The Silent Killers: 5 Signs Your Product Needs a UX Overhaul Slug: 5-signs-product-needs-ux-overhaul

1. Your Support Team is a Broken Record

Quick diagnostic

I was talking to a SaaS founder last week who told me his customer support team was "legendary." He was proud of how fast they answered tickets. But when we looked at the data, sixty percent of those tickets were asking the exact same three questions.

That’s not legendary support. That’s a failed interface.

If your users need a human being to hold their hand just to perform a basic function, the design isn't doing its job. It's supposed to be intuitive. It should feel like walking through an automatic door—you don't think about how it opens, you just walk through. If your users are stopping to pull the handle, push the glass, and eventually wave down a security guard to let them in, you need to tear that door down.

2. The "Frankenstein" Effect Has Taken Over

This usually happens around year three. You launched an MVP. It was clean. Then marketing needed a pop-up. Then sales promised a specific feature to land a whale client, so you bolted it onto the sidebar. Then engineering swapped out the library for the forms.

Now look at it.

You have three different font sizes for headers. Some buttons have rounded corners, others are square. The navigation logic changes depending on which page you're on. This cognitive dissonance exhausts users. They might not be able to articulate why they hate using the dashboard, but their brain knows something is wrong. It feels like a house where every room was decorated by a different person who didn't talk to the others.

3. Onboarding Drop-off is a Cliff

People sign up. They confirm their email. They log in once.

And then you never see them again.

This is the most painful metric to watch because you did the hard part—you got them to the door. But once they got inside, they didn't know what to do. I see this happen constantly with products that assume the user knows as much as the creator. They don't. They are busy, distracted, and probably have five other tabs open. If your product doesn't deliver a "width-of-a-smile" moment in the first sixty seconds—a clear, undeniable victorious outcome—they are going to close the tab. And they usually don't come back.

4. You’re Still Relying on Hover States for Critical Info

This is a specific technical pet peeve of mine, but it points to a larger mindset issue. I was auditing a fintech app recently where the only way to see the transaction fees was to hover the mouse over a tiny grey "i" icon.

Great. Now try doing that on an iPad.

If your design relies on mouse-specific interactions to reveal vital information, you aren't designing for the modern web. You're designing for 2010. Mobile traffic isn't "the future" anymore; it's the default state of existence. If I have to pinch-to-zoom, or if I'm tapping a button that is too close to another button and I trigger the wrong action, I'm not blaming my clumsy thumbs. I'm blaming your product.

5. Launching too big, too soon

This is the one that really scares me. It’s when your own internal teams—sales, customer success, account managers—have developed "hacks" to use the product.

I’ve seen sales reps who have a sticky note on their monitor that says "Don't click the Back button on the checkout screen or it crashes." Or account managers who know they have to refresh the page twice to get the data to load correctly. When your own people are tiptoeing around landmines just to get their work done, imagine what your customers are feeling. They don't have a sticky note. They just have frustration.

If any of this sounds familiar, don't panic. But don't ignore it either. A UX overhaul isn't just about making things look pretty; it's about clearing the brush so people can actually find the path.