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Robot design is a complex cognitive activity that requires the designer to iteratively navigate multiple engineering disciplines and the relations between them. In this paper, we explore how people approach robot design and how trends in design strategy vary with the level of expertise of the designer. Using our interactive Build-a-Bot software tool, we recruited 39 participants from the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. These participants varied in age from 19 to 56 years, and had between 0 and 17 years of robotics experience. We tracked the participants’ design decisions over the course of a 15 min. task of designing a ground robot to cross an uneven environment. Our results showed that participants engaged in iterative testing and modification of their designs, but unlike previous studies, there was no statistically significant effect of participant’s expertise on the frequency of iterations. We additionally found that, across levels of expertise, participants were vulnerable to design fixation, in which they latched onto an initial design concept and insufficiently adjusted the design, even when confronted with difficulties developing the concept into a satisfactory solution. The results raise interesting questions for how future engineers can avoid fixation and how design tools can assist in both efficient assessment and optimization of design workflow for complex design tasks.