> And at that moment it is about the pricing. If you charge hourly, you can iterate however long you want, you can have calls where you argue about usability and long term sustainability of your designs.
You can argue about usability all you want, or you can be part of a longer term process of measuring actual usage and make adjustments after actual users are using it. Between heat maps, click tracking, watching engagement numbers, A/B testing, etc, you can determine if goals are being hit. Are users falling away? Test out alternative UX, see what helps, commit to that. Lose the designer "this is what works best" attitude (not saying you have this, but enough I've worked with do). Help your client help their clients/users.
It's not how most design is thought of - at least in web projects. It's "design" up front - hey, we're using figma - look how awesome all this is! - we can 'design' for tablets and mobile and desktop!. But all the questions about "what happens here" and "how do I deal with a text label that was designed for 20 characters when most of the text data is 30+ characters?" - these get ignored after a client "signs off" on design, and making things "just work like what was approved already!" becomes an ongoing nightmare.
"Look - we did all this hard work of deciding how this should work - you need to just make it work now!" - I've been on the receiving end of these a few times. It's not really all that 'hard' to make decisions when you don't have to implement them. 1-2 years in to my software career, I thought this was a problem with me - I wasn't quite good enough with a piece of software to know how to implement XYZ, etc. This goes back to early VB days, and has compounded with web stuff - someone draws a static 2d picture, and this is supposed to somehow be a gold-standard for how every live interaction should 'feel'. After a couple years of this, I realized it's far less me (although a bit - I'm not perfect), but mostly the process itself, but it's what everyone still does.
If you want 'design' to serve the product/service, it needs to be an ongoing part of the process and budget, and take in to account everything that's learned when users actually use it. If devs need to react to changing use cases, the actual UI and UX may need to be adapted as new information is measured and learned.
You can argue about usability all you want, or you can be part of a longer term process of measuring actual usage and make adjustments after actual users are using it. Between heat maps, click tracking, watching engagement numbers, A/B testing, etc, you can determine if goals are being hit. Are users falling away? Test out alternative UX, see what helps, commit to that. Lose the designer "this is what works best" attitude (not saying you have this, but enough I've worked with do). Help your client help their clients/users.
It's not how most design is thought of - at least in web projects. It's "design" up front - hey, we're using figma - look how awesome all this is! - we can 'design' for tablets and mobile and desktop!. But all the questions about "what happens here" and "how do I deal with a text label that was designed for 20 characters when most of the text data is 30+ characters?" - these get ignored after a client "signs off" on design, and making things "just work like what was approved already!" becomes an ongoing nightmare.
"Look - we did all this hard work of deciding how this should work - you need to just make it work now!" - I've been on the receiving end of these a few times. It's not really all that 'hard' to make decisions when you don't have to implement them. 1-2 years in to my software career, I thought this was a problem with me - I wasn't quite good enough with a piece of software to know how to implement XYZ, etc. This goes back to early VB days, and has compounded with web stuff - someone draws a static 2d picture, and this is supposed to somehow be a gold-standard for how every live interaction should 'feel'. After a couple years of this, I realized it's far less me (although a bit - I'm not perfect), but mostly the process itself, but it's what everyone still does.
If you want 'design' to serve the product/service, it needs to be an ongoing part of the process and budget, and take in to account everything that's learned when users actually use it. If devs need to react to changing use cases, the actual UI and UX may need to be adapted as new information is measured and learned.