You’ve been moving fast. The roadmap’s alive. Features shipped, launches announced, maybe even a few investors impressed.
But now the product’s feeling… messy.
Not broken. Just a bit bloated. A little stiff in places. UX that used to feel sharp now feels like it’s whispering through bubble wrap.
If you’re here — you don’t need a website redesign. You need a reset.
Here’s the checklist to run before you start polishing pixels or opening a fresh Figma file.
1. Start With the Screens You Avoid
You know the ones. The account settings panel. The onboarding that never quite worked. The billing page that got postponed four times.
These are the parts of your product that haven’t been touched since MVP design — and users still visit them every day.
If your own team avoids them, chances are your users are getting stuck in them.
2. Check for Modal Sprawl
How many modals are in your product right now?
How many can be open at once?
It starts with one helpful prompt — and ends with three-stacked overlays, each asking for slightly different things.
Use this rule of thumb: if you can’t diagram the full flow without apologising, the modal logic is broken.
3. Find the Tooltips That Became Crutches
Tooltips are great — until they start doing too much.
If a feature can’t be understood without hovering over six icons, it’s not intuitive. It’s hidden.
Kill the tooltips that try to do the job of proper interface copy. Especially the ones explaining things that shouldn’t need explaining.
4. Read the Empty States (Aloud)
Open your app. Trigger the zero states.
Read them out loud like a user seeing them for the first time
Are they helpful? Do they actually guide someone? Or are they just filler text with a sad icon?
Empty states are underrated UX design power-ups. Make them count.
Pretend you just signed up. Look at your nav.
Do you know where to go? Do the labels mean anything if you haven’t been briefed?
Nav bloat happens when every team gets their own tab. Audit it like you’d audit a homepage: clear hierarchy, sensible grouping, one focal action.
6. Rewrite One Piece of Copy That Feels Afraid
Find a button label, tooltip, or modal that sounds like it’s trying not to offend anyone.
Rewrite it. Make it direct. Make it confident.
No more “might,” “maybe,” or “optional.”
Clean UX starts with clean language.
7. Walk the Flows With a Stopwatch
Pick a core task. Time how long it takes from first click to final state.
Don’t test it yourself — give it to someone new. Watch. Stay quiet.
Every extra click. Every pause. Every dropdown hover. They all add up.
You don’t need to optimise for speed — just for sense.
8. Close a Tab
Not in your browser — in your product.
Find one tab, feature, or function that’s hanging on from a previous version of the strategy. Something no one loves, no one owns, and no user would miss.
Kill it. Simplification is a design decision.
9. Identify Where Users Get Stuck (But Don’t Complain)
Support tickets are one thing. Silence is another.
Find the flows that confuse users without triggering a help request. Abandonment is often hidden in analytics — not inboxes.
These are your real blockers.
10. Spot the Styling Drift
Open three unrelated parts of your product.
Do buttons look the same?
Do headings follow the same pattern?
Is spacing consistent?
You don’t need a design system to care.
Just make sure the thing feels like one product.
11. Revisit Your Primary Call to Action
Audit your major screens. Is the CTA still pointing users in the right direction? Or has it become diluted, duplicated, or buried under secondary actions?
If users hesitate at the decision point, the UI failed.
12. Audit Success Messages
Everyone obsesses over errors. Success gets ignored.
Look at what users see when something goes right. Do you affirm the action? Offer a next step? Reward the effort?
Success should feel like progress — not a dead stop.
13. Look for Dead Ends
Not every screen needs to be flashy, but no screen should be a wall.
Check features that do their job but leave users wondering, “Now what?”
Every click should lead to a choice, not a shrug.
14. Review All “Custom” Logic
Every product has one: that one-off flow that made sense six months ago and now haunts the engineers.
Ask your devs and support team: what’s the most painful bit of UX to maintain or explain?
If it’s not pulling its weight — rewrite or remove it.
15. Run the “Would We Ship This Today?” Test
Pick three screens at random.
Ask the team: if this were v1, would we ship it as-is?
If the answer is “not really,” you know where to focus next.
This isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about getting your product back to a place you can be proud of — without burning the whole thing down.
You don’t need a redesign. You need rhythm. Clarity. A product that feels as intentional as it is fast-moving.
That’s what a reset gives you: confidence.
If you’re looking to go deeper, here’s how DNSK approaches product design, and who you’d be working with.
Because sometimes, the smartest move isn’t starting over.
It’s cleaning house.