UI/UX Mistakes I See New Designers Make

When you first step into UI/UX design, it feels like an adventure. You’re opening Figma, sketching ideas, watching tutorials, maybe even sharing your first shots on Dribbble or Behance, everything looks fresh and exciting.

But here’s the thing: I’ve noticed a lot of new designers (my past self-included) fall into the same traps again and again. And while these mistakes might seem small, they can completely change how people experience your work.

So let’s sit down and talk through the common mistakes I keep seeing not to criticize, but to help you avoid the headaches I’ve already been through.

Designing for Dribbble, Not for People

This is probably the number one mistake. I get it you see these gorgeous shots online, all neon gradients, 3D icons, and wild animations. They look amazing on your feed, so you want to make something just like that.

The problem? Dribbble shots are designed for other designers, not for actual users. They don’t have to work in real life they just have to look pretty but real users don’t care about “pretty” if they can’t find the search bar or if the button text is too tiny to read.

Design for humans first, a clean, boring-looking but usable app will always beat a beautiful-but-confusing one.

Relying Too Much on “Lorem Ipsum”

I call this the “illusion of perfection.” Beginners love to fill their mock-ups with fake text because it makes the screen look balanced. But then comes the actual content and suddenly the headlines are too long, the paragraphs don’t fit, or the tone feels off.

Content and design are inseparable if you design around “Lorem Ipsum,” you’re building a house without knowing how much furniture has to fit inside always push to work with real or at least realistic content early on.

Overcomplicating Navigation

I once saw a beginner’s portfolio project where the homepage had a 12-item dropdown menu, plus a sidebar, plus icons with no labels. It looked “feature-rich,” but when I tried to imagine using it, my brain froze.

Here’s the truth: navigation should feel invisible. If users have to stop and think about how to move around, you’ve already lost them, start simple because people don’t mind scrolling a little more, but they do mind feeling lost.

Forgetting About Mobile

I can’t stress this enough, most people will see your work on a phone, not a giant monitor. But beginners often design big, beautiful desktop screens first and then squish them down for mobile. The result? Buttons too tiny to tap, text unreadable, layouts breaking.

Mobile-first design isn’t just a buzzword it’s reality. If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work.

Throwing Every Font and Colour Into the Mix

I’ve done this infect most of us have, when you’re new, you get excited about fonts, colours, and styles. So, you try them all. One page might have five different fonts, six button styles, and enough colours to look like a candy store.

But here’s the problem: users don’t see “creativity,” they see chaos, Consistency is what makes a design feel professional, limit yourself one or two fonts, a primary colour with accents, and a consistent system for spacing and components, “Simplicity builds trust”

Skipping Accessibility

Accessibility often gets ignored by beginners, and I get why, it feels like “extra work” when you’re just trying to get the basics down, but the truth is, ignoring accessibility means cutting out real people.

Text contrast matters: If someone with weaker eyesight can’t read your light-gray text, that’s a problem.

Button sizes matter: If people can’t tap them easily, the app becomes frustrating.

Alt text, keyboard navigation, screen readers: All of this makes your design more inclusive.

“Accessibility isn’t just kindness; it’s usability”

Designing Without Testing

When you’re new, you fall into the trap of designing in a bubble, you finish a screen, stare at it for hours, and convince yourself it’s flawless. But then you show it to someone else and they get stuck within 10 seconds.

Testing doesn’t have to be fancy, show your design to a friend, ask them to complete a task (“Can you find the checkout button?”), and watch where they struggle. You’ll learn more from 5 minutes of testing than from 5 hours of tweaking shadows.

Adding Features Just to Look “Professional”

New designers often think more is equal to better, but NO! it’s not. More buttons, more tabs, more call-to-actions but too much information is overwhelming.

Good design is about editing It’s knowing what to leave out, every element should earn its place if you can remove something without hurting the experience, do it. Users will thank you for the simplicity.

Copying Without Understanding

We’ve all copied before, you see a nice Netflix UI, or Spotify’s design, and you think, “Cool, I’ll make mine look like that.” But copying blindly without understanding why it works is where things go wrong.

Netflix’s interface is simple because people browse endlessly, Spotify’s gradient buttons work because music is playful and vibrant, that doesn’t mean the same design works for a banking app.

Inspiration is good but blind copying isn’t, ask yourself: why does this design choice exist? Does it fit my project’s needs?

Forgetting That Design = Communication

At the end of the day, design is communication, it’s not art for art’s sake if your interface looks beautiful but people can’t figure out what to do, you haven’t solved the problem.

Good design disappears, it feels so natural that people barely notice it and beginners often want to be noticed but Professionals? well they just want their work to disappear into the background so the user can focus on what they came to do.

My Own Mistakes (And What They Taught Me)

When I started, I made most of these mistakes, and i still sometimes do, I’d obsess over making my designs look different, adding effects just to stand out, and ignoring things like content or accessibility It sure looked good in my portfolio but fell apart when tested.

Over time, I learned that design is less about being flashy and more about being thoughtful, Users don’t really care about your gradient buttons; they care about whether they can buy the thing they came for without stress.

That’s the real shift: from designing for yourself to designing for people.