Since When Is Good Enough No Longer Good Enough?

Say it in a design review and watch the room tighten. Good enough? It implies you stopped caring. That you settled. That you got lazy and decided to call it done.

But that's not what "good enough" means. That's what giving up looks like when it needs an alibi.

Good enough is a threshold, not a shrug. It's where a design does what it needs to do, reliably, learnably, consistently, for the people who use it. It's a decision, not an absence of one.

But good enough for whom? That question sharpens everything. Good enough for the designer on a large monitor is not the same as good enough for the communications officer updating the homepage before a board meeting, or the volunteer who just needs to post an event.

The question isn't could this be better? It's: better for whom, and at what cost to the people who already know how it works?

There's a kind of design that never reaches good enough, not because it falls short but because it's always being improved. Features added. Interactions refined. The interface editors learned last month has quietly shifted.

This has a real cost: the people who use your website every day never get to stop learning it.

Stability is a feature. Learnability is a feature. Consistency is a feature. These aren't signs of giving up. They're signs of a deliberate call, made and held.

So: is your design good enough?

Not pixel-perfect. Not award-nominated. Good enough — functional, stable, learnable, honest about what it's for.

Don Norman, who quite literally wrote the book on how design works, resisted giving his design prize to established names for impressive work. His reasoning: "Too many designers win prizes for doing beautiful concepts, and they win awards, and they get contests, but it actually, it never works in the world."

Winning an award might be evidence of the wrong thing.

Good enough works in the world. For most people using your website on a Tuesday afternoon trying to find what they need, that's the only bar that matters.

Cover image: Don Norman posing with the signature coffeepot which is used in the revised book cover. Illustrated by brilliant Zachary Monteiro