Why UX Feels Harder After You Know the Rules

 A designer has just joined a product team. They know the rules: research first, define the problem, map flows, test solutions. They’ve shipped work before, felt confident in their craft, and trusted the process.

Now, they’re handed a project already in motion.

The research is solid, but incomplete. As they read through it, it offers direction, not certainty. Some insights clearly point to user needs, while others raise new questions that were never fully answered. It’s usable, but it doesn’t provide the clarity they’re used to starting with. The foundation feels slightly uneven — and they notice it immediately.

As they move into the design work, that feeling follows them. Some screens already exist. Some decisions were made before they arrived. Not everything is documented. The team is moving forward anyway. There isn’t a clean slate or a clear starting point — just a series of open threads that need to be picked up.

For a designer used to defined sequences of steps, this is uncomfortable. They can’t be sure the step before this one was ever fully resolved.

They bring their concerns to a senior designer.

“I’m trying to understand what assumptions we’re carrying forward,” they say. “The research makes sense, but there are gaps, and I’m not sure how much we’re meant to revisit.”

The senior designer listens, nods, and responds calmly.

“The research is good,” they say. “It gives us enough to move forward. Not everything will feel fully tied up — and that’s okay. Part of the job is knowing when to move and when to dig deeper.”

It isn’t a dismissal. It’s perspective.

As the project progresses, the designer reviews the work for accessibility. Some issues are straightforward. Others are more nuanced. Color contrast is acceptable in most places, but they notice something bigger: the Next button and the Cancel button share the same styling. Functionally, they do very different things. From a usability and accessibility standpoint, that’s a problem.

They flag it, adjust what they can, and document the rest. It bothers them — not because it’s wrong, but because they know how this would be handled if they had full control.

Shortly after, they’re asked to help synthesize results from a second round of high-fidelity usability testing. They didn’t run the sessions, but they’re brought in to help analyze the findings. Together, the team organizes feedback into a high / now, high / later, low framework.

As they place issues on the board, patterns emerge.

Users struggled with button clarity.
Some missed important information because the typography was too small in key areas.
A few moments of confusion surfaced where labels didn’t quite make sense.

Several of these land firmly in the high-priority category.

They take this back to the senior designer.

“We marked these as high,” they explain. “Accessibility concerns. Readability issues. Clarity problems. I don’t feel great shipping without addressing them.”

The senior designer reviews the list carefully.

“These are good catches,” they say. “Some of these we’ll fix now. Others will go into the next update.”

There’s a pause.

“I know that’s uncomfortable,” they continue. “But high priority doesn’t always mean immediate. It means it’s tracked, understood, and intentionally planned.”

That’s the moment it clicks.

Knowing the rules is what makes this hard.

They can see what isn’t ideal. They know what should happen in a perfect process. But real projects aren’t perfect. They move in phases, under constraints, with tradeoffs that don’t show up in textbooks.

By the time the project ships, it’s successful. Users complete tasks. Stakeholders are satisfied. The product improves — and continues to improve in future iterations.

The designer walks away changed.

They’re still uncomfortable being uncomfortable. They still care deeply about doing things the right way. But now they understand that the rules aren’t meant to be followed perfectly. They’re there to guide decisions when perfection isn’t possible.

UX feels harder when you know the rules — not because the rules fail you, but because real work asks you to use them with judgment, flexibility, and trust, even when the process doesn’t look the way you were taught.

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