In most professions, we instinctively defer to experts. You wouldn’t second-guess a tax lawyer, a forensic accountant—or, at least until recently, a biologist. (The pandemic did funny things to people.)
The point is, we generally understand that there are people who have spent their lives honing skills, learning a profession, mastering it, and investing their time so they can be the very best at what they do. When we hire them, we defer to that expertise. We trust their judgment, respect their skills, and in some cases, even revere them.
Product management—and in particular, UI and UX design—is not like that.
Everyone thinks they’re an expert!
They don’t respect the years of training. They don’t defer to your knowledge. They do think they know better.
Why?
There are a few reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps it’s because it feels familiar—unlike tax law or forensic accounting, we’ve seen this before. We’ve touched it, experienced it, and formed opinions about what we like and dislike. We all use these products—we’re the intended users—so it’s natural that we feel a sense of familiarity, even closeness, to the processes that create them.
But just because you’re a user doesn’t mean you understand everything that goes into this process.
I often say, “Good user experience feels easy to use. Great user experience feels obvious—like it had to be done that way, like that was obviously the only way it could be done.”
When something feels that intuitive and obvious, the UI/UX is great. But the work behind that seamless experience is largely invisible—like an iceberg, most of the effort lies hidden beneath the surface.
Often, these flows are built on a foundation of common ground—best practices that have evolved over time and across hundreds of products. Together, they’ve shaped the patterns that now feel second nature.
This is why we now have established best practices for checkouts, payments, mobile filters, and many, many more interactions.
Developing an intuitive user experience for a new product type, with no established best practices, is horrendously difficult. Think about the UX needed for the first Google Glass, or the AI Pin, or Apple’s new pinch gestures for the Apple Watch.
So, next time you experience a great user interface or user experience, give it the credit it’s due. Understand that magic is happening in front of you—and you are not the magician.