Treating UX as a luxury, not a necessity, is costing businesses more than they realize—especially when the frustrated speak up or drop out.

There’s a recent trend where service providers and product companies see offering a good user experience to their customers as a charitable act and not as a fundamentally good business choice.

There are several aspects where we see this impacting businesses:

• Short-term gain, long-term pain: Customers will tolerate your bad experience until they get a better choice or get sick of your bad one.
• The good stuff never gets used: Customers will miss out on key features or core elements of the value proposition due to findability issues and low engagement.
• Friction that erodes a brand: The frustration generated by lackluster design and choppy user experience accumulates in users’ minds gradually. They may tolerate things at first, but as frustration accumulates, they will become more vocal. This has an immediate impact on market sentiment and a long-term impact on the future consideration of a brand and its offerings.

Having a long-term strategy for how a product is rolled out to customers and how it will evolve to support them is the first step in avoiding these pitfalls.

Having visionary product strategists and designers lead the charge from the beginning will help ensure happy customers from MVP to feature-complete.