Why is it hard for newbies to start?
Weak visual vision
Often, beginners copy someone else's style and lock up on it. They forget that design needs to generate a lot of ideas that don't necessarily have to be beautiful and well developed from the beginning. It's a common design-school error: experts come out of it by the prophylactics and want to do perfect projects right away. But it works backwards: it's better to come up with a few different options, and then gradually throw away the wrong ones and move on to the details at the end.
Experience in a Vacuum — No Real Tasks for Newcomers
Few people understand that the designer's purpose is to solve a request for business, not just to create a beautiful design-machine in Figma. So only professionals who enter the profession, instead of solving a problem, draw a beautiful picture. This transition from beauty to functionality is not easy, but it's very important for career growth. In fact, it's one of the main challenges in starting a designer's career.
Every year, the demand for a specialist increases.
A set of basic skills is already extensive, and it is also associated with knowledge in product analysis, design, animation, and so on. Self-development is very difficult, almost always requires a leader or a mentor.
High competition and often unrealistic demands from companies create additional difficulties: many are looking for professionals for jungle salaries.
4 rookie mistakes and how to work with them
You can identify a few testes that almost all beginner designers have, but you can easily handle them if you see them in your work.
1. To see work as an art. Young people often think they're artists, and they don't do the same thing: they check the gaps between the blocks of the text, they pick colors for hours and try to build a composition in the golden section. All of this is almost not applicable to the design of interfaces. The area is not just called Human Interface Design, it's very practical: it's important to design the interface for a person to work with a computer, website or app, and first of all think about how convenient and easy to use the product. Here's the best advice: think first about the function and then the aesthetics.
2. To complicate the interface and decorate unnecessary elements. Designers often try to add more icons, graphics and other "precises" to a complex interface. In such a case, there is a good rule: the smaller the design, the better. A minimum set of elements is good for both the designer and the future user. The first will do the job easier and faster, and the second will reduce the time needed to solve the request. This should remember the main metric, Time on Task.
3. Playing extra screens and actions for the user. The motto of many beginners is, "It's hard for professionals." Because of this, they deliberately complicate some steps to show how much they can do. For the same reason, you can see the websites of restaurants and cafes that organize dijital men in the same way as normal ones directly at the establishment. Everywhere you add graphics, animated pictures and banners that overload the page and distract from the main one. For example, a telephone number on which a client can book a table and pay for dinner is almost impossible to find.
4. Not to see the overall picture of the process. The beginners try not to leave the comfort zone and think only as part of the task at hand. They lose a sense of scale and fail to connect their part of the work with the overall objective of the project. This creates situations where the designer creates a cool solution that makes registration easier from three steps to two, but then the website transfers the user to a complex set of settings: it loses the whole effect of improvement. To see such errors in time, you have to communicate with other departments: design, marketing, business. The designer can draw their attention to the problem and propose a solution that goes beyond "making the design of the registration." It is important to always feel the extent of the changes that the designer makes to the product.
Lifehucky: How to create a cool interface
Focus on UX is the user's experience. The designer's product should be simple and understandable in the first place. Therefore, when designing a design, you have to always think about the client and the goal he wants to achieve.
It is important to understand that the objectives of each site and application are completely different, so it is worth taking into account the context of the future design. For example, the registration steps in the airline ticket and food delivery application applications will be different. A specialist has to be empathetic with the user so that he can always think about it and imagine how he will work with the product.
Understandable UI is how a website or application looks. A good interface is always made with the attention of a particular user. Since the concept of a user-friendly interface is different for all, the designer needs to separate the target audience from the others and understand how it will be more convenient to use the product.
This approach makes it possible to create interfaces that are truly understandable to a particular audience with certain expectations of the product.
It also welcomes simplicity, so if you don't know at all what to do with the interface, use the principle of "to understand my grandmother." It works in any situation you don't understand.
Conduct corridor interviews and test the interface. It is not possible to calculate exactly how relevant the product will be, so it is better to start with a small design and then add new functions. So you can run the product quickly and develop it to the maximum extent possible, taking into account the needs of the target audience.
Consider, for example, the design for the Generald Photos, a service that generates photos of faces based on artificial intelligence. The first version of the product was consciously designed in the form of a portal of large filter discharge photos: skin colour, hair, race.
The fact is that the original audience was a small group of enthusiasts and companies that are developing artificial intelligence. It's very important for them to have the technical details and the ability to accurately filter the release. So only after this stage, when the hypothesis was confirmed and the product was actually in demand, started testing other use scenarios and taking into account a wider audience. For example, they added similar photographs.
And they started to add functions that are useful directly to the developer company. Because the generation of individuals by artificial intelligence is an experimental thing, I wanted to teach them to make less mistakes and unnatural photos. The cheapest solution that proved very useful is to add to every photo a lyke and a diesel to make users appreciate how well the photo was done. Many have turned it into a game that "hunted" for poorly designed photos and put them on a dyslake. The neural network has been learning from these assessments and has gradually improved.
It may seem that only the product manager, developer or analyst can add these things, but a good designer does it as often as he does. It's very important for him to understand the audience and the product, turn on the empathy, and imagine how best to do it simultaneously for the customer and the consumer.
Using a design system to create a product quickly and qualitatively. If you work for a company that has several products and services, it's an excellent solution to bring all design elements to the same style. This is an obvious idea, but it is not always given enough attention. Why would a user re-educate each time to find the right elements? Why would a designer think each time about new visual UX solutions? Can you standardize them so that the client always knows what to expect, starting with another company service. In the West, it has a big term from perception psychology, which means "expected assignment".
It reduces the same Time on Task, makes life easier for the user because it is easier to move from one service to another, and helps the business to start new products faster, without a long development phase from scratch.
There are mistakes and difficulties in any field, but starting work is easier when you know them in advance, and these recommendations will help professionals to see their gaps and go up the professional ladder faster.