Picture a support ticket that reads: “I can’t find where to change my billing address.” Your team sighs. Someone in the Slack channel says, “It’s literally under Settings.” Someone else suggests adding a help article. Another person thinks, quietly, that users just don’t read.
Now picture the same moment from the user’s side. They’re in a hurry, halfway through a task, with a dozen other things competing for their attention. They looked in Account, then Profile, then Payments. They didn’t find it, so they gave up and wrote to you.
Was that person confused? Or did your product fail to meet them where they were?
This is the most important shift a product team can make: when users struggle, treat it as a design problem, not a user problem. Here’s why that matters and what to do about it.
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The Blame Problem
Product teams rarely say “our users are dumb.” The blame is subtler:
- “They didn’t read the instructions.”
- “It’s intuitive once you learn it.”
- “We just need better onboarding.”
- “Power users love it.”
Each sounds reasonable, and each moves responsibility from the product to the person using it. Once that happens, the team stops looking for design causes. Confusion becomes a training problem, a documentation problem, a support problem, anything but a UX problem.
The uncomfortable truth is that users bring almost nothing to your product except a goal and a limited supply of patience. They don’t know your information architecture, your internal terminology, or the reasoning behind your navigation. They don’t care about any of it, and they shouldn’t have to.
Don Norman, who helped popularize the term “user experience,” made a related point in The Design of Everyday Things: when people misuse a well-designed object, the fault lies with the design, not the person. A door that makes you guess whether to push or pull is a bad door. Nobody says the person is bad at doors.
What “Confusion” Actually Looks Like
Confusion rarely announces itself. It shows up as behavior, and if you’re only watching for complaints you’ll miss most of it.
Hesitation. The cursor hovers. The person scrolls up and down without clicking. They open a menu, close it, and open another. These pauses are signals that the interface isn’t answering the question “what do I do next?”
Abandonment. Drop-off in a signup flow, a half-finished checkout, a settings page people visit and leave. Every abandoned step is a small vote of no confidence.
Workarounds. Users export data to a spreadsheet because your reporting is too hard to use. They screenshot a page instead of finding the share button. They keep their own notes on how your product works. Workarounds are unrequested feature feedback.
Repeated support questions. If the same question arrives fifty times, you don’t have fifty confused users. You have one design flaw appearing fifty times.
Silent churn. Most frustrated users never write in. They leave. The ones who complain are a small, vocal fraction of the ones who struggled.
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Why Good Teams Still Ship Confusing Products
Confusing UX rarely comes from carelessness. It comes from conditions that are easy to fall into.
The curse of knowledge
Once you know how something works, you can’t unknow it. You can’t look at your own interface with fresh eyes. The label that seems obvious to you, because you were in the meeting where it was named, means nothing to someone seeing it for the first time.
Internal language leaking outward
Teams develop shorthand. “Workspaces,” “instances,” “entities,” “assets” might each mean something precise inside your company. To a user they’re vocabulary from a foreign language. If your product’s labels mirror your database schema or your org chart instead of the user’s mental model, you’ll create confusion at every step.
Feature accumulation
Products grow by addition. Each new feature gets a button, a menu item, a settings toggle. No single addition looks harmful, but together they bury the core experience. Nobody is accountable for the whole, so the whole gets worse.
Designing for the happy path
Flows are often built for the ideal user who does everything in order, makes no mistakes, and has all the information ready. Real people get interrupted, change their minds, mistype, and come back three days later with no memory of where they were. Error states, empty states, and recovery paths are often afterthoughts, and that’s exactly where confusion concentrates.
Testing with the wrong people
If your only feedback comes from teammates, friends, or your most engaged customers, you’re testing with people who already understand the product. Their experience tells you very little about a first-time user’s.
Reframing: Every Struggle Is Data
The most productive change you can make is small: when you see someone struggle, ask “what about the design made this hard?” instead of “why didn’t they get it?”
That question turns friction into information. Consider a few common examples.
A user can’t find a feature. Maybe it’s buried too deep, labeled in jargon, or placed where nobody would expect it. The fix might be renaming it, moving it, or surfacing it at the moment it’s relevant.
A user skips your onboarding. Maybe it’s too long, appears before they’ve seen any value, or teaches things they’d rather learn by doing. Skipping is a rational response to poor timing.
A user makes the same mistake repeatedly. The interface is probably inviting it. Two buttons that look alike, a destructive action with no confirmation, a form that accepts bad input and rejects it later.
A user ignores a feature you’re proud of. Either they don’t know it exists, don’t understand what it does, or don’t see how it helps them. All three are communication failures, not user failures.
Practical Ways to Find and Fix Confusing UX
You don’t need a huge research budget. You need consistent habits.
01. Watch real people use the product
Nothing beats it. Five moderated sessions with people who match your target audience will reveal more than a month of dashboards. Give them a realistic task and don’t help. The moments where you want to jump in and explain are exactly the moments to fix.
Nielsen Norman Group has long argued that testing with a small number of users catches a large share of the major usability problems, especially when you test early and repeat often. The point isn’t statistical certainty. It’s spotting patterns you can act on.
02. Read support tickets as design feedback
Ask your support team to tag tickets by topic and look at what comes up most. Every frequent question is a candidate for a design fix. The best outcome of a support ticket is a change that prevents the next hundred.
03. Use analytics to find where, and interviews to find why
Funnels, heatmaps, and session recordings show where people drop off, hesitate, or click in unexpected places. They rarely explain the reason. Pair that quantitative view with short conversations so you’re not guessing at causes.
04. Run first-click tests
Ask people where they’d click to complete a task, before showing the full flow. If a meaningful share of them click the wrong place, your structure or labeling isn’t matching their expectations.
05. Audit your language
Go through your interface and highlight every term that a brand-new user might not understand. Replace internal jargon with words your customers actually use. If you’re unsure what those words are, check support tickets, sales calls, and reviews. Customers tell you constantly.
06. Reduce before you add
Before building a new feature, ask whether the problem could be solved by making an existing one clearer. Removing steps, options, and screens often improves a product more than adding capabilities does.
07. Design the unhappy paths
Spend deliberate time on empty states, error messages, loading states, and recovery from mistakes. A helpful error message that says what went wrong and how to fix it can turn a moment of frustration into a moment of trust.
08. Make onboarding about doing, not reading
People learn by using. Guide them toward a first meaningful success quickly, with contextual hints at the point of need, instead of front-loading a tour they’ll forget in thirty seconds.
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The Business Case
If the human argument doesn’t persuade your stakeholders, the financial one should.
Confusing UX is expensive. It raises support costs, lowers conversion, slows onboarding, drives churn, and undermines word of mouth. It also hides opportunity: every user who couldn’t find a feature is a user who never got its value, and never had a reason to upgrade or stay.
Clear UX, by contrast, compounds. People who succeed quickly are more likely to come back, recommend you, and explore deeper features. Reduced friction shows up in metrics leaders care about: activation, retention, satisfaction, and cost to serve.
A Simple Test
Here’s a quick check you can run today. Pick the three most common tasks in your product. Then ask someone who has never seen it to complete them, without help, while you watch quietly.
If they struggle, resist the urge to explain. Write down where they hesitated, what they expected, and what they clicked instead. Those notes are your roadmap.
The Takeaway
Users are rarely confused by accident. They’re confused because something in the design, whether a label, a layout, a sequence, or a missing message, failed to guide them.
That’s good news, because design problems can be fixed. You can rename the label, move the button, simplify the flow, and write clearer messages. You can’t fix a user, and you shouldn’t want to.
So the next time someone says, “But it’s right there in Settings,” remember the person on the other end, in a hurry, looking in the wrong place for a perfectly reasonable reason. They weren’t confused. Your UX was.
Build for the person who has thirty seconds and no context, and you’ll build something better for everyone.
