I've worked in the field for 20 years and I've struggled to find something that works consistently. My frank opinion is that design (particularly UI design) as

I've worked in the field for 20 years and I've struggled to find something that works consistently. My frank opinion is that design (particularly UI design) as an industry has a perfectionism problem - designers are encouraged to strive for the platonic ideal in their work and are unwilling to budge after their ideas encounter reality. Software engineers on the other hand are encouraged to ship and not make perfect the enemy of good, because the product of their work is often immediately delivered to customers and turned into value for the business. This puts design and engineering at odds with each other, with engineering often being able to play the trump card because they're self sufficient in developing the end product. Exacerbating this issue is the fact that design teams often don't report under the same organizational departments as software engineers, and aren't incentivized the same way as software engineers, which produces a lot of organizational strife. Design organizations often consider their final output to be the mockups/wireframes that describe the product, which is thrown over the wall to engineering, at which point they step away from the process and from that point serve only to criticize the end result or ignore it entirely. The above is my experience and subjective take on the issue, I'm sure others have experienced different. But the above strikes me as somewhat commonplace based on my own conversations with folks in the industry.