[npunt]

Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well.

However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if not, but this issue is my particular hill to die on, it's 100% the single biggest gap in understanding that I see between those that regularly engage in original creative work vs those who do not.

People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!" But that's all hindsight, like saying "I could have bought bitcoin in 2010!" It's not even wrong, it's answering an entirely different question of capability, not probability.

The question is would you have come up with that, were you tasked with the problem and put in the same context? I'd estimate for most great-but-simple inventions, it's not many people who could plausibly say that, because so much of what we bring to bear on problems comes from our own histories and unique perspectives & influences, not to mention talents and predilections.

This distinction between could vs would is core to understanding creative output, especially the ideas that are the simplest to use or understand. The delta between understanding vs coming up with there is often vast; simple things are often the hardest things of all to conceive.

[allenu]

I'm in total agreement regarding some designs that seem obvious later but really took several iterations to reach. There's definitely hindsight bias when a design works so well that it feels obvious.

My point was more that I've seen product demos where parts of a product were presented as having been pored over painstakingly when in reality it was decided on day one that it would work that way. However, because it's a prominent feature, it feels cheap to show the reality, so I get that for demos there's a bit of storytelling that goes into it so the audience feels like it was a revelation.

For UX that I've designed myself, I have definitely found that a lot of the great ones required a ton of iteration and almost "courage" to go against my initial bright ideas and look at things from a different perspective. It often required taking away elements that I thought were absolutely required at first but later realized made more sense to go without. If someone were to look at the final result, they would definitely think "Well, obviously that's how it should work." But more likely they'd have go through a similar journey that I did to come up with it if they hadn't seen the solution.

In a way it's like finding out how a magic trick worked. It's only obvious in retrospect.

[npunt]

A magic trick is a good way to put it, especially for laypeople. I see your point and agree, it's always hard to know going in which ideas you're going to one-shot (and be slightly embarrassed about having one-shotted) and which only come from the courage to kill early darlings and continue down the road of uncertainty.

We're fortunate if we even get that latter opportunity, given most want to take the easy path and cargo cult someone else's idea. The thing I've noticed is that the hard path to continue the exploration often gives the cargo cult answer but with a nuance or two for one's context that make all the difference. I'm curious if you have experienced that as well.

[downthefoxhole]

> People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!"

That's the problem with user interface design as a career. It takes a lot of effort to create simple to understand and simple to use design, and then when users see them, they see it is simple and think it must have been easy to do. Most programmers tend to make programs for themselves and other technical people and has horrible design. The classic corollary example I like is when Apple came up with MP3 players and marketed as 'It can hold 1000 songs' instead of the current marketing at the time 'It has has 1GB of storage'. Technical folks would not be satisfied with 1000 songs becuase they would be doing back of the math calculations on how low of a bitrate you have to get, in order to fit 1k songs in a given space... while the other 95% of the population doesn't want to do any math, and if even if they did, they don't know.. or at least back then, didn't know what a GB was, or how many megabytes an MP3 consumed....

[npunt]

Indeed. UI/UX is actually a pretty shitty career unless you are good enough to regularly pull rabbits out of your hat. At the low end it's just drawing boxes and using someone else's tricks in a system that isn't even the codebase. At the mid end you get the codebase and might occasionally solve interesting problems, but you'll rarely get the recognition and influence equal to its value. Only at the high end do you start getting the rewards, but they tend not to last very long because people quickly adapt to seeing your solutions as obvious.

It's why designers, and creatives more generally, try to cultivate a mystique around themselves, even(/especially?) when they're only mid. The truth is creative work is a lot more playful than it is mysterious, but play is not valued, only mystery is. This leaves many creatives stuck in tension between their internal and external identities.