User experience design possesses a unique power: the ability to take an existing product—even a struggling one—and fundamentally improve it without changing what it does. While marketing can reposition a product and engineering can add features, UX design can make people actually want to use something they previously abandoned or ignored.
This transformation happens through a deliberate process of selection, diagnosis, and systematic improvement. Here’s how UX designers approach picking a product and making it meaningfully better.
Choosing the Right Candidate
Not every product benefits equally from UX intervention. The best candidates share certain characteristics. They solve real problems but suffer from poor adoption or engagement. They have loyal users who complain constantly about specific pain points. They perform a necessary function but frustrate people in the process.
Consider password managers. The category solves an essential problem—managing dozens of credentials securely—but many products languished with poor adoption despite clear user need. When companies like 1Password focused intensely on UX, simplifying onboarding and making daily interactions effortless, they transformed password management from a chore into something users actually recommended to friends.
The key is identifying products where the core value proposition is sound but the execution creates unnecessary friction.
Diagnosing the Real Problems
Once a product is selected, effective UX improvement begins with ruthless diagnosis. This means going beyond surface complaints to understand the underlying user experience failures.
User research reveals patterns. When five different people struggle at the same step, that’s not user error—it’s a design failure. When users develop workarounds or hack together solutions using external tools, they’re telling you the product isn’t meeting their needs. When people say they “love” a product but rarely open it, there’s a disconnect between aspiration and actual utility.
The diagnosis phase often uncovers uncomfortable truths. Sometimes the product tries to do too much. Sometimes it uses jargon that makes sense to the company but confuses customers. Sometimes it optimizes for the wrong metrics—impressive feature counts instead of task completion, for instance.
Making Strategic Improvements
With clear diagnosis in hand, UX designers make strategic choices about where to intervene. Comprehensive redesigns sound appealing but often fail. Instead, experienced designers identify high-leverage improvements that cascade into broader benefits.
This might mean redesigning the first-run experience to reduce abandonment, even if the rest of the interface remains unchanged temporarily. It could involve simplifying the most common user task—which might represent 80% of actual usage—while deprioritizing edge cases that bloated the interface.
Spotify’s transformation illustrates this approach. Early music streaming services were often clunky, focused on replicating iTunes-style library management. Spotify picked a different path: make playing music as frictionless as possible. They optimized for immediate gratification—search, click, listen—rather than complex organization schemes. Once that core experience felt magical, they could layer in additional features.
Measuring What Matters
UX-driven product improvement requires measuring the right outcomes. Download counts or feature usage statistics often miss the point. Better metrics include task completion rates, time to value, user retention over meaningful periods, and qualitative satisfaction.
When Slack redesigned elements of their interface, they didn’t just track clicks. They measured whether teams were actually communicating more effectively, whether new users became active participants faster, and whether the changes reduced support tickets.
These measurements create accountability and reveal whether UX changes are genuinely improving the product or simply rearranging deck chairs.
The Iterative Advantage
The most successful UX transformations embrace iteration. Ship improvements, observe behavior, learn, and refine. This approach reduces risk and allows designers to respond to how users actually interact with changes rather than how they predicted users would respond.
Airbnb’s journey from “air mattresses in someone’s living room” to mainstream accommodation platform required countless UX iterations. Each improvement—professional photography, detailed reviews, better search filters, clearer pricing—built on learnings from the previous change.
Products improve through accumulated advantages. Small UX wins compound into distinctive experiences that competitors struggle to replicate.
When UX Isn’t Enough
Honesty matters here: UX cannot save fundamentally flawed products. If the product solves a problem nobody has, serves a market that doesn’t exist, or is technically broken, better UX design won’t matter. UX makes good products great and mediocre products good, but it cannot conjure value from nothing.
The most effective UX practitioners know when to recommend more fundamental changes—repositioning the product, narrowing the target audience, or even admitting the concept needs rethinking.
The Lasting Impact
When UX successfully picks a product and improves it, the results extend beyond metrics. Users develop genuine affection for products that respect their time and intelligence. Teams become energized by positive feedback instead of constant complaints. Companies discover competitive advantages that are difficult to copy because they emerge from deep user understanding rather than feature checklists.
The transformation isn’t always dramatic or immediate. But product by product, experience by experience, thoughtful UX design elevates what we interact with daily from frustrating necessities into tools we actually appreciate using.