Common mistakes of a UX Designer

Before we explore the common mistakes that a UX designer makes, it’s important to first understand the role of a UX Designer. UX designers focus on making the experience of interaction between humans and digital products better.
In this article, we are going to highlight some of the common mistakes that a designer makes. After all, designers are human beings so they are bound to make mistakes, no?

1. Inconsistent Design

UX Designers, especially beginners make this mistake of inconsistent design. It can be in terms of color palettes, icons, fonts,  buttons, paragraphs, links, headers, footers, hover states, and much more. The inconsistency in design can put your users in doubt about the credibility of the product. And most importantly it will compromise the aesthetics of UI.

2. Ignoring the responsiveness of design

Responsiveness is the key element in a UI/UX Design. Responsive design can help you solve a lot of problems for your website. It will make your site mobile-friendly. It will eventually help in increasing the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. Despite this much importance, unfortunately, most of the designers including me don’t focus on it and it becomes a major obstacle in development.

Recently I made a mistake of responsiveness, here is a glimpse of it:

The above screen is designed by me while the below screen is designed by the developers .

3. Bad UX writing

The language used when creating a digital product is of high importance. The way we speak to the user defines the way the user behaves toward our product. The level of communication must be understandable and human-friendly enough to create a bond. The element of good UX writing is missing in many designers’ work although it creates a major difference in overall “User Experience”. We can observe it from the following example.

4. No proper research

UX Designers normally consider themselves and stakeholders as the real users. But that’s not the case, they are not representative of your target audience. Involve the real users in the design process, rather than having internal colleagues be participants, as they tend to be too close to the design to provide honest and accurate data.

User experience cannot exist without users. User research is a tool that can help you achieve your goals. As UX designers we should remember one thing that UX means “USER EXPERIENCE” so we must consider the real user in the research phase otherwise it will somehow affect the UX of the product. 

5. Usage of dummy content

Trending tools like (Adobe XD, Figma) have plugins for dummy text so we normally use  “Lorem Ipsum”.  If we talk about the dummy content, it works well for the best-case scenarios but doesn’t fit in the worst-case scenarios. If the design is finalized with the dummy content, it will cause alignment and spacing issues with the actual content. As you can see in the example: 

6. Lack of collaboration with the developer

Designers often struggle in collaborating with developers. They just hand off the mockup to the developer to develop it and at that time it is discovered that the development of our mockup is not possible so it becomes a barrier for the product. The actual product that will be used by people will be developed by the developers, so it’s essential for the developer to understand the designs completely. As designers, it’s our responsibility to keep the developers in the loop with us. So now we can conclude “As a UX Designer, we have to design user experience for the real user and for the Developers too  “

7. Poor naming convention

Naming conventions are important for teamwork. It standardizes the way of working within a department, decreasing the dependency on the individual person. The mistake that most designers do is that they name the artboards, components, and other things randomly, so it can become a problem for the developer or any other designer. Some may say that using a Naming Convention is outdated or time-consuming, others may not consider it attention-worthy. But, the truth is that giving proper naming to your artboards can save you and the developer from a lot of hassle. 

      “Work as if you’ll die tomorrow and leave no room for misinterpretation in your deliverables”

You can see the above example of Figma Hand Off, this will create problems for developers if they want to download any asset because there is no proper name of any group and icons.

Let’s sum it up

There are many other UX mistakes we tend to do that can ruin all our efforts. But these are the major mistakes we normally do in our designs. UX Designers should use the best approaches or principles and not be afraid to innovate but to ensure great usability, designers should test their design thoroughly with real-world users. Designers must keep in mind that if the user suffers from design, the UX will be considered poor, and eventually people will switch to another platform.

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