If you’re running a B2B SaaS platform, enterprise software, or any non-consumer product, you’ve probably heard some variation of this: “Our users are professionals — they don’t care if it’s pretty, they just need it to work.”
This sentiment is often used to justify having the engineering team handle the interface design, because UX is a “nice-to-have” for companies with bigger budgets. The availability of decent frontend UI frameworks has made this easier to make a product that looks reasonable on the surface without needing to rely on a designer.
Even though the terms “UI” and “UX” design are sometimes used interchangeably (and they are intertwined), they aren’t the same. UX is not primarily about aesthetics. Every visual element (button placement, typography hierarchy, color coding, spacing, interaction feedback) either supports or undermines the user’s ability to complete their tasks efficiently. You can’t improve workflows without considering how those improvements are presented visually, and you can’t make meaningful visual changes without understanding the underlying user experience they’re meant to enable.
Your users don’t exist in a vacuum. When they come to work and encounter a cluttered interface, inconsistent navigation, inscrutable icons, and confusing visual hierarchy, they’re not comparing it to enterprise software from 2015—they’re comparing it to the many consumer apps they use daily in their personal lives. Their expectations have been shaped by consumer experiences where good design is expected, not exceptional.
When your users rely on your software to do their job, especially if they spend 6+ hours a day using it, every unnecessary click, confusing workflow, and “where did that feature go?” moment adds up. That may not show up in customer satisfaction scores, but they feel it on a daily basis as they can try to accomplish their core tasks.
What happens if a new competitor launches a feature that does exactly what yours does, but with three fewer steps to get the same result? That’s not something you’ll see on a feature comparison table—that’s a UX gap. And it’s the kind of advantage that compounds over time as users get comfortable with more efficient patterns and begin to expect that level of streamlined interaction across all their tools.
If your company isn’t focused on UX because it’s “just design” it’s time to reframe your thinking about the role of UX
UX is not about making products “user friendly” in the abstract, but about:
When you remove friction from tasks users perform dozens or hundreds of times and multiply those small efficiency gains across daily usage patterns, the competitive advantage becomes substantial. What makes software a delight to use isn’t just how it looks, but how utility, usability, and aesthetic appeal compound each other to make for a great product.
Over time product teams often reach a point where they get sick of looking at their own interface. The dashboard feels stale, the color scheme seems dated, and frankly, you’re a little embarrassed when prospects see it during demos. The engineering team starts making comments about frontend “technical debt.” So you start talking about a redesign.
Before you commit to a redesign effort, it’s important to separate your internal team’s visual fatigue from your customers’ experience. Users build muscle memory around the tools they use daily. An outdated design is also one that’s predictable, which helps when you’re trying to get work done under deadline pressure.
How do you decide when a visual refresh makes sense? The question comes down to whether the visual change will make the overall experience better or whether it will just be different. Smart UI updates—better information hierarchy, clearer visual cues, more intuitive interaction patterns, improved responsive design—can dramatically improve task efficiency. The key is to make UI changes that serve specific UX goals, not UI changes for their own sake.
That said, a pure visual refresh can have strategic value when your interface looks so dated that (potential) customers think your product hasn’t been improved in years. If your UI looks like it was designed 15 years ago, people might assume it has been completely neglected. You’ll be fighting an uphill battle in sales conversations, regardless of how robust your functionality actually is or how many backend improvements you’ve made.
This can create a real tension between serving existing users (who’ve adapted to your current interface and prioritize stability) and attracting new ones (who might dismiss you based on first impressions during a 30-minute demo). The solution isn’t choosing sides—it’s being strategic about how you modernize by ensuring that any visual updates come paired with functional improvements that provide real benefits to your current user base.
Before considering a redesign, ask these questions:
Many product teams obsess over two user types:
For most products, the vast majority of your users are neither. They’re perpetual intermediates—people who use your software regularly but never become true experts.
These users are sometimes invisible in your feedback loops because they don’t generate support tickets or request features. They just... get their work done, maybe inefficiently, building workarounds and developing personal systems to compensate for interface shortcomings.
That makes perpetual intermediates vulnerable to competitive switching. When a competitor offers them a cleaner path to accomplish the same goals, they may not have the same switching costs that power users do, nor the learning curve anxiety that beginners have.
When you design (or redesign) for the extremes—making things more “intuitive” for beginners or more “powerful” for experts—you often make the experience worse for the overwhelming majority of users who fall somewhere in between. Beginners eventually become intermediates, and most users never become power users. Optimizing for the middle isn’t a compromise—it’s smart business.
Credit where it's due: designing for perpetual intermediates is something Alan Cooper talks about in his books The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and About Face.
Here’s what a mature UX strategy looks like:
UX isn’t about making pretty interfaces—it’s about building competitive advantages. Every workflow you streamline, every cognitive burden you remove, and every task you make more intuitive creates compound value over time.
The companies that understand this don’t treat UX as a cosmetic afterthought or UI as separate from user experience. They recognize that the functional and visual work together as part of a core product strategy with direct impact on user retention, feature adoption, competitive positioning, and ultimately, revenue growth.
Your users might not consciously notice great UX, but they instinctively know that “good enough” often isn’t.
Having trouble identifying where UX improvements would have the biggest impact on your product? We help software companies audit their products and identify opportunities that move business metrics. Let’s talk about your specific challenges →
