# Common failure modes

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.