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I've spent years making bad designs, so I can tell you exactly what makes something look like it was made by a beginner.
Learn 7 common UI/UX beginner mistakes and how to fix them with practical tips using a recipe app redesign.
Key Takeaways
- Plan user flow carefully to avoid missing key navigation and interaction options.
- Less is more with visual effects; subtlety improves clarity and professionalism.
- Consistent spacing and components unify the design and improve usability.
- Use well-matched icons and provide labels or tooltips for clarity.
- Interactive feedback is essential to communicate system status and user actions.
Summary
- Mistake 1: Poor user flow, missing search and skip options disrupt user experience.
- Mistake 2: Overusing visual effects like gradients and harsh shadows creates clutter.
- Mistake 3: Inadequate spacing can make UI feel cramped; use grids and auto layout.
- Mistake 4: Inconsistent components such as varied corner radii and styles reduce polish.
- Mistake 5: Poor icon usage slows browsing; use consistent icon libraries and labels.
- Mistake 6: Redundant UI elements add unnecessary clutter and should be removed.
- Mistake 7: Lack of interactive feedback makes the interface feel unresponsive.
- Bonus Mistake 8: Over-designed charts can be unreadable; simplicity conveys data better.
- The video uses a real recipe app redesign to demonstrate each mistake and improvement.
- The Figma file with examples is available via the video description link.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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By the end of this video, you'll be able to spot those mistakes instantly.
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and fix them just as fast. We'll look at real examples, before and afters, and easy ways to improve UI without starting from scratch.
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We're going to redesign this simple recipe app, one mistake at a time until it looks polished and production ready.
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Mistake number one: User Flow.
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Let's start with something that quietly ruins your UX: user flow.
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Here's our allergy screen with six preset options, but no search bar if someone's allergic to something else.
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We also don't have a skip button either.
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What if the user doesn't have any allergies?
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These are things you will miss if you don't plan out your flow, but users, they'll feel it instantly.
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So, even something as simple as sketching boxes on paper helps you catch major gaps early on.
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And it's not just all about big stuff; little touches like a filter icon on the search bar or a save button up top go a long way.
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The most commonly missed elements: navigation links, hidden states, and dynamic interactions, like button hovers or micro-interactions.
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Mistake number two: overusing effects.
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Early on, I was addicted to visual effects.
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Shadows, glows, gradients, you name it.
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But the truth, overusing them can make your designs feel cluttered and amateur.
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Let's start with the gradient here.
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It's blue and green.
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And it's just not working.
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If you really need a gradient, stick to variations of the same color, like a darker or lighter green.
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But honestly, this would look way cleaner with no gradient at all.
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And that's usually the case.
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Now, let's talk drop shadows for a second.
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These Figma defaults are way too harsh.
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Instead of just lowering opacity, I changed the entire shadow color, usually to a light gray, and increase the blur significantly.
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Or, once again, remove the shadow completely.
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Because most of the time, less visual noise equals a better design.
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Mistake number three: spacing.
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Most beginner UIs are packed way too tight, like my old app design.
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So, we'll use two tools here: grids and auto layout to make it so much better.
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First, we'll set up a three-column grid for this screen and two-column grid here with these measurements.
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Now, just align elements to the grid as closely as possible.
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If something needs to break the grid slightly, like these elements, just leave it as is if it still feels balanced.
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Next, for stacked content like this, increase the vertical spacing to let things breathe and group naturally.
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Especially on mobile screens, you'll need more space than you think.
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Now, check out these cards and chips.
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The layouts are pretty wonky.
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Perfect time to use auto layout.
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Turn off vertical trim for pixel-perfect control and adjust spacing like this.
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Repeat this across your UI to keep spacing consistent and clean.
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Which is a perfect segue into the next mistake most designers make.
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Mistake number four: inconsistent components.
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Like spacing, this one kills me since it's just so easy to fix.
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You'll notice throughout our design, we have all sorts of different corner radiuses and components, like this back and skip button.
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That are exactly the same but designed differently, which just makes the design feel amateur.
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Instead, let's make a few changes.
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First, we'll make the two search bars identical, other than the prompting text.
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We'll set the corner radius of all smaller components to be 10 pixels.
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This is an important one that most designers miss.
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And of course, we'll update the skip button and back button to match in size, corner radius, and style.
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Being consistent means using styles for colors, variables for measurements, and components for UI elements to really bring your design together.
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Mistake number five: icons.
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I think people underestimate how much good icons do for a design and how detrimental bad icons are.
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First of all, we have no icons on these cards here, which forces users to read more and slows down the browsing process.
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Let's add in some good icons and replace the save text.
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Then up above, we have icons, but they're mismatched in fill, line width, and style.
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We can fix this by using the same library of icons, like Flat Icons.
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On their website, select interface icons and then sort by stroke width and corner to get some consistent results.
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Make sure when you download to grab SVG for the best results.
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If you want to choose a Figma plugin instead, I like Phosphor Icons and Feather Icons.
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Finally, we have a fair amount of icons down here without labels.
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If the icons are well known enough, like the house, bookmark, and user, then you don't need to have anything.
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But for these two, a tool tip pop-up could make the onboarding process much smoother.
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Just try not to have bizarre icons everywhere.
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Finally, this is a very pro tip.
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But interestingly, it is okay to have different styles of icons in the same design, but only if they're visually separate.
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For example, these nav bar icons are slightly different than the food icons, and those are different than our recipe icons.
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But it all works together since they're in separate areas of our design and used for different things.
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Mistake number six: redundant elements.
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Having redundant elements is actually a really common mistake, especially as the trend of having stuff everywhere takes over.
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Looking at this screen, we can get rid of this arrow since we'll be able to swipe on mobile.
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And same idea down below.
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We can also get rid of this arrow since it's really just visual clutter and dim down the color of the button.
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You could probably argue that these arrows aren't needed either.
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But we are going to keep those.
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Finally, the stroke on these elements is really not needed.
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If you are worried about contrast ratios, dimming it down significantly is a good option too.
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But we'll just rip them straight out.
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Mistake number seven: interactive feedback.
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We've covered overusing effects, so now let's cover the underuse of different interactive effects.
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For example, if we're navigating through a flow, but it takes a split second longer for the next screen to load, it looks like we haven't even clicked on the button at all.
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But if we make it grayed out when we click on it, we've added some interaction and it shows the user that the next screen is coming.
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Even better, we could add a loading wheel if it's really taking a long time.
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Another good example is clicking on the save icon.
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Filling it in is a great first step, but we could also add a red dot to our save tab, so when we click on the icon, we get it filled in.
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And it's clear to the user that there's a new recipe added to the save tab.
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We've actually made an entire video just about interactive feedback and micro-interactions.
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So, check out that video afterwards to see some really smooth animations.
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Bonus mistake number eight: charts.
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This is a bonus tip since it has nothing to do with our recipe app.
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But charts are so often messed up by over-designing that thing that I thought I should make a point to mention it.
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I have two charts here.
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Which one do you think I got from Dribbble?
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The one on the right.
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Yes.
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And it's basically impossible to read without any vertical axis.
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And even if we had a vertical axis, it's hard to tell where the bar ends with a rounded top.
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And then there are 16 bars here, but only seven days of the week.
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Why would you do that?
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Whereas the one on the left is simple, definitely less aesthetic, but conveys so much more useful information to the user.
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And that is everything you'll need to start spotting and correcting beginner mistakes.
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The Figma file with the mistakes and the full app is in the link in description.
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Other than that, thank you so much for watching.
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And I'll see you in the next one.
Topics:UI designUX mistakesbeginner UI tipsuser flowvisual effectsspacing in UIconsistent componentsicon designinteractive feedbackFigma tutorial
