The five biggest UX product design pitfalls of all time
You have a great product, but you know it needs a redesign.
It’s probably evolved organically over time but now become a bit of a dog’s dinner; either bloated with features or just looking embarrassingly dated.
Either way, you know your UX and UI needs work but a good team doesn’t come cheap so you want to ensure you do things efficiently and get a good return on your investment.
Over the past decade of product design (doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!) we’ve encountered pretty much every mistake you can make on a redesign and we’ve learned how to avoid them.
Here’s a super quick run-down of the ones you need to watch out for.
#1 The One-Hit Wonder
Launching a product without a plan to keep iterating is a recipe for disaster (we don’t want to be dramatic) being left behind. We find people focus so much on the MVP, without a plan to continue research and design to continue iterating the product after launch.
It’s like the old anecdote about the boat depreciating in value by £X-thousand the moment it touches the water.
As soon as the design is applied and the feature is launched, it begins going stale. Are you monitoring how it’s performing? How are users interacting with it? What’s the next iteration to meet users’ evolving needs?
Can you really afford to invest that much in design without knowing where it’s going?
No, thought not.
#2 The Immovable Brief
Design processes are very rarely linear.
The problems outlined at the beginning that loomed largest when the project was signed off sometimes turn out not to be the biggest once you progress further down the line.
We’ll know more tomorrow than we do today and so any brief worth its salt must allow for decisions to be made from the point of maximum understanding.
Clinging doggedly onto a brief that is overly prescriptive will be constrictive, and could end up ultimately strangling your redesign.
#3 The Unbuildable Dream
How to make yourself unpopular as a designer.
Step One: create amazing design work that wows the stakeholders but doesn’t give any consideration to technical constraints.
Take credit. Bask in glory. 🏆👏
Step Two: Hand the designs to developers, leave it for them to say it won’t work and let them take the blame.
Design that takes place in a segmented vacuum can never be successful, no matter how incredible it looks. Development must be a consideration from day one.
#4 The Franken-Product
Don’t get us wrong, we ❤️ iteration.
However, when taking an iterative approach it can be tempting to pick a single section and overhaul it visually.
While that section may end up looking great, the contrast with the rest of the application will cause issues.
It’s important to remember that a key principle of good UI is consistency, and improved UX shouldn’t look completely different, but rather it should bring everything into line.
#5 The Overly Complex Task
Product design entails both visual design and feature design.
Once your product goes past a certain point of complexity the task of redesigning everything becomes too large.
(We’ve already devoted a whole article to the dangers of complexity. Well worth keeping an eye on.)
And with largeness comes unpredictability.
So, what should you do instead?
What we’ve found works best, is to take an agile UX approach. You’re most likely building your products using agile processes, so it’s only logical that your UX design compliment this, right?
To enhance components across the product rather than screens and keep the look and feel close to what’s there as you iterate and build a design language.
Once you have built that design language it’s much easier (and cheaper) to iterate slowly towards a new coherent design.
Need some support from some experienced UX/UI consultants to drive you away from the pitfalls? Feel free to reach out for a chat about your challenge.
