Spotify UX is often framed as polish. A layer of friendliness added at the end of product development. That framing misses the real story. The biggest contribution UX has made to the product world isn’t better interfaces.It’s better decisions. Over time, UX has quietly changed how products are conceived, built, and evaluated. Not perfectly....
Continue readingThe Land Rover Defender L663: One of the Best Vehicles on Earth With a UX Problem That Holds It Back
Spotify The Land Rover Defender L663 is a masterpiece.It might be the most capable, best-balanced, most character-rich vehicle ever engineered for both modern roads and impossible terrain. The chassis is exceptional. The ride quality is shockingly refined for a box with the aerodynamics of a refrigerator. The drivetrain options are versatile. The proportions are...
Continue readingWhen Stakeholders Think They’re the User: The Quiet Disaster That Derails Products
Spotify There’s a specific moment in every product cycle where everything begins to slide off the rails. It’s not when engineering hits a constraint. It’s not when design pushes back on scope. It’s not even when user research reveals something inconvenient. The derailment happens the moment a stakeholder confidently steps into a room and...
Continue readingThe UX Shift Coming in 2026: This Year Is About Reduction, Not Addition
Spotify Every January, teams explode with energy, roadmaps, and new ideas. But 2026 is not a year to add more. It’s the year to remove. Users aren’t drowning in a lack of features. They’re drowning in layers of decisions, noise, alerts, menus, prompts, disclaimers, and “just one more step” moments that multiply every release...
Continue readingThe Most Annoying UX Component: The Dropdown Menu
Spotify Every product team uses dropdowns. Every design system includes them. Every developer can implement one in their sleep. And users hate them. The dropdown menu is the most overused, under-questioned component in UX. It creates friction in almost every context, yet teams cling to it because it feels neutral, familiar, and easy to...
Continue readingThe UX Debt No One Tracks: Emotional Debt
Spotify Teams obsess over technical debt. They debate design debt. They argue about research debt. Almost no one talks about emotional debt, but understanding it can empower teams to protect trust before it’s lost. Emotional debt is the accumulated frustration, confusion, hesitation, and micro-betrayals a user experiences while interacting with your product. It’s invisible...
Continue readingProduct Fails in a Silo. Always.
Spotify Teams still cling to the fantasy that Product can operate independently. They believe a roadmap, a backlog, and a few stakeholder sessions are enough to shape something meaningful. It isn’t. Product doesn’t succeed because of Product. Product succeeds because of integration. A siloed Product team always produces the same outcomes: partial solutions, misaligned...
Continue readingSurrender to the Drift: The New UX Mandate
Spotify Companies keep telling themselves they “designed” their product. They didn’t. Their users did, through workarounds, hacks, complaints, and abandoned sessions. UX is no longer the craft of shaping an experience. It’s the discipline of detecting where users have already changed your product without your permission. This is the failure point most teams refuse...
Continue readingWhy UX Is Never Perfect
Spotify Every team wants the perfect experience, seamless flows, flawless logic, zero friction. They chase it through redesigns, new frameworks, bigger research plans, and endless rounds of polishing. But here is the part most teams avoid admitting. UX is never perfect. It cannot be. The idea of an ideal experience is a myth that...
Continue readingThe UX Blind Spot Hidden in Team Structure
Spotify Every company claims to be user-centered. They research, build personas, map journeys, and talk about empathy. Yet most products still feel fragmented, inconsistent, and harder to use than they should be. The reason is not a lack of UX skill. The reason is organizational design. The team’s structure shapes the product’s structure. Here...
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