Pre-Design Essentials: Keys to Successful Screen DesignPre-Design Essentials: Keys to Successful Screen Design
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Urška's avatar
Urška Čokelj
• May 29
3 things I check before designing a single screen
Most projects go wrong in the first week. Not because of bad design. Because of bad prep.
After working on platforms for banking, telecom, and biotech, I've stopped opening Figma until three things are clear.
1. What's the actual structure? Not the sitemap. The real one, how content is actually organised, where it lives, why it's split the way it is. Most platforms don't have a design problem. They have a structure problem that got dressed up as a design problem.
2. Where does the flow break? I map every user flow before touching a component. Not just the happy path. The edge cases, the error states, the moment a user doesn't know what to do next. If I can't draw the full flow on paper, I'm not ready to design screens.
3. What already works? Every product has patterns users know. Redesigning for the sake of it confuses people. I document what's working, what's inconsistent, and what can be unified, before introducing anything new.
Skip these and you'll spend weeks designing screens that shouldn't exist.
The best design work happens before the design work starts.
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