Interview frequency: …
Short answer
The Happy Path represents only a small part of reality. Ignoring edge cases such as slow connections, long text, denied permissions, and zero balances causes the user experience to fail in production.
Explanation
A professional designer designs for difficult cases first: (1) long names that break card layouts; (2) right-to-left (RTL) languages compared with LTR; (3) internet outages and retries; (4) unexpected characters and symbols; and (5) session expiry while filling out a long form. Documenting these scenarios protects the app from unexpected failure and provides intuitive recovery guidance.
Common mistakes
- Using short, ideal two-word sample text in forms and then being surprised when real data breaks the layout.
- Leaving error states without guiding users on how to solve the problem or try again later.