Have you ever wondered what’s wrong with all these fancy designs that you see on Dribble or Behance?

It can really hit your self-esteem and bring wrong assumptions to a new designer and an experienced one. Most of the projects on these websites are bending the reality of UX and focusing so much to make something look like a piece of art. As long as you treat this as UI inspiration, this is not that bad. Side effects appear if you look at these projects like it’s thoughtful UX work.

A side effect of treating product design as an art

Have you ever tried to design a certain solution after spending time on dribbble? It’s so easy to blame yourself because our design is not looking like projects that you’ve seen. But do you know how these screens are made? The designer picks a few features or patterns that… fit well with the mockup. Most of that what you see is made like this. There is no thinking about who would use the product. The designer just uses patterns that can look good and ta-dah!

But how does it affect your work? Let’s say you’ve got a job to do — design a homepage for the client’s product. Ask yourself if your process doesn’t look like this:

• 👉🏻 1. Open a platform like dribbble
• 👉🏻 2. Pick the projects that your eyes really like.
• 👉🏻 3. Decide what you would like to use in your design from it.
• 👉🏻 4. Run Figma and start design.
• 😱 5. But wait… what the hell should be on this website, why and what’s the architecture’s information? What is the CTA (call to action) that we want to place?

And you realize the UX of your design is a step that you completely skip. If you focus on the UI at first and later you’re trying to fit the UX into thisthen I would recommend taking a step back and reversing your process. It’s so easy to make a product that looks good but no one will use this. The design job should start in your mind where you ask questions like what and why.

Reality check — your design will not be implemented

If you go to school at 13 years old that try to fit into the environment then you find out smoking cigarettes, skipping lessons, and bullying others are actions that get you to respect from others. You don’t care if it is good or not — it works and people like you. After some time you understand how stupid and unnecessary it was.

The same thing happens to you if you’re a designer.Focusing on that how things looks instead of how things should work and why. You feel proud about your job because it’s pretty until you ask yourselfwhy and for what you’ve designed it. Of course, if you want to be specifically only a UI designer then the knowledge about UX is not that much required from you (but unfortunately job market would be smaller).

There is a skill that you need to knowas both a UI and UX designer. Knowledge about what is easy to implement vswhat is hard and requires spending a lot of money and time. This is something that you will do in your whole career — designing solutions that are easy to implement and satisfy you.

But wait, how does this relate to the Dribbble or Behance? Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you but most of the projects that you see can’t be done in real life. Flying 3D objects that follow your mouse are cool but the design is a business and someone needs to hire developers to code it. So if the developer can complete important features in a month or spend that time making cool animations then I guess it’s clear what’s a rational choice.

The same thing is with designing certain components — you can make an abstract, unique pattern that will cost 6 times more to code or just focus on patterns that look great and are easy to make. Real-life would verify your design a lot of time and you need to find a proper balance to make something that satisfies you and it’s possible to bring this to the working product.