A Smart Bear · Jason Cohen
articleprincipleOn the (un?)importance of design
26 January 2025Profit
Source excerpt
About A Smart BearYou redesign your entire website, customers and employees say it's better, but none of the metrics change… Does design even matter?
This is a limited feed-provided excerpt, not the full original work.
Apollo layer
What a founder can learn
Founder takeaway
Treat positive reactions to a redesign as qualitative evidence, not proof of business impact. Before investing heavily, define which customer behavior or business outcome the design should change and test whether design is actually the constraint.
Why it matters
A redesign can feel better without improving results. Clear hypotheses help founders distinguish valuable customer experience improvements from costly aesthetic work that does not address the business’s current bottleneck.
Relevant guides
Put it to work
For your next design project, complete this sentence: “If this solves the real problem, we expect [specific users] to change [observable behavior], improving [metric] within [timeframe].”