In the startup world, beautiful design is magnetic. A slick interface can captivate investors, impress early adopters, and create a sense of legitimacy long before product–market fit is reached. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: visual appeal doesn’t guarantee usability, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee traction. Your product might look premium, modern, and “designed to win awards,” but if users can’t find what they need, complete their first task, or understand how the product fits into their life, they’ll leave. Quickly.

Design is often misunderstood as decoration. In reality, it’s about function, clarity, and momentum. A product that “looks” good but doesn’t “work” well is a product users abandon.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• The hidden risks of aesthetic-first product design
• Real-world examples where visual polish undermined usability
• Practical UX methods for balancing beauty with function

When good design misses the mark

There’s a common misconception in product development that good looks translate to a good experience. This belief is reinforced by what psychologists call the aesthetic–usability effect, the idea that users are more forgiving of issues if the interface is attractive. And it’s true to a point.

In the early stages, a beautifully designed product can boost perceived value and trust. But users aren’t here to admire pixels. They’re here to achieve something. And when that doesn’t happen — when the visual hierarchy is unclear, when features are hard to access, when onboarding stalls — beauty loses its power.

In our work, we often see this pattern across early-stage products. Teams over-invest in motion design, custom UI kits, or dramatic visual themes before usability is even validated. The interface is visually consistent, yet the product doesn’t flow. Empty states look clean but give no guidance. Animations delight briefly but delay feedback. Every screen is designed to “wow”, and yet the product doesn’t convert.

And that’s where the disconnect begins.

When beauty hides friction

A beautiful interface may elicit an immediate “Wow,” but not always provoke “That made sense.” The aesthetic–usability effect confirms that visually appealing products feel easier to use but only until users try to complete tasks.

Sometimes that frustration isn’t neatly phrased as critique it comes through in plain language. For example, Gmail ubiquitous as it is attracted user backlash not for how it looked, but for how it felt to use. One user vented: “The way Gmail works with all its features… makes me throw my hands up in despair several times a day!”. That sense of overwhelm wasn’t born from poor visuals it was born from confusing flows behind a familiar facade.

Here, the frustration isn’t with how the product looks; it’s with how it behaves. That mismatch matters.

Philips had an interesting case: their research showed that about 50% of returned electronic devices had no defects whatsoever users simply couldn’t figure out how to use them. This finding was highlighted in The New Yorker’s article “Feature Presentation” which explored how complexity can undermine even well-designed products. They bought complexity, but ease of use let them down.

In practice, this discrepancy is a sign of hidden conflict: users stop because navigation is not obvious or standard for them, it is super creative and they do not understand what to expect from it, animations seem theatrical or drawn out, or they reject the product because it did not bring them value or solve their problems.

When beauty becomes а smokescreen, the product loses trust long before users even say anything. It’s what lies beneath that determines whether beauty breathes clarity or suffocates it.

Our case

In one of our recent web products Creatorland, we did a complete redesign, from branding to a complete rethinking of the user flow from scratch. When we tested the old product, we discovered a hidden problem: almost 58% of new users left the app during registration. Despite the acceptable interface, people did not complete the setup, and the problem was not in the design, but in how the registration and onboarding process worked.

​​Here’s what we did:

• Conducted a UX Audit
• Tested user flows, identified endpoints, problem areas, and moments when users left the app.
• Added a visual progress indicator to show users where they are in the process.
• Added the ability to return to the previous step in the process, as well as the ability to exit and return later.
• Moved the profile settings to an earlier stage so that users could immediately unlock the feed and start communicating.
• Added illustrations and concise prompts at each step for additional visualization and information for users.

What changed:

• The bounce rate decreased from 58% to 22%
• The time to complete registration was reduced from 3.8 minutes to 1.5
• The number of new users who filled out their profiles doubled, which significantly increased engagement with the platform.

This was not just a visual update – it was a behaviour-driven redesign that helped users quickly get value. And once they were able to explore, interact, and express themselves, our product retention and activation rates skyrocketed.

What the experts say

Design legends and usability researchers have long emphasized that beauty without clarity isn’t strategy – it’s smoke and mirrors. Yet empirical data make this warning uncomfortably concrete.

In their landmark 1995 CHI study, Kurosu and Kashimura coined the aesthetic–usability effect: users rated visually appealing int erfaces as significantly easier to use, even when functionality was identical, and importantly, objectively slower to navigate.

“Leaving User Experience to Chance Hurts Companies” by Mike Gualtieri states that a well-designed site can experience up to a 200% higher visit-to-order conversion rate, and visit-to-lead conversion rates can soar to 400% higher with superior user experience design

A compelling example is given in the article “Improving conversion rates by 75% just fixing minor UX problems” about Vocier, a manufacturer of premium luggage. Without a full redesign, they applied smart UX fixes, like clarifying CTA buttons, removing distractions, and improving form layout. This alone led to a 75% increase in conversion rates in A/B testing and resulted in significant increases in sales. This wasn’t visual glam-it was behavioral clarity.

And while beauty may increase perceived usability, testing reveals it doesn’t guarantee behavior change. Usability testing consistently uncovers frustrations that aesthetics hide drop-offs during form flows, hesitation when screen elements mislead, and confusion in navigation.

This principle that function should guide form isn’t new. It echoes the thinking of design legends like Dieter Rams, who said: “Good design is as little design as possible. It emphasizes the essential.”

Donald Norman’s framework of emotional design adds even more depth. He defines three levels:

• Visceral – how it looks
• Behavioral – how it works
• Reflective – what it means to users over time

Too many startups stop at the visceral layer. The product looks great, so they assume it’s ready. But beauty without behavioral clarity leads to churn. And without a reflective impact, solving a real problem in a user’s life, no amount of polish can keep them.

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, has consistently warned against this trap. As early as 2007, he criticized “glossy but useless” digital products that sacrificed usability for visual trends. In today’s design culture, that warning still rings true.

In short, beauty opens the door, but usability drives action. Norman’s framework of emotional design demands that products go beyond visceral appeal to excel at behavioral clarity and reflective value. And industry veterans like Jakob Nielsen still warn today: a “glossy” interface that obscures function hurts retention more than bland sincerity.

Good design is invisible

The real difference between beautiful design and truly effective product design often comes down to a change in thinking. The main goal of the product is to address the user’s pain point, solve their problem, or change their life so much that they can no longer do without it. All of this requires in-depth research, a lot of work, and, most importantly, thinking at every stage about how the user will feel, not in terms of design (whether they like it or not), but in terms of usability, convenience, and speed.

That is why there are opinions that UI design is part of UX, because it cannot exist on its own, even if it is a landing page or something even simpler. If you avoid such important processes as defining the target audience, understanding pain points, defining the “Job to be Done,” user flow, and so on, you will end up with a product that no one will use.

Build with clarity, refine with care

At Phenomenon, we’ve worked with early-stage startups and growing tech companies long enough to see the same pattern: teams want to stand out. So they chase what looks impressive, bold motion, flashy gradients, branding flair, before solving what users actually need. Polish has its place. But real growth doesn’t come from beauty alone. It comes from clarity.

Design isn’t just about visual harmony. It’s about reducing hesitation, revealing intent, and moving users toward outcomes.

That’s why we start every product not by asking “How should it look?” but by asking:

• What should this simplify?
• How should this help?
• What should be the priority?

Because that’s when design starts driving growth. We get there by balancing behavior insight with functional clarity, so your product doesn’t just look good in screenshots, it works in the real world.

We build:

• UX flows that feel natural, not forced
• Products that teach themselves
• Design systems that scale with complexity

Great design isn’t what people notice, it’s what they feel when nothing slows them down, when onboarding flows smoothly, when buttons do exactly what they should, when the interface fades away and only outcomes remain. 

That’s the experience we design for.