This article is written by Alicja Colon, a UX strategist at GraVoc. She leads cross-disciplinary teams and UX/UI projects for clients like MIT and Nationwide. With 20+ years in design, she focuses on building digital experiences that feel effortless.
Most website and application redesign projects start with a theory. Someone knows something isn't working. Maybe the website feels outdated, important actions are buried, or users simple aren't converting. The instinct is to fix the obvious points of friction. But often, the obvious problem is only one piece of something much bigger.
Alicja has spent 20+ years seeing the gap between what organizations think the problem is and what users are actually experiencing. Here’s her take on why the obvious problem is rarely the whole problem, and what UX research can uncover.
The Problem You See Isn’t Always the Problem Users Have
Clients know their businesses incredibly well, but everyone experiences a product from a different perspective. Marketing sees one part of the journey. Customer Service sees another. Leadership sees another. Users may see something else entirely.
I was reminded of this recently while leading four stakeholder focus groups within the same organization. One group identified a particular part of the experience as a major source of friction. Later, another group brought up that exact same experience, without prompting, and described it as something that worked smoothly.
Same organization. Same product. Completely different perspectives.
As the conversations continued, patterns started to emerge. Some concerns became more significant, others became less important, and new friction points surfaced that hadn’t been part of the original conversation. By the end, we weren’t just looking at a list of complaints. We could see how the journey connected.
That broader view makes it possible to solve more than one rough edge at a time.
Research Helps Separate Symptoms From Causes
There’s a big difference between knowing something feels wrong and understanding why.
A buried action might look like a navigation problem, but maybe the terminology is confusing. Maybe users arrive without the context they need. Maybe the action itself isn’t as important as the organization assumes.
Those scenarios may look similar on the surface, but they require very different solutions.
That’s where stakeholder interviews, user testing, analytics, support data, and other forms of research become valuable. They help move us from “we think this is the problem” to understanding where the friction actually happens, who it affects, and how it connects to the larger experience.
Because solving the wrong problem well is still solving the wrong problem.
Yes, Research Takes Time
Research can be a difficult sell because it takes more than the hour spent in a meeting. There’s preparation, tailoring questions, reviewing notes, synthesizing themes, and often adjusting the next round of conversations based on what you’ve learned.
But the value isn’t simply the research deck at the end. It’s confidence in what you’re solving.
Instead of investing in the loudest complaint or most obvious rough edge, you have evidence showing what needs to change, why it matters, and what should stay exactly as it is.
Because something on your website or application is working. Promise.
Don’t Fix the First Thing You Find
So yes, if you think your website or application has rough edges, it probably does. You may even be right about where some of them are.
What you’re less likely to know is how those problems connect, which ones matter most, and what users already value about the experience.
That’s the danger of jumping from “we know something is wrong” to “we know what to fix.” Research gives us the space between those two statements—and that’s usually where the better solution lives.
