Member-only story

Here’s an inventory of my assumptions

Rania Bailey
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readApr 19, 2019
Underground Burrow, Public Domain Photography

If you’ve ever tried to miscommunicate, you’ve probably used assumptions. Of course, you’ve probably never tried to intentionally miscommunicate with someone — but that’s my making an assumption. Assumptions are these ideas that are expected to be true without evidence supporting them, and they keep weaseling their way into my design work.

They’re quick. They’re easy. They narrow the possibility space in such a way that lets me get to work on the more interesting parts of my garden of a design. But since they weasel their way in, undermining the foundations of what I’m designing, they end up corrupting the garden. With the weasel tunnels underneath, it becomes all too easy for the garden to collapse.

Over the past year in my current position, I’ve found myself making quite a few assumptions about the users I’m working for. And most of those assumptions, unsurprisingly, were wrong. They set up the design to collapse in on itself, just like underground weasel tunnels.

Ruined Greenhouse in the Walled Garden, Paul Farmer

Here’s an inventory of assumptions I’ve made and discovered to be wrong over the past twelve months:

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Published in UX Collective

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What are your thoughts?

Thank you! I thought I was getting numb to landing pages for no reason - but now connect the dots on the trend of everything cartoon and 3D.
I very much agree about the CTA abuse. Some websites need therapy on that issue - they end up looking like…

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The one thing about a landing page is that it constantly needs the owner’s attention.

If others are using a certain pattern (a trend you mentioned earlier) and it works, why not stick to that? I'm not saying just blindly copy it but use it as a reference and add your personal touch to it.

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