Optimize User Experience by Simplifying App Design DecisionsOptimize User Experience by Simplifying App Design Decisions
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Every consumer app I work on has the same conversation at some point. "Can we add the advanced project management? The custom workspace?" The thing only 5% of users will ever touch. After a decade of designing these products, here's the question that ends most of those conversations: what percentage of your users actually benefit from this? If it's 5%, you're overwhelming the other 95% to serve a handful. If it's 50% or more, that's a different conversation entirely. The trap is that every feature sounds reasonable on its own. A tagging system. Categorization. Assigning users to groups. Each one is defensible. Then you stack twelve of them and the product becomes a maze nobody can navigate. This is how products end up in the state I get called in to fix. Not one bad decision. A hundred reasonable ones, added one at a time, none of them removed. You can keep the power. You just have to be smart about what you show and when. A simple tool people understand beats a powerful tool people abandon.
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MD Rafee 's avatar
The 'hundred reasonable decisions' framing is the most honest description of how apps get unmanageable. The percentage question is a good forcing function. What you don't say here is how you actually get stakeholders to remove things they already shipped, which is usually the harder part of that conversation.
Mateo's avatar
Removing something is a completely different conversation than not adding it. Shipped features come with defenders. Two things that help: reframe it from 'should we remove this' to 'where should this live' because most features belong somewhere, just not in the main flow. And...
Boluwatife's avatar
Huge difference
Saiful Islam's avatar
This is such a good reminder for product design. Simplifying an app is not just about removing things, it’s about making the important actions feel easier and more natural. A cleaner experience usually creates more confidence for users, and this explains that really well.
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