In my experience, "dribbble designers" sometimes take a "cargo cult" approach to design that apes the appearance of good design without understanding what actua

In my experience, "dribbble designers" sometimes take a "cargo cult" approach to design that apes the appearance of good design without understanding what actually makes a design good in the first place. I agree with most of what people have written, but I think the two biggest gaps are: First, understanding the target users and their goals, tasks, skills, context of use, performance, etc. When interviewing designers I'm regularly surprised how many of them have been working in the field for years and have a beautiful portfolio and yet when I drill into their process they seem to have spent surprisingly little effort understanding of the human on one side of the interaction. Second, usability tests with a representative sample of the target audience. (Along with an organization that has the humility to accept when a redesign is unsuccessful.) If you do nothing else, do this. Even the best design groups I've worked with produced nearly the same number of beautiful-but-bad designs as the worst ones. The difference was that the former had the humility to accept that the design missed the mark and continued to iterate whereas the latter was often willing to ship anyway due to misplaced confidence, strict deadlines, or a CEO with a Steve Jobs complex. With respect to things like whitespace, information density, hit-target/button size, modals, adherence to platform standards, up-front complexity vs hidden actions, icons vs words, customizability, etc those can be good or bad depending on user and context. The real problem occurs when a designer attempts to substitute their own gut instinct to compensate for a lack of understanding of their target audience. The mantra often repeated at the design program where I worked was: "The user is not like me."