I've been a product designer for eight years, and I keep coming back to a tension between aesthetics and usability. In my last project, we redesigned a booking interface with a beautiful, minimal layout, but test users constantly missed the confirm button because it blended with the background. We had to add contrast and size, which slightly hurt the visual purity, but conversions improved by nearly 20%. That experience makes me think that in most real-world contexts, usability should trump beauty—but I'm not entirely sure if there are cases where the opposite holds, like in branding or art installations.