Constructing and Evaluating Your Design Solution - Data Visualization: A Successful Design Process - page 166

There are plenty of evaluation methodologies and techniques, probably much more
sophisticated than this, but these are just some of the most useful prompts for you to
gather feedback against before finalizing your work.
Approaching the finishing line
Here is a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more
to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."
The finishing line is now getting ever closer. However, apart from those projects
where there is a clear finite deadline to work to, the judgment of when a design
is actually finished is not necessarily always obviously recognizable. A deadline
provides this finality, but open-ended projects need their own completion point to
be determined. It is natural to keep tweaking, refining, and enhancing your piece
but eventually you need to call out something as being completed.
A useful signpost to note your progress was proposed by designer Martin
Wattenberg (co-developer on the "Wind Map" project that we saw earlier). Martin
describes the subtle but telling change in your role as you shift from debugging
a design (programmatically or figuratively) to finding yourself becoming an
enthusiastic user, engaging with your own work to unearth insights.
As the quote at the start of this section expresses, another viewpoint is to step back
and away from your design and challenge everything that you have included.
Justify to yourself (and/or to others) the reason why features or design choices
need to stay, but also determine what elements you can eliminate, those that don't
add any communicative or functional value. It's not necessarily about striving for
minimalism; rather the most elegant and clear form.
As well as challenging all our design choices we also need to switch mindsets more
towards the Project Manager or Administrator's perspective and undertake some
important checks. Sometimes, when you're close to finishing you would prefer to
stick your head in the oven than seek issues that need addressing, but you've got to
continue to strive for optimal accuracy and intercept any potential mistakes.
Simple errors can completely undermine quality—an extra zero in a value, the
mislabeling of a country, an emboldened font when it wasn't wanted, and so on.
It might be the smallest and most innocent of mistakes, but that can be enough to
tarnish the rest of your work with doubt in the eyes of your audience.