What is Parkinson’s Law?

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that people will give disproportionate weight to little things — things they (think they) understand. In our case, the colour of this button, the size of the logo, the font used. They never comment on the form layout UX, the information hierarchy, the navigation — because they don’t understand it & can’t “add value” there.

Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spended the majority of its time with pointless discussions on relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the less-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult and complex task to criticize constructively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality

If clients want to “bike-shed” about something, what’s the problem? The problem is they don’t understand the importance of things like the font used, the colour of the button, the navigation style used.

They want to change the font, despite the fact you chose this font because it’s readable & has a bunch of different weights you can use to accent the body text.

They want to change the colour of that button, despite the fact you chose it because it contrasts perfectly with the rest of the site and it’s a call to action. They don’t get that some buttons should be styled differently & thus harder to click (think “nuke my account”).

They see other apps using hamburger menus and say “Why don’t we use one of those slider menus?” because they don’t know they should be avoided.

This is all stuff I’ve been asked to do this week — luckily I’ve managed to avoid/compromise on most