Product Design Truths They Don’t Teach in Design School/title

The Day We Redesigned Something That Wasn’t Broken

CEO walked in with screenshots from a competitor. “Our app looks old. We need to modernize.” Translation: they saw something shiny and assumed shiny equals better. We tried explaining that their current design worked well—users could navigate efficiently, complete tasks quickly, find features easily. Didn’t matter. Perception of being dated trumped evidence of functionality. So we redesigned it.

Launched the update. Support tickets exploded. Users were furious. Not because the new design was bad—it was objectively better by most design principles. But it was different, and we’d broken the mental models thousands of people had developed over years. Features had moved. Workflows had changed. Keyboard shortcuts stopped working. We’d traded familiar and functional for modern and confusing.

Took eight months to stabilize things. Added preference options to restore old behaviors. Created migration guides. Held webinars teaching the new interface. Eventually people adapted, but those first few months were brutal. Customer churn hit record levels. The question that haunts me: was modernizing worth it? Or did we create problems that didn’t exist because someone wanted the interface to look more current?

This is what nobody tells you about what is product design in practice—sometimes the right answer is changing nothing. Sometimes familiar beats novel. Sometimes optimization means preservation rather than innovation. Learning to recognize when something works well enough that improvement would actually make it worse is a skill most designers never develop because we’re trained to always be making things “better.” Working with a thoughtful ux digital agency like Phenomenon Studio means partnering with people who’ve learned this lesson through painful experience and won’t redesign things just because someone thinks they look dated.

Why Startups Keep Solving the Wrong Problems

Founder pitches their idea. Explains the problem they’re solving. Describes their solution. Everything sounds logical. Then you talk to their target customers and discover the problem the founder described isn’t actually the problem those customers experience. Or it’s a problem but not their biggest one. Or it’s a problem for a tiny subset while most people face different challenges entirely.

This disconnect between founder vision and market reality kills more startups than bad design or poor execution. They build solutions to problems that don’t exist at sufficient scale. They solve edge cases while ignoring mainstream needs. They optimize for their own frustrations rather than researching what actually bothers their target market. Then they wonder why adoption is slow despite having “obviously better” solutions.

Worked with a productivity startup convinced people needed better task management. Built sophisticated features for prioritizing, categorizing, filtering tasks. Talked to their target users—busy professionals. Know what they wanted? A place to dump thoughts quickly without thinking about organization. They needed brain dump functionality, not sophisticated organization systems. The founders had built what they personally wanted, assuming everyone worked like them.

We pivoted the entire product. Made capture dead simple. Made organization optional and automatic rather than required and manual. Adoption jumped because we’d aligned with how users actually worked rather than how founders thought they should work. This is why startup mvp development fails so often—founders build what makes sense to them rather than what makes sense to their market. The best product design agencies force this uncomfortable confrontation between vision and reality early, before significant resources get wasted building the wrong thing beautifully.

Research That Nobody Wants to Hear

Client had spent a year building a feature they were convinced would differentiate them from competitors. Sophisticated customization engine allowing users to configure everything about their workflow. Launched quietly. Usage was minimal. They blamed marketing—users just didn’t understand the value yet. We suggested research to understand why adoption was low. They resisted. “We know it’s valuable.”

Finally convinced them to let us watch users try the feature. First session, user spent ten minutes trying to configure something, gave up frustrated. Second session, user said “This looks complicated, I’ll just stick with the default.” Third session, user configured something wrong, broke their workflow, called support. Pattern was clear—customization wasn’t a feature, it was a burden. Most users wanted opinionated defaults that just worked, not infinite flexibility requiring decisions.

Presented findings. Stakeholders were defensive. They’d invested heavily in this feature. Accepting that users didn’t want it meant accepting the investment was wasted. Took months to acknowledge reality and shift strategy. Eventually we built smart defaults with light customization for power users who actually wanted it. Adoption improved dramatically because we’d stopped forcing flexibility on people who valued simplicity.

This is product design consultancy reality—sometimes research reveals that your brilliant idea isn’t so brilliant to the people who’d have to use it. Sometimes evidence contradicts what stakeholders believe deeply. Sometimes the right move is killing features that took months to build. The question is whether teams can accept uncomfortable truths or whether they rationalize evidence away to protect egos and past decisions. Digital product design companies worth working with tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, even when truth threatens relationships.

When Redesign Is Actually the Answer

Not all redesigns are mistakes. Sometimes your interface genuinely is the problem. Sometimes technology has evolved enough that old approaches no longer make sense. Sometimes user expectations have shifted based on experiences elsewhere. The trick is knowing when you’ve got a genuine design problem versus when you’ve got other issues that design can’t fix. Getting help from a quality web redesign company means working with people who can diagnose whether redesign will actually solve your problems or just give you prettier versions of the same problems.

We audited a B2B platform where users complained constantly about the interface. Client assumed they needed visual modernization. We dug deeper. The real issues were structural—confusing navigation, illogical grouping of features, inconsistent patterns across different sections. The visual design was dated but functional. The information architecture was fundamentally broken. Polishing it wouldn’t help. Needed to restructure from foundations up.

That’s a legitimate redesign case—when underlying structure is wrong, cosmetic changes waste time. We rebuilt information architecture based on user mental models, simplified navigation by reducing categories, created consistent patterns throughout. Visual design stayed relatively conservative because changing everything simultaneously would overwhelm users. Result looked incrementally better but worked dramatically better because we’d fixed actual problems rather than perceived ones.

Knowing when redesign helps versus when it creates new problems is expertise that comes from experience and humility. Designers love redesigning—it’s creatively satisfying and looks great in portfolios. But product design and development should optimize for user outcomes, not designer satisfaction. Sometimes the brave choice is saying “your interface is fine, let’s focus on these workflow problems instead.” Sometimes the brave choice is saying “yes, you actually do need to redesign this, and here’s evidence why.”

Healthcare Design Where Perfect Isn’t Good Enough

Medical app development operates under constraints that make every other domain seem simple. HIPAA compliance. FDA regulations. Liability concerns. Life-and-death consequences. Every design decision carries weight beyond metrics or revenue. A confusing flow in consumer apps frustrates users. A confusing flow in healthcare apps could harm patients. That responsibility changes everything about how you approach design.

But here’s the uncomfortable reality—most healthcare software prioritizes legal safety over user safety. It satisfies compliance requirements while creating interfaces so confusing that healthcare workers develop dangerous workarounds. Systems that technically meet regulations while making medical errors more likely through poor usability. The legal team is happy. The users are frustrated. The patients are at risk.

Designed a medication dispensing interface where initial requirements included twelve confirmation steps to prevent errors. Sounds responsible until you realize nurses would click through all twelve without reading because confirmation fatigue made them meaningless. We tested alternative approaches. Found that three well-designed confirmations at critical decision points caught more errors than twelve generic confirmations users ignored.

Legal team pushed back hard. Fewer confirmations felt riskier even though evidence showed they worked better. Eventually convinced them through testing data showing the streamlined approach prevented more errors in practice. This is medical product design complexity—sometimes following every safety guideline literally creates less safe systems. Sometimes compliance requirements conflict with usability requirements. The best solutions satisfy both through thoughtful design that understands human factors as deeply as regulations.

Brand Guidelines Nobody Actually Follows

Company spent six months developing brand guidelines. Every color had meaning. Typography choices were strategic. The mood board told a story. Guidelines were comprehensive, beautiful, thorough. Then product teams started building and immediately deviated because guidelines didn’t address real product challenges. How does your brand voice handle errors? What’s your personality in loading states? How formal are you in confirmation messages?

Guidelines covered logo usage and color palettes but ignored the thousand micro-interactions where brand actually lives for product users. Result was products that technically used brand colors while feeling completely disconnected from brand personality. Your marketing says you’re “warm and approachable” while your error messages say “operation failed: error code 4031.” The disconnect is jarring and more common than anyone admits.

Good brand identity design company work extends into every product corner. It defines how you sound when things go wrong. It establishes whether you’re apologetic or matter-of-fact, verbose or concise, technical or conversational. It determines whether you blame users or help them recover. These decisions matter more for brand perception than perfect logo placement because this is where most customers actually experience your brand daily.

We extended guidelines for a fintech company whose brand promised “clarity and honesty.” Their product used language like “transaction processing error” and “verification pending.” Nothing clear about that jargon. We rewrote everything in plain English. “We’re having trouble with your payment—want to try again?” instead of error codes. “We’re checking your information—usually takes about a day” instead of pending status. Same information, aligned with brand promise. That alignment is what branding identity agency work should create but rarely does.

Mobile Design That Actually Works

Everyone says “mobile-first” while designing primarily for desktop and shrinking things down. Real mobile-first means understanding that mobile contexts are fundamentally different—users are often distracted, screens are small, touch targets need size, connections might be slow, sessions are shorter. Designing mobile isn’t about fitting desktop experiences into smaller screens. It’s about rethinking what someone needs when they’re using your product on a phone.

Worked on a banking app where the client wanted feature parity with their desktop platform. Every capability available on desktop should work on mobile. Sounds reasonable until you actually use it—complex workflows that made sense on large screens became tedious on phones. Features requiring precision mouse clicks became error-prone with touch. Dense information displays became unreadable. Feature parity created a universally mediocre experience rather than platform-optimized experiences.

We pushed back. Proposed identifying the three things people actually do on mobile versus desktop. Optimized those mobile workflows ruthlessly. Made less common tasks available but de-emphasized. Result was a mobile app that felt native and purpose-built rather than like a shrunken website. Usage actually increased because we’d focused on making common tasks excellent rather than making all tasks possible. Partnering with an experienced mobile ui ux design agency means working with teams who understand that great mobile design often means saying no to features that don’t work well in mobile contexts.

AI Features That Actually Help

Every product wants AI features now. Most don’t need them. Or they need different AI than they think. Or they need AI eventually but not yet. Or they need better data before AI will work reliably. But pressure exists—from boards, from investors, from competitors claiming AI capabilities. So teams force AI into products regardless of whether it makes sense or works well enough to be useful.

Evaluated AI for a customer support platform. Client wanted AI to auto-respond to common questions. We researched their support tickets. Most questions weren’t actually common—they were specific to individual customer situations requiring human understanding and judgment. The few truly common questions were already answered in their FAQ that nobody read. The real opportunity wasn’t AI responses but improving documentation discoverability and triaging complexity better.

We built smart routing that directed simple questions to improved self-service while connecting complex questions to appropriate specialists faster. No AI needed. Problem solved more effectively than chatbot would have. Sometimes AI for product design means recognizing that simpler approaches work better for the actual problem rather than the imagined one. Sometimes the innovative move is solving old problems really well rather than applying new technology to problems it can’t actually solve reliably.

When AI genuinely makes sense, design becomes critical. Users need to understand what AI can do, what it can’t do, why it’s making specific recommendations. They need confidence indicators. They need easy ways to override or correct. They need explanations that don’t require understanding machine learning. These design challenges determine whether AI features get used or ignored, whether users trust recommendations or verify everything, whether AI helps or just adds complexity users route around.

Measuring Success Before Starting

Every project should begin with answering one question: how will we know if this worked? Not “will stakeholders like it” or “will it look good in our portfolio” but what specific measurable outcome will improve and by how much. Without clear success criteria established before design starts, you’re guaranteed to have arguments later about whether work succeeded because everyone’s measuring against different unstated expectations.

Client wanted to redesign their dashboard to “improve engagement.” Asked them what engagement meant specifically. They didn’t know. We defined it together: daily active users, time spent in key features, completion of primary workflows. Then designed specifically to improve those metrics with clear hypotheses about how design changes would drive improvements. Could measure objectively whether work succeeded rather than arguing about subjective impressions.

This shift from outputs to outcomes changes everything. Instead of celebrating shipping on time, you celebrate metrics moving in right directions. Instead of defending design decisions based on principles, you defend them with evidence of impact. Instead of arguing about aesthetics, you focus on what actually drives behavior. Service and product design should always connect to business objectives you can measure—otherwise how do you know whether design is working or just looking nice?

The top product design firms obsess over outcomes. They want analytics access from day one. They propose A/B tests to validate approaches. They follow up months after launch checking whether metrics actually improved. They care about impact, not just completing deliverables on schedule. That outcome focus separates agencies treating design as craft from those treating it as business strategy that happens to be expressed through user experience design decisions.

What Actually Matters

After building hundreds of products, some truths become unavoidable. Great design solves real problems for real people in real contexts. It’s grounded in research showing what users actually need, not assumptions about what they might want. It’s measured by outcomes that matter to business health, not subjective opinions about aesthetics or stakeholder preferences. It requires teams that communicate clearly, stakeholders who trust evidence over politics, and designers who care more about impact than impressive portfolio pieces.

The best product design companies challenge clients when they’re wrong, advocate for users even when it’s uncomfortable, and measure success by business metrics rather than design awards. They’re the teams that will honestly tell you when redesign isn’t the answer, when your roadmap is unrealistic, when AI doesn’t make sense, or when you’re solving the wrong problem. These hard truths are more valuable than comfortable agreement that leads nowhere productive.

Whether you work with Phenomenon Studio or another design partner, focus on finding people who prioritize substance over style, evidence over opinions, outcomes over outputs. Ask about their failures and what they learned. Push them to explain how they handle disagreement. And remember the goal isn’t revolutionary design that wins awards—it’s products that reliably help users accomplish goals without unnecessary friction. That’s harder than making things pretty, which is probably why so many teams default to aesthetics. But it’s also what actually moves business metrics and creates lasting competitive advantage in markets where experience quality increasingly determines winners.

 By Morgan Ellis, Lead Experience Designer