Stop designing for other designers

Every piece of design work has two audiences. The people who use it, and the people who screenshot it.

The second audience is loud. It lives in the feeds where designers show each other work, in award submissions, in the group chat where a colleague drops a link with the fire reaction already implied. Its applause is instant and countable, and countable applause is a hard drug for anyone whose work is usually invisible when it succeeds.

The first audience is silent. It’s a woman holding a phone in one hand and a toddler in the other, twelve percent battery, standing in direct sunlight, trying to find your hours before the meltdown starts. She will never compliment the kerning. Her entire review of your work is whether it worked.

The drift and its tells

Nobody sets out to ignore her. The drift happens through taste, which makes it hard to catch. Spend all day looking at exceptional, experimental work made specifically to impress people like you, and your sense of normal recalibrates. Legible starts to read as timid. Conventional starts to read as lazy. Eventually a clear page with an obvious button feels like a failure of imagination, when it’s actually the whole assignment.

The drift has tells. A few we check for in our own work:

• The navigation is a puzzle with a satisfying answer.
• Body text is light gray on slightly lighter gray, because somewhere around year three of looking at beautiful things, contrast started to feel aggressive.
• The animation demos wonderfully and adds a second to every interaction, every time, forever.
• It’s been reviewed on a calibrated studio monitor and never once on a cheap phone outdoors.
• The part of the page the team is proudest of is the part users scroll past fastest.

Any one of these can be defensible. All five together means the work has quietly changed audiences, and nobody sent the users a memo.

Clients get pulled into the drift too, by the way. Somebody senior sees a striking site in another industry and asks for that, and now everyone’s building a monument in the middle of what should be a road. Part of the job, ours and any honest studio’s, is saying the quiet thing out loud: the site you loved is gorgeous, and you bounced off it in nine seconds. You just don’t remember, because you weren’t trying to buy anything.

Who’s holding the scorecard

Now, the caveat that matters: this is not a case for boring. We’ve all seen “user-focused” invoked to sand every edge off a brand until it could belong to anyone, and that’s its own failure. Craft matters. Ambition matters. Restraint, done well, is craft, and a distinctive site that also works is the actual target. The point isn’t to aim lower. The point is to know who’s holding the scorecard.

Because when the two audiences want different things, the user wins. Every time. Not as a philosophy, just as arithmetic: she’s the one whose visit pays for everything, including the part of the budget that bought the animation.

Here’s the twist that makes the whole dilemma mostly fake, though. Lasting respect inside the field goes to work that worked. The designs that get taught decades later tend to be the ones civilians used a million times without noticing: transit signage, paperback grids, instrument panels.

Applause is a lagging indicator of taste.

Outcomes are the reason anyone hires a designer twice. Chase the second one and the first tends to show up anyway, just fashionably late.

Build the missing signal

Some of this isn’t ego at all. It’s feedback loops. Users almost never tell you a design worked; they just quietly succeed and leave. Other designers tell you constantly, in public, with numbers attached. Starve someone of one signal and flood them with the other, and any compass drifts. So build the missing signal on purpose: watch the session recordings, read the support tickets, sit in on a sales call. Applause you have to go looking for is usually the kind worth having.

Which is why we’ve built the habit of asking, somewhere past the midpoint of every project, one slightly deflating question: who is this part for? Not the hero section, that one’s easy. The clever parts. The parts we’d screenshot. Sometimes the answer is “the user, genuinely,” and those parts stay and we’re glad. Other times it’s “designers we’ve never met,” and something gets simpler that afternoon.

It stings a little. It’s supposed to. Taste that never gets overruled by purpose isn’t taste, it’s decoration with a mood board.

Nobody’s grandmother has ever admired a hover state. She found the phone number, or she didn’t.