Parallax. It may be an unfamiliar term to many. It’s defined as the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer. For example, a driver may look at a speedometer and it reads 65, but when the passenger looks on it appears to read a different speed due to the difference in angle they are viewing the speedometer from. There’s nothing different with the speedometer itself, but just the angle it is viewed from makes it appear different.

We need to view our designs from the parallax as well. Well, to clarify, we need to view them both head on and from the parallax as well. Doing this doesn’t change the content but gives us a different viewing angle of that content from which we base our designs. This can mean many different things. We can adapt this to mean designing a web app to fit a mobile experience or we can adapt it to mean moving a local machine experience to a network-based experience. Or maybe it’s just a simple (or not so simple) redesign. It’s really just about taking the same basic problem and adapting that problem for some difference in an environmental variable, but the purpose is to use these different angles to feed various POVs into our designs to improve the user experience.

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As designers, we’ve all had our designs criticized at some point. Whether it was a simple “I would like to see this changed here” to an all-out “I don’t like this at all,” we’ve all heard something about our designs that didn’t pan out the way we expected. I’ll use an analogy. Let’s imagine design as music. There’s pop music that’s going to fit a lot of people’s taste and make them happy, but there’s also indie folk and death metal that sits on the fringes and makes a niche set of people happy. No genre is better than the other but they serve different purposes and are never really going to satisfy everyone. Universal design is an ideal and not a 100% solution, but we’ll save that for another article. The fact is that design is not science and, while there are certainly principles and theoretical practice that improve designs, there’s virtually never one right answer. That’s why we’ve got to be able to accept the fact that our designs aren’t always going to be that 100% perfect solution for our clients. Here’s some tips to handling criticism of your designs.
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