 What are some of the biggest mistakes I made in my early UX career and what would I do now if I could go back to avoid them? I was so focused on UX design and so focused on the dogma of usability and I was like basically like a warrior for usability, for UX design. I was a bit of a pain in the ass to my clients because they would ask me for something and I would sort of fight with them a little bit if it wasn'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, you know it just just I really wanted to stick to the rulebook and what I didn't think about was the fact that these clients don't care about UX and that'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 a 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 experience 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 is 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 to understand the business goals a little bit more made my career more successful and I kept making the mistake of being too dogmatic about the design. As you're watching this video, if you think it's really valuable, we have videos like this every Tuesday. We'd really appreciate if you could subscribe to the channel and hit the bell. So one mistake that I wish I'd avoided at the beginning of my UX 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 just sit down. If I were starting again today I would be a lot more strategic about what I choose to learn because when you're just starting out there's so much exciting stuff out there and you might just hear a video of someone talking about something and you get so excited about it and you get fear of missing out and like this is the thing I need to learn and 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 really good to learn a lot and just 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 and then I would set a timeline for myself and say like 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? Yeah so one mistake that actually stands out to me that I did in 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 is pretty much one of the most important screens of every app but the instructions actually were making different versions of the home screen just to show the client different options that we could pursue and 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. One thing that you viewers of this YouTube channel of AJ and Smart's channel I see you making this mistake all the time in the comments so you know sometimes I'll talk about something like a new Apple product or or some UI and then you write in the comments oh Apple socks or that design sucks blah blah blah blah blah that shows me that you're immature in the way that I was when you're just thinking about the design when you see Apple releasing I don't know they just at WWDC they just showed off the new widgets yes that's not super exciting but if you think about the integration of 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'd known that a bit earlier but it takes time to learn so definitely one 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 so a lot of times I would be working on something and I would want it to be really good and 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 okay and I would still have had the time to work on something to the level that I wanted to get it out at but I didn't and I learned that lesson the hard way and so communicating early on and asking for help even when you think there's a chance you might not me the deadline just 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 gonna get into trouble and I learned that the hard way I try to don't beat myself up when I make mistakes but generally the way I deal with mistakes is if I made a mistake which I'm okay with I really try and figure out what the actual underlying problem is and the reason why the mistake happened and then after I tried and figure that out I just try and find ways to prevent that just trying to take a step back reflect and then come back with a solution and a pretty much like a checklist so you don't make the mistake again so this is gonna sound simple but it's actually really really hard to do so when something goes wrong and you make a mistake just own it and take full responsibility for it and resist the urge to come up with excuses or point a finger at like the situation or the client or a teammate because all of that doesn't really matter focus on what you could have done differently even if you like deep down inside you think it was someone else's fault just own the mistake and say I'm really sorry about this next time like I'll know how to do x better because now I know not to do you know y for example but just own the mistake and this is going to be really really hard so the real question is what are you going to do differently next time to handle that situation thank you for watching this video I hope it's been really valuable to you I want to know in the comments below which piece of advice you found most valuable or most relevant for your UX career and if you think the advice in this video is really valuable we'd really appreciate if you subscribe to the channel nearly three quarters of reviewers aren't subscribed to the channel yet and it makes a huge difference to us we also have a weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to below in the description if you want exclusive access to some amazing UX UI product design and career advice resources check that out too see you next week