10 Common Mistakes UI Designers Make

Remember these mistakes when designing your next interface.

1. Disregarding scope

It’s not uncommon for designers to introduce features that will overcomplicate the development process while bringing no additional value to the application. Focusing on the business objectives, project scope, timeline, and the way products are developed are all valuable considerations when prioritizing features for design.

If, for example, we’re designing an option for the users to upload a profile picture but we also add functionality to crop, scale, and rotate the photo, then this would unnecessarily complicate the design.

It’s effortless to add a “rotate” or “crop” button in design but would be trickier to implement in development. A safe bet is to avoid adding features unless they’re essential to the application. Always keep the business and user goals at the forefront of the design process.

2. Not preparing for handoff

When we’re designing a product or experience, we should take into account who else is going to be using our work. Whether our designs are handed off to developers or other designers, everything must be organized and appropriately documented.

Our design files should have artboards named and laid out horizontally how they would be clicked through.

We should have an organized design file that contains all the icons in SVG format and a high-quality version of any images used in our designs.

When I hand off my work to developers, Zeplin is my preferred method. Zeplin makes it easy for developers to grab code snippets, dimensions, spacing, font sizes, SVG assets, and so on.

There is a lot more that can be done for a seamless handoff, read Dorjan’s article on preparing for handoff if you’d like further insights.