1. Don’t be too Dogmatic About the Design.

I was so focused on UX design and so focused on the dogma of usability, and I was basically like a warrior for usability, for UX design. I was a bit of pain with my clients because they would ask me for something, and I would sort of fight with them a little bit if it weren’t really connecting or aligning with the way that I wanted to do UX because I wanted to do UX design the proper way, you know perfect usability. I really wanted to stick to the rulebook and what I didn’t think about was that these clients don’t care about UX and that it’s not their job to care about UX. They’re coming to me because they want to sell something online or make something more engaging. They’re not coming to me to make just nice usability. They have a business goal behind why they’re coming to me, and now when I talk to clients, I actually lead with the business goals. I ask them about their business goals. I’ve learned the language that they speak, and a lot of the ways that I’ve learned the language that they speak is obviously experienced and being in the rooms with them. But I’ve also read a couple of books that have helped.

So, for example, the Lean Startup, The Lean Startup is a great book that will teach you sort of like the ways to understand how products are made from the product manager and CEO perspective, hacking growth as a great book that you can read if you’re looking to get that perspective as well and so just for me as a designer, understanding the business goals a little bit more, made my career more successful. I kept making the mistake of being too dogmatic about the design.

2. Pick One and Dive Deep into it.

Another mistake that I wish I’d avoided at the beginning of my career is not picking something and sticking with it long enough, I didn’t have the patience, and the solution for that would be really to sit down. If I were starting again today, I’d be a lot more strategic about what I choose to learn because when you’re just starting, there’s so much exciting stuff out there. You might hear a video of someone talking about something, you get so excited about it, and you get fear of missing out like, this is the thing I need to learn. You stop everything you were doing, and you go and learn that and if you do that a lot, then you would be just all over the place, and you wouldn’t have anything that you specialize in, and so the way I would counter that is that it’s still perfect to learn a lot and to explore in the beginning. But I would be more strategic about it. I would sit down and write down why I want to learn something, why I think it would benefit me. Then I would set a timeline for myself and say, all right, I’m going to go really deep on this for two months, and I’m not going to focus on anything else during that period, and then at the end of the two months, I say like, do I want to continue down this road? Do I want to develop this further, or is there something that I think would be even more beneficial now?

3. Hear Even Simple Instructions that Your Clients instruct

Another mistake that actually stands out to me that I did a client project was basically ignoring the instruction because I was assuming that as a designer, I know what’s going to work, and that was basically a huge mistake because in the end, like I should have worked on the home screen, which was pretty much one of the most important screens of every app, but the instructions actually were making different versions of the home screen to show the client different options that we could pursue. Because I didn’t see really the bigger picture of why I should make different options, I just followed this narrow path that my brain pretty much laid out to me and just made one version of the home screen.

4. Don’t Just Be Reliant Only on Design; Instead, See the Bigger Picture of that Product.

When you see Apple releasing the new widgets, yes, that’s not super exciting. But if you think about integrating all of their services, if you think about the business models behind it, then it’s a bit more interesting. So I think the idea that being a UX designer is not just about the visuals and the user experience, but also about the bigger picture of the product and sort of the business behind the product. I wish I had known that a bit earlier, but it takes time to learn.

5. Always Be in Touch with Your Manager or Boss

So definitely, a mistake that I made a lot early in my career is not communicating with my manager or my boss early enough about when I needed help or when I needed more time. I would be working on something many times, and I would want it to be perfect. So I would go over the deadline and not communicate that until it was too late, that would cause problems, and if I had just communicated that I needed more time for something, things would have been OK. I would still have had the time to work on something to the level I wanted to get it out. But I didn’t, and I learned that lesson the hard way. So communicating early on and asking for help, even when you think there is a chance you might not meet a deadline, communicate that very early, see if you can ask for more time or if you can reduce the scope of the thing that you’re working on because if you don’t, you’re going to get into trouble and I learned that the hard way.