We get it. Everyone wants to impress.
Stakeholders want polish. Marketing wants consistency. Executives want something they can show off. So your team spends cycles refining pixel-perfect screens, building slide decks, and polishing prototypes.
But here’s the thing: design isn’t for approval. Design is for people.
At Ridiculous Engineering, we work with clients who are building ecommerce sites, content platforms, and digital tools that actually need to work—not just look good in a meeting. And we’ve seen how too much time spent designing to impress slows teams down, burns out designers, and delays actual learning.
Design Theater vs Design That Works
We call it design theater when a team prioritizes internal buy-in over user validation.
Symptoms include:
- Endless Figma files and no live users
- Feedback rounds that go in circles
- Sign-off processes that favor aesthetics over usability
One reason design theater persists is the false consensus effect—the tendency to assume that others think and behave the way we do. When teams rely too heavily on internal preferences or feedback loops, they risk designing for themselves instead of their users.
In contrast, design that works is grounded in:
- Real user context
- Lean prototyping and feedback loops
- Collaborative iteration with engineering and product
- The end result? A design that’s meant to evolve, not just impress.
From Decks to Direction
When your design process is optimized for sign-off, the real user often disappears from the process.
We help teams shift focus back to:
- Solving the actual problem
- Shipping fast and refining based on real-world use
- Empowering cross-functional teams to build with design, not around it
Combating false consensus starts with humility, recognizing that user behavior isn’t always predictable or aligned with internal assumptions. That’s why user-centric design isn’t just good UX; it’s a business imperative. Real experiences drive real outcomes.
This doesn't mean sacrificing quality. It means building intentional, adaptable systems—not one-off screens.
How Ridiculous Engineering Helps
At Ridiculous Engineering, we build ecommerce platforms, CMS solutions, and custom tools with a focus on user impact and business outcomes, not just surface-level polish.
We:
- Guide design decisions based on goals, constraints, and user context
- Integrate designers with product and engineering early
- Use tools like CONSUS (our headless CMS solution) to deliver flexible, reusable components
- Build with versioning in mind, so teams can evolve UI over time
Our goal isn’t just to ship something beautiful, it’s to ship something useful.
Ask Yourself:
- Are we designing for decision-makers or for users?
- Is our process optimizing for feedback or for approval?
- How fast can we learn from real use?
If these questions resonate, we’d love to collaborate.
Ridiculous Engineering: We build websites that don’t just look good—they do good.
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