The Mindset Shift for Designing Better Frontend Systems
September 16, 2025
When you read most design docs or product requirements, you’ll notice something: they’re almost always about the happy path — the perfect scenario where everything works exactly as intended.
The assumptions are: all services respond correctly and timely, the network is always stable, users are on modern browsers (and latest devices), and nobody makes mistakes. But reality is far messier than that.
Users mistype their email addresses, click the wrong button (because of bad designs or accessibility issues), or lose connection mid-action. Developers and QAs make mistakes too. Services fail. Devices slow down. And more often than not, the unhappy path is the one your system will have to deal with.
In truth, the happy path we love to design for is just a small slice of a system’s real life. Frontend system design — even if you’re “just” working on the UI — is largely about anticipating and handling these unhappy paths.
Source: The Mindset Shift for Designing Better Frontend Systems
Juntao Qiu Has been writing extensively on front-end systems design in recent months. We’ve linked to at least a couple of his pieces in lately. Here he observes that when we design systems, we very often think about the “happy paths” (the best possible use cases) and pay less attention to when things don’t go quite as well.
But as he observes, it’s this ability to see outside the most common use cases and paths that distinguishes the senior developer from the rest. Here he explores the mindset shift required to think beyond the happy paths.
Juntao We’ll also be speaking about our upcoming Developer Summit on this topic.
