How to find and deal with edge cases in UX design

Learn how to identify and address edge cases when working as a UX designer

Often after we finish designing a solution for our product and believe all the things are correct, and then one developer from our product team asks us:

Are you aware of how you handle the case where the user…?
There are times when we will say YES, and other times when we will say:
I didn’t think about this case and I have to resolve it.

Illustrations Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley

One of the points that always complicates the product design work and takes longer to solve is when the designer realizes that there are some edge cases in the design (sometimes called corner cases) that need to be solved to be able to ship the product.

The purpose of this article is to describe how I find edge cases, how I deal with them, and why I prefer not to solve all of them.

First let’s understand the difference between happy path, different cases, and edge case

Let me start by explaining a bit about 3 different and common situations we encounter in our design process to better understand the article. Although there are places where it can be further divided, I…