6 Exercises to Overcome Skill Plateaus as a Designer

How to continue to build your technical design skills when you feel stagnant and stop seeing improvement.

Cover image from Oleksandr Aleksandrov on Dribbble.

Four years ago, I embarked on a drastic career change from pre-med to product design. I dropped all my courses, attended a hackathon every weekend, and worked over 80–90 hours a week to land my first job as a designer.

Despite being a Sr. Designer and working for quite a while—I still sometimes get asked this.

I promised myself that I would continue to improve my design skills with the same fervor I had when I first started. Unfortunately, growth doesn’t happen on a continuous linear scale; there are plateaus.

Throughout my design career, I’ve experienced phases of plateaus and growth. Here are a few design exercises I came up with that helped me break out of those plateaus.

People stop improving because they stop pushing themselves, and because they lose motivation to continue improving at the skill. They reach a point where they feel like they’re “good enough” and the perceived benefit of trying to get better is outweighed by the perceived benefit of being comfortable.

Like most people who’ve read Outliers, I believed 10,000 hours of any design work would make me an expert. I spent countless hours on random UI shots without a clear goal in mind.

The first couple of months were a period of tremendous growth — however, it took almost a year until I noticed I had long stopped improving. The rapid exciting gains I had, in the beginning, started slowing down.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t recreate that initial feeling of rapid improvement. One day I stumbled upon Peak by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool and discovered what I was doing wrong.

“When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid — or at least steady — improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable limit. So you should stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.”

To break out of my current plateau, I had to understand the difference between naive practice and purposeful practice. Deliberate practice also exists but is not the focus of this article.

Naive practice

Naive practice is comfortable and what most people do by default. It involves staying within your comfort level and going through the motions without reflecting on the deeper meaning behind your actions.

For instance, you might practice playing a song, but continue onward when you miss notes. After reaching a level of basic proficiency, you stop improving because you haven’t set incremental goals, and thus aren’t being challenged.

This sounds obvious in retrospect, but I feel this is especially common for designers practicing outside of work.

“People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless… But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.”

As a designer, I first learned visual design by completing the 100-day UI challenge. I developed a mental library of UI patterns, and a set of common UX heuristics, and became extremely familiar with the iOS human interface guidelines.

Afterward, I ended up creating hundreds of UI shots using the exact same knowledge base. I continued to practice the same set of patterns over and over again. It’s no wonder I stopped improving.

A sad comparison of perceived progress.

Purposeful practice

Purposeful practice is one step above naive practice. This kind of practice focuses on achieving specific goals rather than simply doing the activity. These goals must also be measurable, actionable, and time-bound.

For instance, you might be distracted during naive practice, but you must focus your undivided attention on purposeful practice. The purposeful practice also requires feedback and room for creative problem-solving.

Try to endure periods of discomfort & self-doubt when experimenting with new ideas and concepts. When hitting a barrier, challenge yourself to break convention and look for external sources of inspiration.

Using what I’ve learned over the past four years working on a wide range of projects and for companies, I put together a list of six exercises and resources covering a wide spectrum of design skills to engage in purposeful practice. I’ve included exercises to help you improve in visual design, interaction design, product thinking, UX writing, information architecture, and more.

Exercise 1 — UI component & pattern audits

To expand your knowledge of UI patterns and UX heuristics, conduct comprehensive audits on UI components and patterns.

Specifically…

• Understand the pros & cons of each permutation — e.g. What are the advantages of adding icons to a multi-select checkbox interface vs. making it plain text?
• Understand the use cases behind the component — e.g. When should you use a radio button? Checkbox? Select Box?
• Understand the best practices of a particular pattern — e.g. Did you know the length of input fields should correlate with the expected string length instead of being uniform in width?
• Understand all the possible interaction states of a particular component across all platforms — e.g. For web components have mouse down, mouse up, hover, and selected states that don’t exist on mobile — how does this look like for a particular component?

Afterward, I would make use of these insights on a live product in production. Bonus points if you can set up a multivariate AB test or a usability test with specific metrics.

There’s a relevant project called UI recipes that aims to help with this, but I don’t think it has been updated in a while. You can also find a library of mobile UI patterns on Pttrns.

The screenshot was taken from UI Recipes.

Your best bet would be to start curating a personal collection of interesting and unique UI components and patterns you stumble across and do an in-depth audit of a particular piece once you have enough material to work with.

Exercise 2—Redesign products for new platforms

To expand your knowledge of design systems and UI frameworks, you first need to become familiar with the core platform differences, then find products that don’t exist on all platforms and design the missing platforms from scratch.

A good place to start is the Material Design Guidelines for Android by Google and the Human Interface Guidelines for iOS by Apple. Web guidelines are a bit like the wild west, but I had great success from learning @Webflow, going through Webflow University, reading articles on Smashing, and learning a bit of front-end development from the Odin Project.

Screenshot from Webflow.

I’ve also had success downloading established design systems on Design Systems Repo, dissecting how it was built, and attempting to recreate screens from that design system without using the system itself or referencing the source file.

Exercise 3—Interaction cost fixing

To improve your interaction design skills, start by learning how to use a flow tool like Whimsical, Overflow, or any of the flow plugins available on @Sketch and @Figma.

Then in your tool of choice…

• Take screenshots of each screen within a product’s particular interaction flow. I use the Full Page Screen Capture Chrome extension for the web (or shortcut Shift+Cmd+3 on Mac) and the native screen capture for iOS and Android.
• Draw connector arrows between each screen from the trigger UI element (if applicable) to the next screen. Make sure to label the interaction type somewhere around the connector.

• Above each connector, annotate the interaction cost above it. I don’t believe there’s a formal calculation for interaction cost, but I use a combination of Fitt’s Law and a scale for various input gestures (e.g. on mobile a vertical scroll has less interaction cost compared to h-scroll) for physical cost; then a scale for cognitive cost based on my understanding of UX principles.
• Identify the critical paths using a Red Route Analysis (sometimes using logic & intuition is fine here).
• Redesign the user flows & interaction patterns for critical paths that have an unreasonable amount of interaction cost.

Exercise 4—Continuing whiteboard challenges

To improve your problem-solving and reasoning, continue to practice various white-boarding exercises (even if you’re not looking for a new job). Here’s a list of 100 challenges to get you started.

It’s best if you can find a mentor to evaluate your white-boarding solution, otherwise, make sure to set measurable goals or add additional constraints to keep yourself accountable. The ideal scenario would be to find a peer group or mentor that can evaluate your solutions. A good place to look is the DesignX Slack community, the Designers Guild, and HH Design Group on Facebook.

Exercise 5—Information architecture audits + tree tests

To improve your understanding of information architecture (IA), I would suggest reading this book to build a solid foundation, then completing the following exercise.

• Complete an audit of all the main pages connected to the homepage of a particular site (start with sites with 25 core pages or less)
• Set up a tree test for 30–50 participants (either in person, or online using Optimal Workshop)

• Look at the results and evaluate how intuitive the navigation is
• Revise the sitemap, using card sorting as needed
• Set up more tree tests and compare the results using the first test as the control variable
• Iterate until most (>95 percent) of your participants were able to navigate to the correct page for each task

Exercise 6—Rewrite landing page content + 5-second tests

To improve your marketing design chops and UX writing skills try the exercise below.

• Find a landing page to improve on Landingfolio or Landbook
• Figure out what message the landing page is attempting to communicate in each content section to its visitors
• Conduct 5-second tests using Usability Hub
• Evaluate how effectively the copy communicates the website’s intended message by looking at specific words and phrases the participants use. Sometimes I find generating a word cloud out of the results to be helpful.
• Collect snippets of copy that weren’t performing well in the test, paste them into a word document and attempt to rewrite the alternative copy
• Use a tool like Canvas Flip Visual Inspector or Chrome’s Developer Tools to replace the website copy with yours
• Run additional 5-second tests and iterate as needed

Stop doing the same old exercises

In conclusion, to break out of your design plateaus you must constantly strive to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Discomfort is a sign of growth. If you keep doing the same design exercises, or the same type of projects, you’ll never grow past them. There will come a time when these six exercises also become obsolete. At that point, you’ll be more than equipped to find the unique exercises that would afford you the most personal growth.

https://ambitiousdesigner.substack.com/

Ready to level up your design skills and reach your full potential? Subscribe to The Ambitious Designer newsletter for weekly doses of UX insights, frameworks, and practical career advice.