“I Stopped Designing Screens. I Started Designing Decisions.”

  I Stopped Designing Screens. I Started Designing Decisions. What changed when I stopped asking “What should this screen look like?” and started asking “What decision is the user trying to make?” When I started learning UI/UX, I thought good design meant making interfaces look clean. I focused on spacing, typography, colors, components, and whether a screen felt “modern.” Those things matter. But I eventually realized something uncomfortable: A polished interface can still be a bad product. The real challenge isn't creating a beautiful screen. It's understanding what the user is trying to accomplish, what is getting in their way, and what the business needs to achieve at the same time. That changed the way I design. The screen isn't the problem Imagine a user opening a health app before visiting a doctor. At first glance, the problem might seem simple: “They need a place to store their medical records.” So you could design: Upload button Documents section Search Categories...

  Empathy Is Not Guessing What Users Feel I used to think empathy meant understanding how the user feels. Now I think it means something slightly different: Being willing to accept that I might be wrong about them. That's a much harder thing to practice. As designers, it's easy to look at a problem and immediately create a solution. A user can't find something. → Add a button. Users are confused. → Improve the copy. People aren't completing a flow. → Reduce the number of steps. Sometimes those solutions are right. But before designing them, there is a more important question: Why is this happening? Empathy starts with curiosity When I started learning UX, I often approached problems with assumptions. I thought I knew what users wanted because the solution seemed obvious to me. But users don't experience products the way designers do. They don't see our information architecture. They don't know our design system. They don't understand the reasoning behind...