Last year I watched someone finish setting up a Salesforce integration. OAuth: worked perfectly. Field mapping: one click. Big green success message: “Connected successfully!” They closed the window looking satisfied. I was helping them debug something else, so I had their screen still open. Three days later, same person: “Is Salesforce broken? Nothing’s syncing.” I…

Last month, a SaaS founder asked me to review their onboarding. “We implemented every best practice,” they said. “But activation is terrible.” I opened their app. Welcome screen with value props. Account setup wizard with progress bar. Interactive product tour with twelve hotspots. Empty state illustrations with cheerful CTAs. Contextual tooltips on every button. Profile…

Your perfect onboarding just got killed by someone who never saw it. I watched a $50K ARR deal die in a conference room last year because of a question our SaaS onboarding never answered. The product worked. The user loved it. She’d completed our beautifully designed onboarding in 8 minutes, explored features, and was ready…

Most banking apps look fantastic when the balance is healthy. Sunlit gradients. Confetti for rounding up. Little fireworks when you tap “paid”. Then the number hits £0 (or worse), and the polish falls off. Tricky language, greyed‑out buttons, pop‑ups with moral undertones. The UI that was keen to celebrate a £3 cashback suddenly becomes shy about fees,…

Most UX audits are long, expensive, and full of beautifully formatted reports you’ll never read twice. This isn’t that. This is the UX sanity check — the quick-and-dirty, seven-question sweep I use when I want to know if a product is healthy enough to survive the week. It’s not a replacement for a proper deep-dive audit, but…

Every product accumulates UX/UI debt — cluttered flows, unloved screens, ghost features no one uses but everyone’s scared to remove. But here’s the catch: fixing everything at once isn’t just unrealistic, it’s usually a massive waste of time. You don’t need a redesign. You need a triage plan. We once audited a SaaS dashboard so overloaded with icons, tooltips,…

Quick story before we start. A few years ago, a startup hired a “top-tier” agency for a full UI/UX overhaul. Six weeks and a slick deck later, they launched. Two weeks after that, they were back — asking why their users still didn’t understand the product, why the bounce rate hadn’t changed, and why devs were…

This post isn’t just a rant — though there will be ranting. It’s a spoiler for every team that’s ever said: “Let’s just do a quick design audit” with the same energy as someone saying “I’ll just Google the symptoms.” So, you’re staring down sluggish conversion numbers, vague user complaints, or an executive Slack message…

When teams plan new features, they obsess over happy paths: full dashboards, populated lists, satisfying graphs. But the one state that usually gets the least love? The empty state. Empty states aren’t just placeholders or cosmetic afterthoughts. They’re critical moments — tiny psychological battlegrounds where your product either earns trust or quietly pushes users away.…

It sounds harmless. Polite, even. “Maybe Later” — the soft opt-out on your modal, onboarding flow, or product tour. A UX safety valve. A peace offering to the anxious user. But here’s the problem: “Maybe Later” almost always means “Never.” And worse — it trains users to avoid learning your product at the very moment they…