Great products transcend the Usability vs. Utility debate

Your design team is pushing for simplification to make users’ lives easier. Your sales team is advocating for power features to close deals. Your customer success team is demanding both — a clearly impossible feat.

You’re stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. The next step is for you to choose which flavor of pain you want this quarter.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

The whole scenario exemplifies the casualties of the usability vs. utility war.

But the problem isn’t what you think it is — which is why you keep getting surprised when deals don’t close and customers churn, often for contradictory reasons.

The reality is this:

The battle between usability and utility is a futile war that’s destroying product value on both sides. While most companies choose between power and simplicity at every turn, the best understand that the right answer, as always, lies somewhere in between — and they find a way to maximize both utility and usability.

It’s not a zero-sum game.

Product teams the world over are bleeding value trying to pick sides in a war they shouldn’t be fighting.

Treating usability and utility as opposing forces has created a generation of products that either overwhelm users with power they can’t access, or underwhelm them with simplicity they can’t scale.

The cost isn’t just in lost deals — it’s in the very soul of product development.

Death by perfection

On the one side, you have designers on a quest for the perfect user experience. When you fight this fight, unintended consequences ripple through the entire product lifecycle.

• Beautiful interfaces temporarily (and only temporarily) mask missing functionality — eventually new users realize that their needs are not being met, and *poof* they’re gone
• Simplification efforts accidentally remove critical power user features (or they do so not-so-accidentally) (you tell me how important those power users are or aren’t to your business)
• User testing focuses on “ease” metrics while missing capability gaps
• Engineers, what with their logical brains and all, don’t react well when told to remove useful complexity (which by the way, they spent a lot of time thinking about and building)

When you sacrifice utility at the altar of usability, you don’t just lose features — you lose your product’s reason for existing (i.e., its value to users). If it’s pretty but doesn’t do anything useful, then it’s pretty useless.

Death by feature factory

The opposite approach — piling on features in the name of power — creates a devastating spiral of complexity.

• Feature bloat makes simple tasks unnecessarily complicated (“where do I even go to do that thing?”)
• Training costs skyrocket as complexity compounds — both when onboarding new users, and when onboarding new hires
• Support tickets keep rising… and rising… and rising — users can’t keep it up with it all, they’ve only got so much brain cache and muscle memory to go around
• Tech debt accumulates as features interact in unexpected (read: should-have-been-expected-but-remained-unplanned-for) ways
• User satisfaction paradoxically drops as capabilities increase

Adding features without considering their accessibility isn’t building value — it’s building barriers to success. The more friction you add, the slower users move — and when they hit a critical slowness threshold, they bail.

As always, the answer isn’t one or the other — it’s somewhere in the middle.

But it’s a bit more nuanced than that as well.

It’s not a matter of reducing complexity in favor of some extra usability, or trading a feature or two on the roadmap for sorely-needed UX-improvement time, or deciding that the team should sacrifice usability and/or user testing so you can move faster and/or break more things, respectively.

Those are just compromises.

What you need is a mindset shift.

Don’t sacrifice one for the other. Build a product that is both usable and useful, all at once, together.

Step 1: Focus on value

The ever-important first step is to acknowledge, understand, and agree that success comes from focusing on user outcomes rather than feature lists or design principles.

End of list. If not value, you have gifted your users nothing.

True product value isn’t about features or design — it’s about enabling user success through both.

Step 2: Iteratively build value naturally

Complexity doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You just need to introduce it at the right time, at the right pace.

• Interfaces should prioritize frequent tasks while making power accessible (albeit not via minimal clicks)
• Complex workflows should be broken down into digestible steps (and take advantage of the Spark Effect)
• Learning curves should feel natural — gradual, not exponential or step functions
• Advanced capabilities should be introduced contextually, not haphazardly strewn about the product
• Features should follow consistent, familiar patterns — users shouldn’t need to learn new paradigms on every page

Great products don’t just contain power — they reveal it at exactly the right moment, allowing users to seize it when they can most benefit from it.

Step 3: Ensure users feel empowered to attain value

None of this focus on value can work if users themselves don’t feel like it’s possible to achieve what they want to achieve (or, feel like it’s too hard, or not worth the time or effort).

• Advanced capabilities should feel like rewards, not obstacles
• Hints in the UI should guide users toward greater mastery — they should nudge, not force (said another way, those power user features aren’t hidden, they’re just tucked away in a sensical manner, waiting to be revealed)
• Power user paths shouldn’t obstruct casual users (or users on the path to power user status)
• Features that don’t add value should be deprecated (or at least pushed aside that much more) — the complication for the 99% isn’t worth it just to satisfy the edge case needs of the 1%

Products win when they grow with their users instead of forcing users to adapt to them. And more importantly, the users win when they can do what they need to do without being confused by what they don’t.

Understanding whether you’re succeeding requires zeroing in on metrics that matter.

And those metrics are the ones that are directly tied to — you guessed it — value.

So watch for signs that users are attaining that value. E.g.:

• Time-to-value decreases for new users (note: this is not “onboarding time”, it is the time it takes for a user to realize actual value and experience their first “Aha!” moment)
• Cumulative value (however that is measured for your users) continuously increases over time (put serious thought into what value truly means for your users — it can be revenue earned, time saved, users acquired, customer satisfaction achieved, anything — just make sure it matters to your users, not you)
• Support tickets decrease and shift from basics to advanced topics (if the easy stuff isn’t buried amongst a mountain of complicatedness, users will need to ask less questions about it)
• Feature adoption increases with product tenure (note: feature adoption in and of itself is not a value metric, but rather an indicator; still, especially for products that offer a large amount of features, this should generally increase over time)
• Power features see organic discovery and adoption (but only by the users who actually need it, allowing the rest to go on their merry way)

Success isn’t measured by what your product can do — it’s measured by what users actually accomplish with it.

Stop fighting a senseless war of usability vs. utility.

Learn from all the products-that-could-have-been.

Choose value. Focus on helping your users accomplish their goals, instead of providing them endless actions to take or over-simplifying capabilities in the name of “clean UI/UX”.

It’s not that usability and utility don’t matter — they do. It’s that their balance will come naturally when you focus on helping your users win.

So the next time someone asks you whether the team should be prioritizing power or simplicity, remember this: the wrong answer is choosing between them. The right answer is making them work together to create products that both delight and empower users at every step of their journey.