No app needs a good UI until it has a rival

One of the most popular services in the world having one of the worst experiences of anything you use is not a puzzle. It’s a signal and it’s a common one.

What it tells you is that the value isn’t coming from the software. It’s coming from what the software gets you to, and in that situation the software doesn’t need to be good. People pay for access to an enormous library of music and podcasts and they put up with the interface because the interface is a toll rather than the thing they came for.

You can watch the same pattern anywhere you look. Nearly every business tool is a disaster from a usability point of view and they make fortunes because whatever the user gets out of the other end makes the mess worth tolerating. I could list hundreds of shockingly bad pieces of software I’ve used happily over forty years and every one of them did something I actually wanted done.

That’s worth knowing if you’re building something because it inverts the usual advice. People say every application needs a beautiful interface. What every application actually needs is to do something useful and the interface is a side issue until a specific thing happens.

The specific thing is a competitor arriving with a service that’s really equivalent. That’s the moment the interface starts to matter and it matters enormously at that point because it becomes the thing people use to pick between two options that are otherwise the same. Before that moment it’s a nice to have. After it, it’s the whole fight.

Which means the question to ask about your own product isn’t whether the interface is good. It’s whether anyone could offer the same underlying value tomorrow, and how quickly. If the answer is that the library took fifteen years and a thousand licensing deals to assemble, you have a long time to be ugly. If the answer is that a competent team could match you in a quarter, you were always in an interface fight and just hadn’t noticed yet.

There’s a related signal for anyone earlier than that. When you run a startup and people are hungry to use your product despite obvious flaws, that’s one of the classic signs you’ve found something valuable. Not because the flaws don’t matter but because tolerance of them is the clearest evidence available that the underlying thing is worth having. Somebody putting up with your rough edges is telling you more than any amount of praise for a polished demo.

The failure mode this explains is the beautiful product nobody wants. It happens constantly, it’s easy to fund, and everybody involved can see that the work is good. All of the effort went into the part that only becomes decisive once you’ve won the part that comes first.

The reason this is hard to act on is that it cuts against how designers and developers are trained to think, and against what feels like doing the work properly. Nobody wants to hear that the ugly thing is winning because the ugly thing solved the problem first, and the honest response is that you should still make it good, just after you’ve established there’s something worth making good rather than before.

Order of operations, again. Almost everything difficult about building products turns out to be order of operations.

The other thing it explains is why so much advice about product design is useless. Most of it is written by people describing a market where the underlying value was already settled, so all that was left to compete on was the surface. That advice is correct for them and actively misleading for anyone still trying to work out whether the thing is worth having at all.