Dribbble Broke Ux Design

More flows, less coats of paint.

Back when I started my career as a designer (and founded @ideaware) I remember working countless hours with customers iterating through use cases, personas and flows. What we used to call back in the day User Experience (not sure what that applies to anymore).

The output from those exercises lead to clearly defined user interactions that met the desired outcome in the product. Only after this, did we “skin” the product creating visual proposals and ultimately a design system.

I saw this slowly change with the advent of dribbble.

Dribbble basically became a pissing contest between seasoned and junior designers (I’m guilty of this) on who would create the most popular piece of screenshot.

Screenshots that mean nothing in terms of UX.

So while many experienced agencies and designers have kept digging away in the trenches thinking about how an interface should work, a whole new generation of designers began skipping all of this, focusing on just the visual aspect.

This is why I think dribbble broke UX design as a practice.

Instead, think user flows first.

A nice building needs a structure behind it. Same applies to software products. As designers, we must think first about how a user will interact with a product, and most importantly what outcomes do we want to encourage from using the product.

Apply a nice coat of paint later.

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