It's user experience all the way down

4th Jul 2025

There’s a good chance you’re already aware and agree with the following statements

• Good user experiences are great for growth and retention
• Businesses need revenue to survive
• Happy employees get better outcomes than unhappy ones

A company is healthiest when everyone has good experiences. But there’s no free lunch, we are faced with choices that improve one aspect at the cost of another. Cutting corners to hit a deadlines can be good for the business, but bad for users. Adding a new feature can be good for users, but a maintanence burden for employees.

When faced with a decision to make, I want to stress the importance of being conscientious about the tradeoffs, lest you end up with a particularly bad experience for one of those groups. This can be a death sentence: Users stop using your product, employees resign or give up, or the business runs out of money.

But the only way to make an informed decision is to have a good understanding of who your users are, how the business operates, and what your employees do. This requires effort! Don’t be the engineer that only cares about technology, or the business leader that doesn’t know anything about their users, or the product designer that doesn’t care whether product features fit into the engineering vision.

As a personal example, I was on a project where the team was given a non-negotiable scope, deadline, and resources. The team raised that we’re not likely to be able to do that work in time, and was told in no uncertain terms that we should cut corners to make it work, even if the product is full of bugs, which we can fix up afterwards when the client complains. So that’s what we did. To noones surprise except the leadership team, morale was low and turnover was high. When I explained to them why this was the case, they genuinely didn’t understand why the engineering team was so unhappy with this project, after all, surely hacking together a feature and squashing bugs one by one is the same as from building it with good processes from the start. I responded by handing in my resignation.