Spotify UX is supposed to make things clearer, easier, and more humane.So when an experience feels confusing, bloated, or frustrating, the instinct is to say UX failed. That’s only partly true. UX doesn’t usually fail because designers are careless or unskilled.It fails because the conditions around UX quietly undermine it. Most UX failure is...
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 readingNissan’s fight back
An Open Letter to Nissan Spotify Nissan, it’s time to stop pretending everything is fine. The brand that once defined durability, originality, and grit has spent the last decade chasing competitors instead of outpacing them. The company that built the indestructible Hardbody, the bulletproof Pathfinder, and the scrappy Sentra has drifted into a place...
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 readingThe UX Problem No One Tracks: Cognitive Drift
Spotify Most teams assume UX issues come from bad flows, unclear labels, poor hierarchy, or inconsistent patterns. Those are surface-level. The deeper problem, the one almost no team measures, is cognitive drift. Cognitive drift is the gap that quietly forms between how a product used to work in the user’s mind and how it...
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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