Beginner UX Designers should avoid these mistakes.

One of the proven ways to accelerate your growth as a designer is to make mistakes early and learn from them quickly. In today's video, I'll be talking about 5 mistakes that beginner UX designers make and how to avoid them. If you're new here, my name is Samuel and I'm a senior product designer based in London. On this channel, I provide UX design tips, techniques, and tutorials that can help designers improve their craft and stay ahead of the competition. If all of this sounds interesting to you, please like this video and hit the subscribe button so you can see more videos like this from me. With that being said, let's get right into it. Mistake number 1 is prioritizing shiny visual detail over functionality. It is very common for beginner UX designers to focus on visual design details that makes a website or application, quote unquote, visually appealing while paying less attention to the design principles and solutions that makes it functional and usable. So beginner UX designers need to find a balance between design aesthetic and functionality. One of the best ways to achieve this balance is to have a clear understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve and ensure that the visual design plays a role in solving that problem. If it doesn't play a role in solving the problem, then it's probably unnecessary and you can do without it. And this brings us to the second mistake, which is not having a clear problem statement. When I first started working on projects as a UX designer, I was so quick to jump into design tools like Figma or Adobe XD. Without understanding what the problem was. Then I would spend endless amounts of time going through design solutions with stakeholders who could be clients or product managers without making any progress. See, it's very tempting to think that you understand what the problem is without clearly articulating it, but this will only lead to a roller coaster of design reviews that could leave you depressed because you're not making any progress. For a problem statement to be clear, it needs to answer the following questions. Number 1, who is affected by this problem? Number 2, what does this person need? And number 3, why do they need this problem solved? Here's an example of a problem statement. Let's imagine that you are trying to design an app that helps busy people to find events around them. A problem statement would be something like this: Jack and Jane are busy professionals that need to find social events happening around them because it helps them to relax and unwind. One thing that helps to come up with a clear problem statement is the insights gathered from user research. Now that brings us to the 3rd mistake, which is completely ignoring user research. I feel like this is the obvious one, but user research can never be overstated in the design process. And a lot of designers still completely ignore user research. I understand that in a lot of companies that designers find themselves, it is really difficult to advocate for user research because the companies are not prioritizing it. But this is something that you have to keep doing. You have to imbibe the habit of getting feedback from your users because that would make you a better designer. Because whenever you're trying to solve a problem for a particular sector, You need to understand the exact problem that they are facing. A lot of times designers waste time solving for the wrong problem because they have not conducted any form of user research and they've not gotten any form of feedback from their users. So it's important to develop this habit of getting feedback at any stage of the design process. User research is not only at the beginning of the design process. It is constantly iterating whatever design decisions you have by trying to get close to your user as much as you can. And even with personal projects, when working on personal projects, you might think that, oh, because this is a personal project, I really do not need to prioritize research. But working on personal projects helps you to also start to imbibe that habit of gathering feedback. So even when you can't have full-skilled user interview sessions or full-skilled user research sessions, you could have semi-formal interviews with friends, colleagues, family members. And even if you don't have the luxury of time to go through that process of interviewing people, you could leverage existing surveys online or competitive analysis in the problem space that you are trying to solve. One thing that is very, very important is to make sure that the majority of your design decisions are backed by research and data, and that will definitely make you a better designer. The 4th mistake is not exploring multiple solutions, especially as a beginner. It is very, very easy for you to come up with an idea or a solution and fall in love with it. Now the thing is, the first idea that you come up with or the first solution that you come up with is usually not the best. So it's always good to explore further. It's always good to think about different ways that you could solve a particular problem. This is something that I've learned from my days as a graphic designer or as a visual designer. Whenever I'm creating logos, once I have like the first idea, I feel so good about it and I feel like there's no need to explore more. Then I wake up the next morning, open my laptop to see the idea that I, that I'm so happy about yesterday, and I feel like, oh my God, this is total shit. So it's always good to explore further. It's always good to think about different ways that you could solve a particular problem. Think about the problem space properly and then provide different solutions that can solve the same problem. This helps you to engage your stakeholders and your teammates with different ideas, and then it also helps to expand the solution and ideas more so that you could come up with more ideas that eventually solves the problem for the user. One of the proven things that has also worked in the UX design space is to have maybe 2 solutions that you can then test with user, which is called A/B testing. So when you have the solutions and then you deploy them to users and you see how users interact with it and you see the one that users tilt more towards, then that way you are able to understand the best way To solve their problem, one thing to keep in mind is that the more solutions you have, the higher your chances of actually solving the user's problem in the best way. Mistake number five, which is the final mistake, is ignoring visual design completely. This is the direct opposite of the first mistake that I spoke about, which is prioritizing visual design details over functionality. A lot of beginner UX designers feel like. They don't need to be good at visual design because that is for UI designers. They think that they can just improve their UX design skills while the visual design skills suffer. Well, I hate to break it to you, but to be a good UX designer, you need to be able to design visually appealing design solutions as well. Also, the way a lot of design team structures are set up is different now. When UX design started getting really popular, we had UX designers and then we had UI designers. UX designers thought about the flow holistically. They thought about all the information architecture. They do they conduct all the user research, and the UI designers put all the fancy screens together. But right now, because of the competition that we have in the tech space and the UX space, we have hiring managers looking for designers that can do both efficiently. And I mean, I don't see a problem with this as well because personally, I think when you're designing a solution to a problem, you want to be able to. Design that solution from end to end. So while thinking about it holistically, you need to be able to also think about how to communicate it visually to the user as well. So don't underestimate the impact of strong visual design skills in your UX design toolbox. Hopefully this video has been able to clearly explain some of the mistakes you should avoid as a beginner UX designer. I must also say that this merely covers all the possible mistakes that you could make at the beginning of your UX design career. But don't let that discourage you. In fact, these mistakes do not define you. It is how fast you learn and improve that does. Don't forget to like this video and hit the subscribe button below so that you can see more videos like this from me. I'll see you in the next one.