The Unbearable Cheapness of UX (2)
1. If you treat UX as a cost, it comes back as a bigger cost
The UX concerns removed early on do not disappear; they get pushed onto other teams and users.
- How the cost shifts
- It is passed on as user time, customer service labor, complaint handling, and manual work by operational teams.
- A few years later, it is billed again as next-generation rebuild or redevelopment budget.
- Especially in AX
- If AI is added without context and fails to solve the user’s task, it only increases the labor needed for review and correction.
2. Failure already starts at the procurement stage
Functional requirements are usually concrete, but experience requirements often remain vague sentences.
- Warning signs
- Phrases like “intuitive UI” or “user-friendly” are used without any success criteria.
- There is no definition of which user should complete which task, and how easily.
- When UX criteria are missing
- You end up with a system that has many features but is hard to use in practice.
- Users turn to customer service, while employees fall back on Excel and workaround processes.
3. Feature completion and user success are not the same
A button working and data saving do not mean the experience is complete.
- Questions of user success
- Can users find the feature?
- Can they recover on their own when an error occurs?
- Can they complete the task without customer service?
- When organizational convenience conflicts with user flow
- If DB structures, department structures, or security procedures are exposed directly on the screen, users are forced to absorb the provider’s complexity.
4. A UX PM’s role is to pull complexity back into the organization
The larger the DX/AX initiative, the more it needs someone responsible not just for producing screens, but for the quality of the experience.
- What a UX PM should look at
- Core tasks, failure points, reasons for operational workarounds, and the real nature of customer service inquiries
- Screen experiences that can build trust in AI outputs and help users recover
- The standard ahead
- As AI increases the speed of output production, the standards used to judge experience quality become even more important.
