Articles on user experience design — principles, patterns, measurement, and the practical decisions that separate considered products from cluttered ones.
View All TagsMost companies treat self-serve support as a way to reduce ticket volume. The framing is correct in the way an accountant's framing is correct — it's measuring the right thing for the wrong reason.
A help center optimized for ticket deflection is one design. A help center optimized for the user actually getting their question answered is another. They look similar. They behave very differently.
Most product teams say they "know their users." Pressed for specifics, what they actually have is a vague sense of who's signed up — a sketch built from sales calls, the loudest voice in support, and the founder's gut. That sketch is not a mental model. It's a guess wearing the costume of a guess.
Real understanding is more boring than that, and harder to fake.
Walk into any SaaS product built between 2014 and 2022 and you'll meet the same houseguest: a five-step tour that interrupts you the moment you sign in, pointing arrows at things you haven't asked about and didn't know you needed.
The tour exists because someone — usually someone senior — argued, correctly, that users don't know how to use the product. Then someone else — usually someone in design — built the obvious solution: show them. The tour is the fossil of an honest impulse.
It still doesn't work.
Open any product on its first day of use and the first thing you see is a screen with nothing on it. No projects yet. No reports yet. No teammates yet. The empty state.
For most teams, the empty state is the last thing the design org thinks about and the first thing the new user sees. The math is bad.
NPS is the most influential metric in B2B software and one of the easiest to lie with. The lie isn't usually deliberate — it's structural, baked into how the metric is computed and where it gets sampled. Most NPS dashboards are reading their own noise.
Tooltips are the most over-deployed and under-edited element in modern product design. Every product has hundreds of them. Most products would be improved by deleting most of them.
The reason tooltips proliferate isn't that they're useful — it's that they're cheap to ship. A tooltip is the answer the team gives when the interface isn't legible enough on its own and the deadline is too close to redesign it.