The most important skill that UX designers forget about

No, it’s not about being a master of Figma who knows every shortcut and trick. It’s also not about picking nice colors, design systems, or describing tasks into small checklists…

It may sound crazy but it took me 3 years to understand this. In my opinion, the most important skill that senior and junior designers forget about is — the assumption that you’re wrong. Everything you design is wrong, your beliefs are wrong and your ideas will not work out.

What the hell am I talking about? My best-designed screens that were loved by users and coworkers are the screens where I argued my every decision. If I found a solution for a certain problem then instead of jumping straight to design it — I took a pause and asked myself:

„What if this idea would not work out?”

“What if my assumptions about this feature are wrong?

As designers, we are usually open-minded people but at the same time, we often act like we know everything. If there is someone other who tells us his objections or recommends different solutions then we tend to close our ears and thinking

„I am a designer, I design products so I know the best how to do this. How this developer could find out a better idea than I did?! I have read whole books and articles about things like that…”

You may think — “no, it is not about me” but take a break and ask yourself about your last workshops or reviews from others. How did you act? What was on your mind? Were you likely to hear what they want to say?

With this mindset, you’re killing your opportunity to make the best design. EGO is a silent friend of everybody but you shouldn’t let him talk instead of rationality. Especially at the beginning, it is so hard to accept the fact that your work would be rated by others all the time. You will spend so much time and effort on the design that will be ruined by a few users who will say they don’t like this.

„I am the wrong mindset” will extremely improve your design and workflow instant. So how to start using this? 🤔

1. The hardest first step — stop being attached to the things that you’re creating. You should learn this from the very beginning of your career. Opportunity is murdered every time you let the EGO speak instead of hearing what others want to say.

2. Argue your every belief/idea/solution. Instead of thinking „Yeah, this feature would boost the conversion” ask yourself: How this feature can fail?

• What is the alternative?
• Why this is placed over here instead of there?
• What are the pros & cons?
• What can go wrong with this?

3. Finally, if you can answer all the objections and questions about the design, you’ve dug deep but it seems hard to catch other pain points of your work then you’ve done the job. The effects will show up quickly, trust me — there’s nothing better than playing in PING-PONG with co-workers who try to argue your decisions, but you have the answer to each objection.

✅ Try my checklist that allows me to design great solutions

Basic questions:

• What problem are we solving?
• Is it important to the user?
• Are there no more important problems to solve?
• At what level does the solution need to be/how much time max to spend on it?
• What are the technical/business constraints?
• Are there any edge cases/specific states of this feature?
• What is the user trying to accomplish on this screen?
• What the user can do?
• How have competitors/benchmarks solved this?

Advanced questions:

• How this design can fail?
• How did you come up with this solution, and what were the arguments behind it?
• What is the context of the whole flow? How will the user get here, what will they do, and why will they get here?
• What is a simpler version of this?
• Is there anything we could remove?
• What assumptions are you making when designing it this way?
• Why is it in this place? Could it be somewhere else?
• Why is this element being shown at all?
• Is it worth displaying it by default?
• Why has the screen been organized this way?
• Should we break up some items into separate screens?
• Does the user know what the system status is?
• Have I thought about all the states that can happen?
• Are there any errors/successes/warnings that can happen?
• Why is this solution better than others?
• What are the alternatives?