7 Design Mistakes Startups Make While Budgeting & Beyond

7 Design Mistakes Startups Make While Budgeting & Beyond

7 Design Mistakes Startups Make While Budgeting & Beyond

You have mere seconds to make a good first impression on your user. But it’s not as simple as ensuring your product looks aesthetically pleasing.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to fail to convince users that your product is worth using. All it takes is making a mistake when approaching its design, be it underinvesting in research or foregoing user testing.

As a design agency, we at Fivecube often help startups mitigate the consequences of common design mistakes with UI/UX audit and redesign services. Here are seven of them you should keep in mind when you outline your startup’s budget.

Mistake #1: Underinvesting in User Research

Some startup teams rely on their intuition in choosing the product’s core features and designing the interface. They’re convinced they already “know” the user, so there’s no point in spending time and money on user research.

Yet, allowing these assumptions to drive design choices can result in a digital product that doesn’t actually address users’ key pain points. Or, it can turn out to be too frustrating to use, leading to substantial churn.

Our advice:

  • Conduct lightweight user research that includes interviews with 5-10 potential users

  • Map out user personas and journeys before designing the product

  • Consider using the findings from third-party research

Mistake #2: Not Creating a Design System

This is one of the most common website design mistakes: not preparing a design system. But even if you have a design guru on your team now, you need this document to guide future UI/UX design and improvement. Think of it as a cheat sheet that describes your brand identity and ensures design uniformity and consistency.

Plus, one experiment showed that having a design system speeds up design tasks by 34%. So, it’s not just about design consistency: these productivity gains translate into cost savings in the long run, too.

Our advice:

  • If you hire product or web design services, add the design system to the project’s deliverables

  • Verify that the design system includes primary and complementary colors, typography guidelines, and button design and layout examples

Mistake #3: Overlooking Interface Responsiveness

Some startups assume that their traffic will be coming mostly from desktops, so they don’t bother with adapting the interface to mobile devices. In this case, your website will get penalized by Google in SERPs because crawlers index mobile versions of websites by default.

Other startups think that responsiveness simply means subtly changing the layout, and it’s a mistake we often have to address when providing website redesign services. The thing is, responsiveness also means rethinking navigation to adapt it to touchscreens and revamping user flows to match them with the OS's native features (e.g., date selection).

Our advice:

  • Adopt a mobile-first design approach to avoid these web design mistakes

  • Mimic the mobile OS’s native user flows

  • Thoroughly test usability on mobile devices before going live

Some startups assume that their traffic will be coming mostly from desktops, so they don’t bother with adapting the interface to mobile devices. In this case, your website will get penalized by Google in SERPs because crawlers index mobile versions of websites by default.

Other startups think that responsiveness simply means subtly changing the layout, and it’s a mistake we often have to address when providing website redesign services. The thing is, responsiveness also means rethinking navigation to adapt it to touchscreens and revamping user flows to match them with the OS's native features (e.g., date selection).

Our advice:

  • Adopt a mobile-first design approach to avoid these web design mistakes

  • Mimic the mobile OS’s native user flows

  • Thoroughly test usability on mobile devices before going live

Some startups assume that their traffic will be coming mostly from desktops, so they don’t bother with adapting the interface to mobile devices. In this case, your website will get penalized by Google in SERPs because crawlers index mobile versions of websites by default.

Other startups think that responsiveness simply means subtly changing the layout, and it’s a mistake we often have to address when providing website redesign services. The thing is, responsiveness also means rethinking navigation to adapt it to touchscreens and revamping user flows to match them with the OS's native features (e.g., date selection).

Our advice:

  • Adopt a mobile-first design approach to avoid these web design mistakes

  • Mimic the mobile OS’s native user flows

  • Thoroughly test usability on mobile devices before going live

Mistake #4: Focusing on Features Over UI/UX

Some founders think that as long as their product comes packed with features, the UI/UX doesn’t matter that much. That usually happens because they don’t understand that UI/UX design isn’t just about the looks: it’s about ensuring your product is convenient to use.

Take onboarding as an example. With thoughtful UI/UX design, your product will guide users toward getting maximum value from the product right at the beginning. That’s key to user engagement, retention, and loyalty.

Our advice:

  • Focus on solving one problem well before adding other features

  • Choose the said problem based on user research

  • Design the onboarding user flows to showcase the key value of your product

Mistake #5: Prioritizing Good Looks Over Features

Where some teams focus entirely on adding as many features as possible, others think that sleek design is more important than the actual product’s value for users. This is one of the somewhat common graphic design mistakes.

The thing is, no matter how aesthetically pleasing your design looks, the product should still address a real pain point for your users. Otherwise, they won’t stick around.

Our advice:

  • Use graphic design to support, not substitute functionality

  • Ensure consistently high performance for your product

  • Gather feedback on your product with interactive prototypes before development

Mistake #6: Mistaking Quantity for Quality

A cluttered interface overloaded with buttons, links, and features will only confuse and frustrate the user. That’s why good UI/UX is usually minimalistic: fewer elements and a simple layout make the interface easier to understand at a glance and, therefore, navigate.

Our advice:

  • When reviewing mockups and prototypes, opt for a more minimalistic UI/UX

  • Set aside the budget for user testing and iterating through design versions

Mistake #7: Not Budgeting for User Testing

We’ve mentioned user testing several times above, and it’s for a good reason. No matter how experienced your UI/UX designer is, they’re not a psychic. Their initial mockups and wireframes won’t be perfect from the get-go.

This is where user testing comes in: it provides the real-world feedback for improving the user flows and making the digital product truly intuitive and easy to use. But, of course, user testing means an investment of time and money.

Our advice:

  • Set aside the budget for user testing at key steps in development

  • Prepare for iterative design improvement when planning the project

Final Thoughts

Need a design expert to avoid all the common and uncommon design mistakes? Contact us to discuss how we can help your startup’s digital product succeed with a human-centered UI/UX design.

Need a design expert to avoid all the common and uncommon design mistakes? Contact us to discuss how we can help your startup’s digital product succeed with a human-centered UI/UX design.

Jun 9, 2025

By

Fivecube Team

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