Designers are meant to achieve the impossible: Making a complex process look easy. If it’s handled all too well, you stand as a rock star in front of the entire team.

However, if you fail to meet the expectations, it is rather a disappointment. It is because designers can self-critique easily. They are perfectionists and take mistakes too personally.

Even for a perfectionist, there are certain mistakes that they believe to be true. They are some serious myths that we live with. Today is all about those myths that are serious mistakes in the world of design and how to fix them.

Myth 1: Users understand it all

Great designers spend a lot of time researching and gaining intuitive knowledge on new discoveries. They are also dealing with user interface a lot which makes them a victim of ‘Common sense’. What may be common to you, may not always be as easily understood by the user as how you interpret it. Since you are spending so much time in the environment, researching and working on it, it comes to you easy.

This is the reason why these assumptions are the most devastating of all. A user may stumble upon certain controls for the first time that you thought a user may be used to of. Since you are the designer, your job should be to make things easier for them. Guide the user to the finish line, every time. If there are any steps, mention clearly. Also, avoid cluttering the navigation, especially for an ecommerce website design.

Myth 2: Design for the users (only)

We have already heard a lot on this lately: Design for the user. Focusing on the needs of the user that are your audience only are not the only users. Most of the audience finds us by way of searching on Google. Those visitors are also the ones that you need to cater to. Therefore, there’s more of the audience that you actually expected.

There are several kinds of users that interact with your design. So always prototype your design, test it and repeat until you find the website an easy catch in the very first instance.

Myth 3: Clicking and scrolling jails

Clicking and scrolling jails defy the principles of an intuitive design. To ensure that the user clicks or goes through, designer bombard the page with calls to action. Pages are optimized based on these clicking and scrolling jails only. Then there are also those that continue to pop up in the users’ faces and nothing could be more annoying than that.

If you really want to build a long-term relationship with the leads, sacrificing experience, and practically the entire screen shouldn’t be implemented. To make your UX understood, ensure that the scrolling is obvious, so should be the most wanted actions.

Myth 4: Mobile rules are the same

Mobile consumption is on the rise and there’s nothing new about it. The more we are aware, the more we get lost in the making the aesthetics of design so pretty that we totally forget about the cross device testing. If you do not have a responsive website today, regardless of how pretty the design is on computer, the user may have to tweak the screen on the mobile and that is the end of it – he will abandon the site.

It is important to test mobile and desktop separately and ensure that there are fewer taps and tweaking involved. Solve their readability issues instead of sabotaging the mobile UX at the expense of making a mere desktop site look grand.

Myth 5: Design will supersede performance

As mentioned earlier, we are sometimes so lost in the design visuals, we tend to ignore other things. Performance is one of those ignored elements. If a website is not speedy, it will negatively impact conversions. Also, considering errors become an important task because we ignore if a link is broken – because we were so focused on the visuals!

Check in with the analytics tool to locate any errors that are triggered often. Also look into the pages with slow load times because testing a users’ patience isn’t a matter that needs to be taken lightly.

Way Forward

Take these UX myths into account and from next time onwards, don’t fall for the trap! See how the fixes work for your website and let us know in the comments.