03
Why you can't act on customer insights anymore
Where most UX challenges really come from
When products are described as having “UX problems,” the implication is usually that something went wrong late in the process. Screens are confusing, flows feel awkward, or users need too much explanation. The assumption is that these issues can be fixed by improving research, refining interactions, or polishing details closer to launch.
In physical products, this assumption is often misleading. By the time UX issues are visible, the decisions that caused them have usually already been made, and locked in. But user experience does not emerge in isolation. It is shaped by choices about product and system architecture, component selection, chipsets, and other constraints that are decided long before anyone talks about usability. What users experience day to day is the surface expression of those earlier decisions.
This is why many UX teams find themselves working in a very narrow space. They are asked to improve clarity or ease of use, but only within boundaries that are no longer negotiable. The form factor is fixed. The interface is constrained by everything locked in place already. Manufacturing or cost decisions limit what can be changed.
Small decisions add up to lived experience
What makes this dynamic hard to address is that the decisions shaping UX rarely announce themselves as UX decisions. They appear earlier, under different labels: a component choice made for cost reasons, a layout chosen to simplify assembly, a feature included to satisfy one stakeholder. Each choice makes sense locally. None of them feels like a UX decision at the time.
Over time, these choices accumulate. By the time usability testing reveals friction, the underlying causes are often untouchable. UX teams are left to manage symptoms rather than causes. This is where frustration grows on all sides. Designers feel constrained. Engineers feel blamed for things they can no longer change. Leadership hears repeated complaints but sees no clear way forward. The conversation stays focused on UX quality, while the real issue sits upstream.
In physical products, UX problems are rarely caused by a lack of empathy or research. More often, they are the result of implicit decisions that were never framed as experience decisions at all.
What to look at instead
UX issues are signals, not failures. They point to decisions that were made without fully considering their experiential consequences. Treating them as isolated UX problems misses the opportunity to learn from them.
In physical product development, UX quality is determined long before the first usability test. It is determined when decisions are made about what the product is allowed to be. Once those decisions harden, UX reflects them faithfully.
If your product has UX problems, the more useful question is not what went wrong in UX, but which decisions you are now living with—and how early they were made.
If this feels familiar, this is the kind of situation we help teams gain clarity on.