Most of our clients hire us to take fuzzy ideas (some fuzzier than others) and bring them to life in the form of software. A designer’s role at Atomic is to be the point person of a team that advocates for the user. How? By helping to design the flow, structure, and look and feel of the application. We help bring the fuzzy into focus. We work to balance important trade-offs throughout the process of building software.
At their core, Atomic designers are like money managers who act with fiduciary responsibility for their clients. They have the project’s best interest at heart. Arguably most importantly, designers help balance the feasibility of implementation. They do this by understanding the complexity, cost, budget, and timing available so they can propose the correct solution to the problem at hand. Designers don’t attack this problem alone. They are part of a cross-functional team working to bring the best product possible to life.
As a product matures, the likelihood of building the wrong product should decrease due to testing and validation from users and the reduction of technical implementation risks. The shrinking of risks over time should unlock resources to improve the experience. The product’s polish, interactiveness, and depth of features can increase as the software product matures.
For Atomic, providing great design usually means choosing to focus on solid visual designs over highly-polished interactions. We often, but not always, work in the early product development stage. This typically means trading off the high styles or fancy transitions for talking to users and validating the core features of an application. Those fuzzy ideas need to be validated before spending valuable time and energy making things look appealing.
The base level of delightfulness on projects is ever increasing. There is an ever-increasing number of tools and resources at the implementation team’s disposal, making those once challenging tasks trivial and inexpensive. This is great news for our clients as we’re able to deliver higher-fidelity products faster, cheaper, and less expensively.
It should be mentioned that Atomic designers can excel in delighting the user through animations and highly refined design. When more mature projects come in, we’re excited to dive deep into the other areas of design we enjoy.
The right software can change everything, and the bottom line for our clients is that Atomic designers aim to deliver the right amount of design for each project.