Every design decision we make is magnified by millions of concurrent users and a high-stakes product performance environment. We can’t afford waste, yet our default human state is to look for endless options; to chase the shiny new tool, the slightly better framework, or the unnecessary feature.
That’s where the power of constraint comes in, a lesson I inadvertently taught myself during a bizarre three-year personal challenge. Starting in 2017, I listened exclusively to Kanye West. Seriously, only Kanye. It was a weird, over-the-top, slightly obnoxious thing to do, much like the artist himself at times, but it worked. I kept it going all the way to 2019 simply because those years were overwhelmingly my most productive. The lack of choice became my biggest secret weapon, and it’s a mindset I’ve brought into our enterprise-level UX work.
The greatest luxury is a lack of choice
In a rapidly scaling product team, the biggest time sink isn’t execution, it’s analysis paralysis. If I give a designer a blank canvas and infinite fonts, they spend half a day deciding. If I give them a strict, non-negotiable set of system components, they spend that same time solving a real user problem.
My musical prison eliminated the decision fatigue of choice. There was no ‘What should I listen to?’; I just hit shuffle. The time saved not analysing options was poured into doing more, into creating more. This is why strict constraints are so vital to high-performance UX teams. By limiting the design vocabulary to our established design system, we force creativity into solving the user journey itself, not into reinventing the primary button’s colour. When you are forced to find a novel solution within the bounds of your existing tools, the resulting solution is almost always more efficient, more scalable, and frankly, smarter.
Scaling a design system by force
The goal of our design system is not to limit the visual creativity of the team. It is to enforce consistency at scale, which in turn frees up cognitive load for both the design team and the user. The three years of a solo-artist soundtrack operated the same way. The consistency of the sonic palette provided a stable foundation that allowed me to focus purely on my work, using the music as a dependable, non-distracting engine.
When we impose a rigorous, non-negotiable design system in the enterprise world, we achieve this same effect. We aren’t building marketing sites anymore; we’re managing complex user flows in real-time, high-stakes environments. Consistency is a performance feature. The user must be able to trust that a button will behave a certain way, that an icon means what they expect, and that the UI will not surprise them. It’s the difference between a high-stakes financial trader trusting the system implicitly, or having to pause for a microsecond to re-analyse a new component. In live broadcast, that pause is a fail. Constraint delivers reliability.
Judgement over endless analysis
The final lesson from my ridiculous musical habit was the refinement of my professional judgement. When you don’t have to weigh up every possible option, you stop over-analysing and start trusting your strategic gut. I was forced to make a decisive choice once (stick to the challenge) and then my brain was liberated from making that small choice every day.
As a UX Lead, my value is directly tied to my ability to make high-quality, high-velocity decisions that move the product forward. We can’t run a six-week A/B test on every minor UI change. We must synthesise user research, operational data, and our strategic goals, then make the confident call and execute. The constraint taught me to stop chasing the perfect option and focus on the best available option, which allowed me to organise my time around activities that truly impact our product’s performance and user satisfaction. The freedom we crave is often found not in having everything, but in intelligently deciding what we can live without.
My soundtrack for the year is ‘Aggressive Saving.’ Everything I do now has to align with that. It works!
Three-year soundtrack is very ambitious. I think maybe one year soundtrack is more realistic for planning. My life changes too fast for three years! But I like the idea of the guiding narrative, like a manifesto for your own time.