How Elizabeth-Mary Olowolabi’s first year in UI/UX changed how she thinks about design

The technology industry is heavily saturated with beautiful digital products that absolutely no one wants to use. For early-stage designers and product founders, the allure of a pixel-perfect interface often masks a fundamental structural rot. A screen can look flawless on a digital canvas yet completely collapse when placed in the hands of an actual user trying to solve a real problem.

Elizabeth-Mary Olowolabi, a UI/UX designer currently building Silhoh, a product studio, spent her first year in UI/UX design falling into this exact trap. Starting in the design space often feels like a steep technical climb. The initial assumption is that mastering tools like Figma will automatically translate into designing great products. Olowolabi quickly discovered that the software is the easy part. The actual difficulty lies in completely restructuring how one thinks about user behaviour.

“My early work failed in ways I only understand now because back then it looked visually acceptable,” Olowolabi admits, reflecting on her entry into the field. Her foundational mistake was a common one across the technology ecosystem. She assumed that UI/UX design was primarily an exercise in ensuring interfaces looked clean. This misunderstanding dictated her entire approach to design during that critical first year.

One of the most persistent errors amateur designers make is treating a digital product as a gallery of isolated images. Olowolabi found herself hyper-focusing on individual screens instead of mapping out the overarching user flow. She would meticulously craft the layout of a single page in total isolation, paying little attention to how users actually moved from point A to point B. It felt natural at the time because the prevailing, albeit flawed, logic suggested that good design simply meant well-crafted visuals.

However, interfaces do not exist in a vacuum. Digital products are ecosystems. UI/UX is fundamentally about how different touchpoints connect to form a seamless, frictionless experience. When a designer focuses purely on the aesthetics of a single page, the connective tissue of the product begins to fray.

Olowolabi soon began noticing glaring gaps in her deliverables. Steps did not flow logically. Transitions felt disconnected. Core actions were buried or unclear. The entire user experience felt fragmented and disjointed. While disconcerting, this realisation forced a necessary reckoning. It became clear that UI/UX design is heavily reliant on engineering the relationships between screens rather than decorating the screens themselves. Shifting from thinking about static pages to thinking about dynamic systems completely altered her professional trajectory.

This systemic failure often traces back to another critical misstep, which is skipping the problem definition phase entirely. The rush to create is a powerful force. Before grasping the actual problem a product was supposed to solve, Olowolabi would already be deep into a Figma file, generating interfaces for a loosely defined concept. The inevitable result was a polished design that addressed no clear user need.

Strong product work happens long before a design tool is ever opened. No matter how visually striking a solution might be, it remains structurally weak if the underlying problem is ambiguous. Today, her workflow has been completely inverted. Defining the problem is the non-negotiable first step. Before laying down a single component, she forces herself to answer two foundational questions. What problem is being solved, and who exactly is it being solved for?

For a long time, the industry has conflated aesthetics with usability. Olowolabi operated under the assumption that a visually polished interface automatically equated to good user experience. She believed that as long as a design looked modern, it was inherently effective. It took time to unlearn this mantra and realise that users do not experience design purely as a visual medium. They experience design as a metric of ease or difficulty through the specific action they are attempting to complete.

A brutally simple, perhaps even plain interface can feel incredibly intuitive and efficient, whereas a visually stunning dashboard can remain entirely unusable. This distinction helped her understand the difference between making an interface look good and designing an experience that works well. Visual design is undeniably important, but it is only the surface layer of a much deeper functional experience.

This also led to another common mistake: focusing too much on design tools. Beginners often spend an inordinate amount of time learning the intricacies of design software rather than developing their design thinking. Olowolabi poured hours into mastering Figma features, plugins, and shortcuts, convinced these technical skills would elevate her status as a designer. While technical proficiency is useful, her decision-making skills were lagging far behind.

Software cannot tell a designer if their idea is solving the right problem. Without a rigorous understanding of user goals, human psychology, context, and technical constraints, software skills are virtually useless. The moment Olowolabi stopped obsessing over what she could create and started questioning why she was creating it, the quality of her work shifted.

“When I stopped asking myself ‘What should this screen look like?’ and started asking ‘What problem am I solving and for whom?’, I began focusing more on context, goals and users before considering visuals,” she notes. Instead of rushing toward a finished interface, she became obsessed with understanding what that interface would actually help a human being accomplish.

Today, her approach is unrecognisable from her first year. Understanding the problem precedes everything. Designing in user flows has replaced designing in silos. Clarity and usability consistently trump visual appeal. Crucially, she now seeks critical feedback early in the process rather than waiting to present a finished, unvalidated masterpiece. Projects now feel intentional because they are guided by rigorous problem-solving rather than subjective aesthetics.

Applying these design lessons through Silhoh

These hard-won lessons are now the driving force behind Silhoh, the product studio she is currently building. Olowolabi is now applying these principles as she explores how digital products can support meaningful connections, improve mental health, and deliver better experiences in remote care.

In these contexts, unclear or difficult-to-use interfaces can create unnecessary friction for people trying to access information, support or care. As Silhoh develops in its early stages, Olowolabi is focusing on understanding users, accessibility, and testing ideas with potential users. The primary objective is to focus on exploring what makes digital experiences genuinely useful, accessible and easy to navigate.

The shift from a designer focused primarily on aesthetics to one increasingly focused on problems, users and systems has shaped how she is building Silhoh. Most early career mistakes stem from a distinct lack of context. It is incredibly easy to spend hours debating colour palettes and button components because those are variables a designer can immediately control and see. The actual heavy lifting requires stepping away from the screen to understand the messy, complex human journey happening on the other side of the interface.

Olowolabi’s evolution proves that the real skill in the technology sector is not in creating perfect screens. The real skill is in completely understanding the business, the problem, and the human being those screens are built to serve.