Thanks to companies like Apple, consumers now expect high-quality design as a default. For startups, this means a fantastic product can be ignored if the UX feels slightly off. Good design is no longer a differentiator but a fundamental prerequisite for earning a user's initial trust.
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Designers once felt like imposters, but the profession grew rapidly, championed by figures like Steve Jobs. Now, design has a "seat at the table" and is recognized as a critical differentiator and a core business process for problem-solving, not just aesthetics.
Many founders hire UX help expecting a final "graphic design polish" on an already-defined product. The real value comes from a design partner who ideates alongside the core team from the beginning, ensuring the product's structure is coherent before it's built.
True product excellence lies in details users might not consciously notice but that create a magical experience. Like Jobs' obsession with internal aesthetics, these small, polished edge cases signal a culture of craft and deep user empathy that is hard to replicate.
As AI makes software creation faster and cheaper, the market will flood with products. In this environment of abundance, a strong brand, point of view, taste, and high-quality design become the most critical factors for a product to stand out and win customers.
Early versions of Figma failed to gain traction because designers, its target users, fundamentally didn't trust the tool's own subpar visual design. This meta-problem highlights that for a tool to be credible to its expert users, its own execution must embody the principles it espouses. A redesign was the key to unlocking user trust and adoption.
Not all parts of an application require the same level of design polish. Founders must develop an "editorial eye" to invest heavily in the core user experience (a 9/10) while accepting "good enough" for less critical areas like settings pages (a 5/10).
For highly commoditized interactions like text editor undo or canvas pinch-to-zoom, users have powerful, ingrained expectations. Failing to match these conventions doesn't make a tool feel "different"; it makes it feel fundamentally unusable and broken, regardless of its other features. Innovation should be focused elsewhere.
As AI commoditizes basic functionality, 'good enough' is no longer sufficient and will be considered mediocre. Sustainable advantage will come from the top of the stack: superior design, craft, brand, point of view, and storytelling.
Robinhood's superior user experience isn't just the design team's responsibility; it's a core part of the company's DNA, driven by leadership. The CEO and VPs spend significant time on design details, ensuring a high bar for polish that competitors often neglect.
The era of winning with merely functional software is over. As technology, especially AI, makes baseline functionality easier to build, the key differentiator becomes design excellence and superior craft. Mediocre, 'good enough' products will lose to those that are exceptionally well-designed.
