97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 13. Design Customer Experiences, Not Features

Gail Giacobbe

Many UX designers have had the experience of designing a new feature and seeing it perform well in early user research, only for it to fall flat when it goes to market. One key reason this can happen is that designers may fall victim to wearing feature blinders: looking narrowly at a particular feature and failing to step back and look at the end-to-end customer experience.

I fell into the feature blinders trap while leading a project to improve the renewal experience for a subscription product. Our goal was to increase renewal rates, and our user research uncovered quite a few design flaws in the original renewals page. So we updated the page design, ran early user research, and refined the design until it performed well with our target audience. We then rolled it out broadly, confident the updated design would result in big improvements in renewal rates. But as we monitored the data, we observed only a small improvement—nothing near the rate of improvement we had been aiming for. What had happened?

We dug into the data and noticed that a large percentage of customers who failed to renew had an expired credit card on file. When we looked at renewal rates for that set of customers, we saw they failed to renew almost 100% of the time. Then it struck us—we had done nothing in our renewals page redesign to address ...