The Top Mistakes UX Designers Make

While UX designers are taught to fail fast, Scott Berkun talks about the things that they keep failing on, and advice to break the cycle.
By Vicky Teinaki on

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In Berkun’s talk picked by the audience of Puget Sound SIGCHI, he ran through the biggest issues and advice. He goes into details on the mistakes in the post, so instead, here’s a table to see both the mistakes and the advice at the same time.

Mistake Advice
Not credible in the culture Earn credibility in your culture on your culture’s terms.
Never make it easy Make it easy / fun to follow your advice.
Forget your coworkers are meta-users. Design for your developers/managers, as they are the first users of your work.
Never get dirty. Have something at stake
Pretending you have power. Consider switching to a role with power
Ignore possible allies. Seek powerful allies
Vulcan pretension. Get out of your office
Dionysian pretension. … and drop your ego
Don’t know the business. Follow the money

I thought it particularly interesting how he approached the talk:

Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

So what do you think? What other mistakes do UX designers make?

Vicky Teinaki

An England-based Kiwi, Vicky is doing a PhD at Northumbria University into how designers can better talk about touch and products. When not researching or keeping Johnny Holland running, she does the odd bit of web development, pretends her TV licence money goes only to Steven Moffatt shows, and tweets prolifically about all of the above as @vickytnz.

3 comments on this article

  1. сергей on

    Gotta love the cryptic consultant talk. It’s not vague at all

  2. Pingback: Usabilla UX Tweet Scoop – Week 7 of 2012 - The Usabilla Blog

  3. giuseppe on

    i made a slideshare presentation of The top mistakes UX designers make http://tiny.cc/v7ivk. take a look & enjoy!