Designers! Don't just make it easy to use. Make it impossible to live without.
We have reached a strange inflection point in the design industry. We are surrounded by products that are “perfect.” They follow every heuristic, pass every accessibility audit, and boast buttery-smooth onboarding flows.
And yet, so many of them are utterly forgettable.
We’ve spent the last decade obsessed with usability, the reduction of friction. But in our crusade to make things “easy to use,” we’ve neglected the far more difficult, messy, and vital work of making things useful. We are building frictionless roads that lead to nowhere.
The “Inevitable” vs. The “Polished”
There is a specific kind of beauty that the design industry rarely talks about: the elegance that emerges when something is truly useful. It isn’t the beauty of a rounded corner or a perfect gradient; it’s the beauty of a solution that feels inevitable.
A usable product is a polite guest; it doesn’t get in your way. But a useful product is a partner; you can’t imagine doing your job without it.
The industry is currently raising a generation of “pixel-pushers” who can build a flawless design system but struggle to explain the business logic of the feature they’re skinning. We are optimizing the how before we’ve even validated the why.
The View from the Trenches: B2B is Not a Playground
This isn’t an academic critique. It is a perspective born from a decade in the trenches of high-stakes B2B SaaS. Sectors like Aviation and Commercial Real Estate, where “simple” is often a dangerous lie.
When you are architecting a system for a pilot or a multi-billion-dollar asset manager, “ease of use” is a secondary concern. Their primary concern is: Can this tool handle the complexity of my reality?
As a Design Practitioner, I’ve seen peers spend weeks debating the corner radius of a card while the underlying data logic didn’t actually help the user make a decision. That is a failure of design.
In complex industries, utility is found in the logic layer, not the UI layer. If the architecture is flawed, no amount of “user-centric” polish will save it.
The Usability Trap
Why do we default to usability? Because it’s safe.
It’s measurable: You can track “Time on Task” or “Click-through rates.”
It’s comfortable: It’s easier to move a button than to tell a Product Manager that the entire feature is a waste of engineering resources.
It’s aesthetic: Polished UI feels like “doing design.”
But this creates “The Polished Turd” syndrome. We ship beautiful features that nobody asked for, then wonder why the churn rate hasn’t budged. We are essentially making the “wrong things” easier to do.
The Utility Pivot: From 8% to 89%
I’ve seen the power of choosing utility first. In high-complexity environments, you don’t move the needle on adoption by making the buttons prettier. You move it by re-aligning the product’s utility with the user’s “Jobs to Be Done.”
When you solve the core utility (the “burning house” problem), users will forgive a clunky UI. Look at early Craigslist or Wikipedia. They were (and are) “ugly,” yet they are indispensable. Why? Because their utility is absolute. They are built on systems that last, not trends that fade.
How to Start Designing for Utility
If we want to build products that last, we have to stop being decorators and start being architects.
The “So What?” Test: Before opening Figma, ask: If this feature worked perfectly, how exactly does the user’s life improve? If the answer is “It’s slightly faster,” you are solving for usability. If the answer is “They can finally see their entire fleet’s risk in one view,” you are solving for utility.
Master the Domain: You cannot design utility for an industry you don’t understand. If you’re in B2B, you need to know the business logic better than stakeholders do.
Design as Engineering for Humans
Design is not about how it looks; it’s about how it works at the edge cases of complex industries.
Let’s stop wasting our best effort on making the “wrong things” easier to use. Let’s refocus on the elegance of the inevitable. Let’s build tools that are so useful, their usability becomes a footnote to their impact.
Be a product-builder first, and a pixel-pusher second.