Did you know that people use a lot more than 10% of their brain? Or that goldfish don’t actually have a 3 second memory? How about that the Great Wall of China is not the only man-made structure that can be seen from space?
Every discipline accumulates myths - ideas that circulate widely enough to feel like common knowledge but that don't hold up under examination.
UX design has its share, and some of them cause genuine problems: they lead designers to make avoidable mistakes, or to misrepresent their work to colleagues and stakeholders.
In this article, I’ll explore four of those.
UX and UI are the same thing
The conflation of UX and UI is understandable - they overlap, they're often done by the same person, and in casual conversation the terms get used interchangeably, but, they describe different things.
UI refers to the visual and interactive surface of a product: the components, the layout, the typography, the colour, the micro-interactions.
UX refers to the complete experience a person has whilst using that product, which includes the UI but also encompasses information architecture, content strategy, accessibility, flow, error handling, and the user's emotional state across the whole journey.
The practical difference matters because it affects how work gets evaluated - A product with a beautiful UI can still deliver a poor UX if the navigation is confusing, the task flows are poorly designed, or the content fails to answer the user's questions.
Conversely, a product with sparse or functional visual design can deliver a very good UX if it gets those underlying elements right.
Treating UI quality as a proxy for UX quality is one of the more common evaluation errors in product teams, and it tends to surface most clearly during usability testing, where products that looked excellent in design reviews reveal significant friction in use.
Simplicity means minimalism
These two words are frequently used as synonyms in design discussions, but they describe different goals.
Minimalism is an aesthetic position: it involves stripping an interface down to as few elements as possible, removing decoration, reducing visual noise, and placing what remains in generous negative space.
Simplicity is a functional position: it describes how easy it is for a user to complete the task they came to do.
The distinction matters, because they can point in entirely different directions: A minimal interface that sacrifices navigational clarity in pursuit of visual restraint can be harder to use than a more visually complex one that structures information effectively.
Alternatively, a simple interface - one that makes every task as easy as possible - might require more elements on screen, not fewer, if those elements provide the context and feedback users need.
The question for UX design is not "How little can we show?" but "What does this user need to accomplish their goal, and how do we make that as clear as possible?" - Sometimes the answer is minimal; often it isn't.
UX requires artistic creativity
Creative capability is an asset in design - the ability to generate novel solutions, to approach problems without being anchored to existing conventions, to find unexpected approaches to familiar challenges. But it is not the primary demand of UX work, and the belief that it is, deters some people from the field who would be excellent practitioners.
A large part of UX practice is analytical rather than generative, involving understanding users through research, identifying where current experiences create friction, making structured decisions about information architecture and flow, designing for edge cases as well as ideal paths, and communicating design decisions in terms that engineers and stakeholders can act on. Most of the work is closer to problem-solving under constraints than to artistic expression.
Creativity enters most productively not in the generation of novel visual ideas but in the identification of approaches to design problems that balance user needs, business requirements, and technical feasibility in ways that didn't seem obvious at the outset.
Users will be patient with your product
This may be the most consequential myth on the list, because it shapes how designers and product teams think about quality thresholds. The assumption that users will invest time in learning a product that offers genuine value is intuitive - but it isn't well supported by evidence about how people actually behave.
Users have an enormous number of alternatives available to them, with very little time to spend on them, alongside the cost of switching typically being low. A product that is difficult to use in its first session - that requires significant cognitive effort to understand, that doesn't make its value evident quickly, that creates friction on the path to the first meaningful action - loses most users who encounter it.
The cognitive biases that govern switching decisions tend to favour what is familiar and easy over what is objectively superior; the status quo, however imperfect, has an advantage that a new product needs to overcome, not merely equal.
This is what makes the early experience of a product so consequential: the window in which a user decides whether to invest further is shorter than most product teams assume, and the tolerance for difficulty is lower.
Recognising these myths for what they are doesn't make the work easier, but it does make it more accurate. UX practice benefits from clear thinking about what the discipline actually is, what it demands, and what it can and cannot control - and these four are good places to start.
In Summary
With a few myths busted, now we’re better equipped to not only understand what’s going on in the foundational levels of User Experience Design, but also what goes into creating effective, usable, and valuable experiences for our users, that genuinely provide benefit to their day!
