugins and imports, motion and interaction design prototypes can ingest the same layout files that produce development specs and final design documentation. This process unlocks high fidelity prototypes, reduces dev (and design) hours, and speeds up iteration.
