Check the work against these before review. Most designs that fail, fail here.
Strategy
- Solving the brief, not the problem. The brief described a solution and it got built.
- No metric. Nobody can say what would make this a success.
- Designing for the demo. Works beautifully with the data in the mockup.
- Scope creep by sympathy. Every stakeholder request absorbed; nothing traded away.
Structure
- Navigation mirroring the org chart. The IA matches internal teams, not tasks.
- The happy path only. Every screen assumes success.
- Batch blindness. The expert doing fifty of something has only a one-at-a-time path.
- Modal escalation. A dialog opening a dialog.
- Hidden state. The user cannot tell what the system currently thinks is true.
Interface
- Competing primaries. More than one action styled as the most important.
- Density without hierarchy. Dense data with nothing guiding the eye.
- Iconography without labels. Icons carrying meaning nobody outside the team knows.
- Colour as the only signal. Status carried by hue alone.
- Decoration with no information. Shapes, gradients and illustrations that say nothing.
- The mockup's content. Three-word names, perfect photos, no null values.
System
- Detaching under pressure. A one-off variant made on deadline that becomes permanent.
- Token bypass. A raw value used because the right token didn't exist yet.
- A component with one state. Default designed, everything else deferred.
- Naming divergence. Design calls it one thing, code another.
- Documentation as screenshots. Nothing an engineer can actually use.
Accessibility
- Focus ring removed for aesthetics.
- Placeholder as label.
- Contrast eyeballed on a good monitor.
- Keyboard path never walked.
- Motion with no reduced alternative.
Process
- Hi-fi too early. Structural feedback arriving after the visuals were polished.
- Engineering consulted at handoff. The constraint that reshapes the flow found last.
- Testing the prototype with the team. Everyone already knows how it works.
- The undocumented decision. Agreed in a call, relitigated in month three.