Her Last Vow

Farewell to UI as a Full Service

This is the story of how design (my drug of choice) finally drove me completely bonkers🤪 and got me to quit offering UI as a full service altogether.

1. BORED —not interested in drawing rectangles anymore

A girl can only draw rounded rectangles with nice shadows for so long. So by the end of 2019, I felt that my career had to improve. It’s been many years since I’ve done something other than drawing shapes, making the logo bigger, figuring out ways to make the design “shine”, and all those nice and completely useful things clients usually ask for.

moving ON!

So I taught myself how to use nocode tools like Webflow, Adalo and Bubble and started building solutions instead of just designing an experience. Which was a wise decision because EVIL was on the way…

2. Honey, you should see me in a crown — COVID19 is here, cash is dear.

#closeenough

The Evil pandemic brought the planet to its knees. And suddenly, clients started cancelling UX/UI projects because they don’t have the funds to invest in research, UX design, UI design then development as separate services.

Everyone is expected to work from home all of a sudden, funds dropped. People lost their jobs and for the first time ever; they had time to dedicate to side hustles they always wanted to launch.

So I started offering complete UX/UI and development packages for MVPs. It’s working well. Still face issue though— the more services you offer, the more you need to explain things; like what is an MVP? why can’t an MVP contain 25 (not entirely necessary) features? why can’t it look like the 3D animated shots on dribbble…you get the picture. It’s mostly UI based complaints.

3. Elementary —can you change it back? it’s easy.

We’ve all been there. A client with a big team is still unsure about a visual style, so you keep trying out new concepts until they are happy with one. Once that blessed moment arrives, you create a sample flow applying that style to showcase to the team and suddenly you receive the following:

no, we just think we’re better off without it. Can you change it back to that style you showed us two weeks ago?

As if I had a choice.

me, trying to be civil

What is the reasoning behind design decisions? what’s the point in understanding why this works best for their market at that point in their projects’s cycle? they like what they like and that should be enough 😶🙄

Therefore I now offer the following UI related services but NOT Full Project UI Design:

• Existing UI Audit according to usability standards.
• Design system creation.
• Feature UX and UI design based on already set visual style.

I’m not that good a UI designer and I’m sure the design community will survive without me and will not be disappointed by my decision. I will leave this fight to those brave souls who still have the energy to “show another option” and “make the logo bigger” and “make it more lively”.

As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to full UI design:

Disclaimer: This blog post openly uses Sherlock theme. I own nothing by my own story.

Sherlock Holmes & all the story titles I use here belong to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock TV show is owned by BBC.