The perfect shopping cart?

On the first day of my User Experience Design class, we watched a video about IDEO, a renowned design firm known for its human-centered innovation process and team of interdisciplinary experts. In the video, the designers of IDEO were tasked with a seemingly simple challenge: redesign the standard shopping cart. Their process started with empathizing with users, brainstorming, and field observations, which led to prototyping carts with unique features. They combined the best ideas from each version, iterating on the design until they created what seemed like the perfect shopping cart.

…but is a design ever perfect?

Once the designers settled on a final design, they tested them in a grocery store with real customers. At the end of the video, a woman offered feedback that stood out to me:

“At first I was a little shocked; you have some fantastic ideas here. It needs a little refining, but I think that it’s great. We would want them.”

This simple comment underscored an important reality that even the best designers don’t create perfect products. There is always room for improvement.

You won’t know until you test.

I had a similar realization during the Interaction Design course for my graduate certificate program, where we redesigning the Missouri State Archives website as my final project. We spent a lot of time researching user pain points and crafted what we believed were the perfect solutions on paper, but it wasn’t until we tested our final website with real users that we realized it had more flaws than we initially anticipated.

So what is good UX Design?

As an aspiring UX Designer, one key lesson I’ve learned is that good UX design is not about achieving perfection. Instead, it’s a continuous cycle of bringing ideas to life, testing, and iterating. Even if a design seems flawless on paper — solving a problem being intuitive, and meeting user needs — there’s always room for refinement once it’s put into practice.

One of my favorite stages in the design process is prototyping. I love exploring a range of ideas, even seemingly outlandish ones, and bringing projects to life step by step until reaching a “final” product. The idea that no design is ever truly perfect excites me because it opens the door to endless innovation.

These are the kinds of questions I’m excited to explore throughout my studies, as I strive to create designs that not only meet users’ needs but constantly evolve with them.