You busted your butt for a week to complete a set of mockups derived from a functional spec: wire frames, flows, call-outs, tab-order…you know the good stuff. Then the Product Manager has a lightbulb, and suddenly you’re back in the saddle grabbing old sketches and flows. You feel flush and ready for war. But wait, you put your pain aside; it’s a good idea and after all, that’s job security, right?

Your tea has barely set, the ink in the inkwell barely poured and the second round is fired on the deck. Late in the afternoon on Thursday he presents this direction change to you, and blankly states “So when can we have updated mockups? I have a meeting to show them Monday.”

Only time will tell if your subtle laser beam eyes really cause itchy uncontrollable rashes… and last I checked murder is illegal. This is a patience tester. This is a breathing exercise. He is not mean; this is just ignorance.

Education. It is our job as designers to educate when necessary. This dilemma of sorts is more than just for designers. Design is not flimsy. It’s not to be thought of as whimsical and fun (though it is). Design requires time and THINKING. This EDUCATION is a problem that can only be solved by flexibility. By subtle manipulation. And a wee bit of stubbornness. Equally divided, cross-checked, osmosis at it’s best.

One must be stubborn, manipulative, and flexible all at once.

At the beginning of most projects designers are asked to give a guesstimate of how long “ X " will take. And more often than not, we receive missing constraints or requirements or use cases or personas… What has happened is designers have hopped on the local shuttle and quickly apply the Scotty Principle.

This is not cheating. This is surviving. You take a pretty good guess and append. Maybe append again. You negotiate with the awe-struck PM who thinks this is a two hour revise and subtract a couple days. Win-win. Negotiate and ask for more than you need. If you ask for 3-days they may be so excited you are willing to take that time to get it done they have forgotten the half-day they offered you. If you get it done early - hero. Perhaps leaving some time for you to run it by with engineering, visual designers - gasp - users??

Ask for more than what you want, and let them work you down to what you really want or really need. Be willing to put in some extra hours if it means doing the right thing for your users. You are apart of this team and realistically sometimes a timeline can’t slip. While it is important to pull the brakes and have everyone learn a lesson, that good design takes time, it’s also sometimes important to be flexible and work the extra mile for the greater good. But when do I pull the brakes OR work my @ss off? Dr. McCoy wisdom- “I'm a doctor, not a brick-layer”; that is the bigger Q.