Investing in UX is not a luxury reserved for well-funded startups. It's an economic decision that reduces support costs, increases retention and accelerates adoption.
User experience is often perceived as aesthetics — pretty colors, smooth animations. This is reductive. UX is fundamentally about the quality of the path a user takes to reach their goal. A form with ten fields where three would suffice is bad UX. An incomprehensible error message is bad UX.
The foundational principles remain those of Jakob Nielsen: visibility of system status, match between system and real world, user control, consistency, error prevention. These heuristics date from 1994 and haven't aged a day. Before launching any design tool, it's worth asking: am I respecting these ten principles?
The most neglected step remains user research. We design too often for ourselves. A 30-minute interview with five real users systematically reveals surprises. Assumptions melt away. It's uncomfortable, but it's precisely what allows you to build a product people actually want to use.
→ See also: Design System · User testing · UX in B2B applications