Did you know that people use alot 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?

Common myths like these aren’t just fun trivia to read over, they perpetuate the world of design quite heavily, and can cause some real damage, so in this article we’ll go over 4 common Myths that we should know!

UX & UI are the Same

It’s a mistake to assume that UX & UI are A.) The same thing or B.) Entirely different. With enough practice in UX Design, you’ll quickly notice that instead, UI is part of the user experience, much like many other smaller cogs and wheels such as accessibility, usability, functionality and many more (which I will talk about soon in an upcoming article, be sure to follow to read it and learn more about UX!).

It’s difficult to create a good experience by purely focussing on visual design, not impossible, but a task that would be more effort than rewarding. However, creating a good experience without visual design is actually not so difficult; before people realised that visual design plays an important part in how our users perceive products, they was quite a lacking focus on the visual aspect!

Of course none of this means to say that you should overly focus on one or the other, as with anything in life, balance is the key!

Simple means Minimal

Simplicity and minimalism are often confused as one and the same thing, not just in User Experience, but in design in general. Minimalism means to take out everything but the bare bone core, without making it unusable, whilst simplicity demands that the task at hand be as easy to complete as possible.

This might not instantly make sense and may make you think — ‘But, that sounds like that same thing to me?’ but after enough practice and experience in creating simple, even minimal designs, it will start to become clear that the key focus of good & simple user experience design isn’t visual or cognitive clutter, it’s whether or not the user finds it easy to do what they came to your product to do.

UX Design demands artistic creativity

It doesn’t hurt to be creative in any walk of life, rather it’s a great asset that colours everything you do from the purely logical to the fantastically creative with vibrancy, but this doesn’t mean you need to be a creative genius, or even be a creative mind. Whilst parts of UX Design ask us as designers to temporarily tap into our creative body (or to load up dribbble & behance for some tactical ‘borrowing’…), a lot of it actually focuses on the logic of experience and the user process! Without logic, the User Experience falls into a state of weird niche art that our users might be interested in at first glance, but thoroughly detest in practicality.

Users will be patient with your product

Believe it or not, users mostly don’t care about what you can give them if it takes them too much investment or effort, they’d be much happier to use their current product or competitor, even if they are tenfold lower in value, but easier to use!

There are a plethora of cognitive biases that back this up, and very clearly shout to us as creators to make things easy for the user. With new products popping up daily, it’s just not enough to give a simple value proposition to our users and assume they’ll work it out from their; the value should speak for itself.

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!

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