There is a stage in early design careers that is almost universal: a period where confidence outpaces ability, where you are certain enough in your instincts to act on them but not yet experienced enough to know when those instincts are wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes this well; the less we know, the more sure of ourselves we tend to feel, because we don't yet know enough to recognise the gaps.
Looking back on my first year in UX, most of the mistakes I made fit somewhere inside that window. Not dramatic failures, but habits and assumptions that quietly limited the quality of the work until something shifted and they became visible. These are six of them.
1. Identifying with my designs
The first, and perhaps the hardest to unlearn, is the tendency to treat designs as expressions of yourself rather than as hypotheses to be tested. When this happens, feedback stops feeling like information and starts feeling like criticism - and the design process quietly stops serving the user, instead starts serving the designer's ego.
The irony is that this attachment tends to produce worse work. Tunnel vision sets in, cognitive dissonance does its work, and the design becomes increasingly shaped by what you want it to be rather than what the evidence suggests it should be. The shift from treating designs as yours to treating them as the team's best current thinking is one of the most practically useful things that can happen early in a design career; it makes collaboration easier, feedback more absorbable, and the work itself significantly more honest.
2. Trying to reinvent the wheel
There is a version of creative ambition in early UX that mistakes novelty for quality: the instinct to design something new, something that doesn't look like anything else, something no one has done before. It sounds like exactly the right instinct to have as a designer, and in some contexts it is.
But most of the time, users don't want something they've never seen before; they want something that works, and many of the patterns that define digital interfaces - navigation structures, form layouts, error states, feedback mechanisms - exist because they have been tested against millions of users over many years and have survived. Ignoring that in favour of originality is not creative, it's inefficient, and more often than not the user pays for it. Simplicity, familiarity, and convention are not the enemies of good design; they are the foundation on which it is built.
3. Designing for myself instead of for users
This one is deceptively easy to fall into, because in the absence of research the default user is always yourself - your mental models, your preferences, your assumptions about how something should work. Those assumptions feel reliable because they're based on direct experience, just not the right person's.
The beliefs of designers, stakeholders, and product managers about how something should be experienced matter, but they are a starting point, not a conclusion. What users actually do - which is often quite different from what we expect - is the conclusion. Getting curious about that gap, rather than dismissive of it, is one of the more formative shifts of an early career.
4. Making it attractive before making it usable
There is a particular kind of design review early in a career where something looks genuinely impressive and falls apart the moment you try to use it: beautiful typography, confident colour, strong visual hierarchy - and then a form that doesn't make sense, navigation that leads nowhere, a flow that makes assumptions the user can't follow.
Aesthetics matter in UX; a well-crafted visual experience builds trust and shapes how users feel about a product. But all of that comes after usability, not before it. A design that is beautiful but doesn't work is not a good design with a usage problem, it is a failed design that happens to look confident. Resolving the functional questions first, before investing in the visual finish, changes the quality of everything that follows.
5. Adding when I should have been subtracting
The tendency to accumulate - features, elements, options, information - is one of the most consistent pressures in product design. Stakeholders want more, briefs grow, scope creeps, and the path of least resistance is almost always to add rather than to question whether the addition serves the user at all.
Every element added to a design asks something of the user: attention, processing, a decision. Those costs compound quickly, and the result - a crowded and effortful experience - tends to erode the quality of whatever was genuinely good about the design to begin with. Less is more isn't a stylistic preference; it is a cognitive one. Users have a finite capacity for complexity, and the designs that work best are the ones that respect it.
6. Underestimating the power of words
UX writing is the area I spent least time on in my first year, which in retrospect was a significant oversight. The words inside a product - labels, instructions, error messages, confirmations, microcopy of every kind - shape the experience as directly as layout or visual design, and in some moments more so.
The psychology behind how users read and respond to language is well documented; tone creates trust or erodes it, clarity reduces friction, and the right word at a moment of user uncertainty can entirely change the outcome of an interaction. Treating UX writing as a discipline rather than a finishing touch is something I would do differently.
In summary
Most of these mistakes share a common root: designing from the inside out, from your own perspective rather than the user's, from instinct rather than evidence. The shift that comes with experience is not necessarily a change in ability - it is a change in orientation; towards the user, towards the evidence, and away from the assumption that what feels right to you is what works best for them. That shift is learnable, and the sooner it happens, the better the work tends to become.
