Tag Archives: Product Design

Nov 02 2025
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Time Returned, Time Resold

Rain-blurred motorway at dusk viewed through a windscreen; dashboard lights glow amber in an empty driver’s seat — a quiet image of autonomy and time unclaimed.
Autonomy promised freedom. Instead, it gave us metrics.

Every few years a new invention turns up promising to give us time back. The dishwasher did it, then the calendar app, now the self-driving car. Efficiency, they say, is liberation. But the minutes never come home. They’re quietly re-employed: answering messages that weren’t urgent until we saw them, scrolling through news we already half-read. We don’t get more time. It just comes back wearing a different outfit.

Design now speaks the intoxicating language of generosity. We’ll save you clicks. We’ll make it seamless. Lovely words, but they come with a tempo you didn’t choose. The system nudges, reminds, congratulates you on your streak. Even the oven chirps when it’s done pre-heating. Helpful, yes – in the way a personal trainer is helpful when all you wanted was a walk.

Efficiency was meant to hush the world, not make it chatter. Parcels update you mid-journey, cars suggest faster routes, TV apps interrupt the credits to make sure you don’t go off to bed just yet. You start to feel managed by your own apps and appliances. Is it me, or do they all sound slightly pleased with themselves?

Still, there is a deeper promise in all this autonomy. Because the best thing about a self-driving car isn’t speed, it’s permission. The choice to drive when you want to: for rhythm, for presence, for drivers like me who relish the satisfaction of line and camber, and to switch off when you don’t. The long crawl north to the Lakes. The dawn blast to the airport. The late-night, rain-spray-soaked slog home when you’d gladly hand over the wheel and let the motorway unspool while you exhale, watch the window-light flicker, maybe half-doze through an episode of something forgettable. Control should be optional, not constant.

That’s what the technology could be about: selective surrender or a quieter freedom. But for some unfathomable reason, the marketing and product design departments have decided autonomy is best packaged as constant optimisation. That means another dashboard app full of metrics and prompts and juanty reminders. We built cars clever enough to drive themselves, then gave them personalities that never stop talking.

Real luxury now isn’t speed but discretion: the right to decide how long something should take. To drive when you feel like driving. To look out of the window when you don’t. Technology can make both possible.

Convenience promised to return our hours, but mostly it’s taught us to account for them. Every minute feels spoken for. Perhaps the odd thing is how willingly we’ve agreed to it and the peculiar pleasure we take in shaving seconds off tasks we didn’t enjoy anyway.

Maybe the best thing a self-driving car could do is forget the ETA and let us forget, too.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine.

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Aug 13 2025
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You’ve Booked the Flight. Now Feed the Cat.

Or, What a Ryanair journey map taught me about real UX.

There’s a type of interface that shows up on Dribbble every few months: flight check-ins, boarding passes, baggage-tracking dashboards. Always slick. Always serene. The UI equivalent of cucumber water.

Most of them start at Choose your seat and end at Enjoy your flight. Which is tidy. But also nonsense.

A few years ago, I worked on a project for Ryanair. I drew out a journey map (with pens, natch), not the polished, stakeholder-pleasing kind, but something closer to the real emotional terrain of travel. One that began well before the confirmation screen. One that started, in fact, with the cat.

Because booking a flight isn’t a clean beginning. By the time anyone taps “Book now,” they’ve already trawled five sites, tried to align half-term dates with the one cousin who replies to group chats, checked weather reports, and googled “Do I need a visa for Croatia?” even though they’re flying to Naples.

Life admin, not travel ambition, is what usually kicks things off. That’s where the journey begins.

The diagram traced everything from that fraught pre-booking stretch through to the post-trip hangover, highlighting the emotional and logistical clutter that most airline UX avoids. Not because it isn’t there, but because it’s messy. And mess doesn’t fit neatly into a product roadmap.

There’s the bit after you book, when nothing much happens, except everything might. The vague unease when no one’s confirmed your seats. The passive-aggressive alert that “something has changed” in your itinerary, but you’re left to figure out what. The nervous rechecking of emails. The slow panic over cabin bag dimensions.

Then comes the day itself. A spike in interaction. The printer runs out of ink. You’re stood at Departures at 6:30am trying to download Peppa Pig episodes with 4% battery and no signal. Your toddler’s hungry. Your partner’s tense. And you’re still wondering if you packed the Calpol.

And yet… this is the brand moment. Not the glossy UI, not the neat API integration. Just this: the knot in your stomach, the uncharged phone, the boarding pass you can’t pull up without a connection.

The map tried to capture that. Not to romanticise it, but to acknowledge it.

Even on the return leg, the friction isn’t over. Passport queues. Lost luggage. The existential despair of a train replacement service. You get home, open a week’s worth of mail, find a parking fine, trip over a stray shoe from the hasty departure packing, and realise you didn’t leave anything for the cat-sitter.

Most journey maps stop at wheels-up. Ours didn’t. Because experience doesn’t follow a clean arc. It loops, it stutters, it sags in the middle. Thoughtful UX understands that.

A tired parent, dressed in a dark winter coat with a fur-lined hood, stands in a dimly lit Swedish airport baggage claim area late at night. They are looking down at their phone, which shows a 4% battery icon. To their left, a child sleeps soundly in a dark grey stroller. A large, dark suitcase tilts precariously next to the parent, appearing as though it might fall. In the background, an empty luggage carousel stretches out, with a few other suitcases scattered on it. Further back, blurred figures of other travelers are visible, and the warm glow of a vending machine can be seen on the far left. The overall atmosphere is one of exhaustion and quiet resignation.

Of course, Ryanair won’t build an app that books your pet-sitter or packs plug adapters. But this kind of messy map reveals where the brand can quietly show up—not with a feature, but with timing, tone, and the rare dignity of being understood.

Maybe that’s a 6-sheet in the departure lounge that says “Still cheaper than therapy.” Maybe it’s an email that clears, not clouds. Maybe it’s an in-seat comm that drops the marketing voice for once and just says: “Made it. Welcome back.”

Even for Ryanair, in fact especially for Ryanair, those moments can build memory, trust, and repeat business. Because no one remembers the boarding pass. They remember how they felt when the wheels touched down, the keys were missing, and the cat looked at them with contempt.

You’re not designing for delight. You’re designing for 4% battery, no signal, and a queue that won’t move. That’s where memory lives. And maybe loyalty too.

AI disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used strictly as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. ALT text and tagging were also generated with AI support.

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Feb 12 2025
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Amazon’s UX: Why Customers Ignore the Chaos

Amazon’s interface is a mess. Everyone knows it, doesn’t matter if you’re in the industry or you just use it to buy lightbulbs, the odd book and some fancy Tupperware. It’s the digital equivalent of a hoarder’s house, clutter everywhere. A friend of mine once memorably described looking for something as like “rummaging through a warehouse with a torch”, but [she does it because] “I know the bloody thing I want is in there somewhere”. On any given part of the site there’s inexplicable stacks of unrelated items, and a sense that at any moment, something might fall on you. My particular hate are sponsored listings, intruding like pushy sales reps with their irrelevant nonsense while you’re on the way to buy the actual thing you searched for (although sometimes the actual thing turns out to be a not-quite-there copy from some random far-east factory). Genuine customer reviews also get buried under an avalanche of SEO-stuffed nonsense, and yet, dear reader… here I am, ordering 90% of what I buy from Amazon. And you do too.

However frustrating the experience, it isn’t bad enough to drive people away. Fast delivery, sheer product choice, and a checkout process so frictionless it should be flagged with Gamble Aware. All of this outweighs the UX sins.

So, Does UX Even Matter?

It is a question worth asking. If a platform’s core proposition is so compelling, with cheap prices, instant gratification and no meaningful alternative, does the user experience really determine success? Or does it just need to be functional enough?

The Amazon Conundrum

Armchair critics love to dissect Amazon’s UX. In the dark corners of the UGC web, Reddit threads are full of users raging against the chaotic interface. Tech journos lament the aggressive Prime pushing, the pay-to-win search results. On paper, it’s a usability horror show. But let’s be clear, Amazon isn’t neglecting UX. It employs entire teams of UX designers, researchers, and engineers who are constantly refining the experience. Not to make it more elegant, but to make it better at selling things. If adding another sponsored listing increases revenue, they’ll do it. In 2022 alone, Amazon made over $31 billion from its advertising business, largely driven by these placements, making it a core part of their revenue model (Vox). If customers still find something to buy despite the friction, then as far as Amazon is concerned, the system is working just fine. The difficulty we have as UXers is understanding and reconciling this. Because we see ‘Sponsored’ listings trump the actual best-result search listing we say “This is wrong, users hate this!” but somewhere deep in Amazon HQ is the data to say, “You know what, they actually don’t, and here’s some more $” (EcommerceFuel and others provide further context on how Amazon’s sponsored listings work and why they persist). The same logic applies to other blunt instruments like relentless pop-ups (deeply irritating but demonstrably effective at nudging hesitant users into making a decision) and those blinking, anxiety-inducing countdown timers all over that Instagram brand’s shop aren’t there by accident either.

When UX Takes a Back Seat

Of course, Amazon is hardly alone. Plenty of other sites with objectively terrible UX remain dominant because their value proposition is simply stronger than the frustration they cause:

  • Booking.com drowns you in pop-ups and ‘Only 1 left at this price!’ warnings. Yet its vast selection and competitive pricing make it impossible to ignore.
  • British Airways’ website looks and feels like it’s been trapped in 2009, but people still book flights because, they will always believe the brand stands for something British and the pilots are the best trained and most decent in the skies.
  • Vinted The latest upstart eCommerce brand is having a runaway success in the UK but this is absolutely down to the simplified sell-send logistics and payment process, and definitely not to the bloody awful filtering and product exploration UX (seven different ways to filter on Ralph Lauren sweaters anyone?).
  • GP surgery websites, National Rail, car park booking systems, there’s a vast ecosystem of poorly designed necessities that survive because users effectively have no choice or poorly rationalise their value/essentialism.

This phenomenon isn’t anecdotal or lost on UX thinkers. As David C. Wyld argues in The Endless Battle Against Bad UX, poor usability is pervasive in major companies, and fixing it isn’t always a top priority. Similarly, The World is Running on Bad UI (Michal Malewicz) notes how many essential services and platforms operate on clunky, outdated interfaces yet remain functionally irreplaceable. Their insights reinforce the central argument here: bad UX doesn’t necessarily mean bad business.

The Captive Audience Factor

The obvious point here is that there is a difference between platforms like Amazon, where the UX is frustrating but functional, and services where users are stuck with whatever’s available. The difference with Government portals, legacy corporate systems, anything remotely tied to infrastructure is that these things aren’t just designed badly; they are fundamentally unmotivated to improve.

It’s not even a matter of UX being ignored (again, plenty of these organisations are populated by skilled and well-meaning design folks), it’s often a mix of limited budgets, outdated tech stacks, bureaucracy (many hands), and the sheer pain and complexity of rebuilding something that’s been patched together over decades.

The same logic applies to countless internal systems in large organisations, where usability takes a backseat to bureaucratic inertia and legacy technology. Everyone grumbles about it, but change is slow, and innovation rarely prioritises the dull but essential parts of work life. Just as no one is investing to replace the office microwave that’s been there since the turn of the millennium, so we continue to suffer through whatever shitey interface we’re given.

The Reluctance to Overhaul

Could Amazon wholesale overhaul its UX if it wanted to? Technically, yes. But would it be worth it? Probably not. The site is a sprawling ecosystem of millions of products, channels and third-party sellers, advertising deals, and logistics chains. Trying to impose a sleek, minimalist interface would mean unpicking the very mechanics that drive sales at an enormous cost.

The same goes for other massive platforms. The bigger and more layered a system becomes, the harder (read more expensive) it is to rebuild from the ground up. This is exactly the scenario I described in The Local Maximum Problem, where businesses become trapped in cycles of micro-optimisation rather than taking bold steps toward meaningful UX improvements. Businesses, especially ones as enormous and entrenched as Amazon, often optimise for small, short-term gains instead of taking the risk of a complete overhaul. They’ve reached a peak where micro-adjustments keep the machine running, even if they don’t solve fundamental UX flaws. Redesigning from scratch is a leap into the unknown, and when the current setup is still printing money, who would take that risk? Maybe they update a search filter. Maybe they tweak the layout slightly. But the underlying experience remains a Frankenstein’s monster of competing priorities.

So, Does UX Matter?

Yes, but not in the way purists would like to believe. Good UX reduces friction, increases trust, and improves efficiency, but it doesn’t always dictate whether people use a platform. When the value proposition is strong enough, users will tolerate a lot.

The idealistic view is that platforms should improve out of respect for their users. But what do you think? Have you ever abandoned a platform because of its terrible UX, or do you find yourself sticking with frustrating experiences because the value proposition is just too strong? Perhaps if people keep clicking, why fix what isn’t broken?

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