I’ve been snooping around some profiles of people from Handled, a remote-first company I’ve been interested in working for. I was vaguely introduced to Tom Greever by seeing some amusing meme that I can really relate to (involving carpentry and software resumes). His Twitter had a interesting prompt, asking for people to give advice on what every UX designer should know. I don’t really consider myself a UX “professional,” but I do like to say that I can recognize most good design points and offer input.

I figure that any normal opinion or advice would get drowned in the sea of professional opinions, but after sleeping on it, I thought about the value of flaws. My advice would be to “not consider all flaws as mistakes.”

Could a design be intentionally flawed to be perfected? I don’t know if this can be proven without some deeper speculation, but to talk about a close example, one of my projects which was drafted a couple of years ago had a major revamp at some point. The reasoning for the changes was mostly due to conflicts from updates to the API it was using – a lot of work to fix – but I ended up simplifying the design so much that it was just… TOO easy to use. That’s great, right? Probably, most likely, but what if too easy might not be the best? This particular piece of software implemented a peer-to-peer driven network. In short, vague terms, the more peers that use it, the better the “signal” was – the better the user experience.

That’s where my consideration stemmed from. If all the user had to do was install it and everything else was handled automatically for them – no further input required – they might not appreciate how much it’s doing for them in the background, routing their data to where it needs to go, assisting others in routing their data, being a part of a great community, etc. This was a technological achievement in some ways, but it was all INVISIBLE. Some users might just delete it because they don’t realize the value of having it installed, since there is no feedback of telling the user that they’re doing their part. If they stop using it, it damages (slightly) everyone else’s experience. A flawless design does everything that you want it to do without you doing anything, right?

I didn’t end up doing anything like making it have useless prompts to try and convince the user that it was great software, and it still has a healthy network today regardless, but that was just one example that came to mind. If we get more philosophical, we could observe other intentional “flaws” that make things great. Flaws is in quotes at this point, because these are deliberate moves against harmony – and not mistakes. I was doing a lot of music composition practice last decade, where we came to appreciate the value of “dissonance” mixed with the “harmony.” Dissonance is when two notes clash and don’t go well together. There are a lot of parallels to this, with the basic idea that flawless harmony is boring. All stories need their conflict before resolution. Everything needs a balance. If we look to a broader scope, there’s life. Life is an amazing mystery that we try to understand every day, and today one observation stands out to me: the “flaws” are part of its perfection.