The digital market has fallen into the trap of “good enough.” Features are copied, products are averaged out, and AI—rather than opening new horizons—often accelerates commoditization. Nowhere is this more visible than in banking and insurance apps, which increasingly differ only in branding, not in the actual user experience. Yet it is precisely in the era of AI-driven product design that space emerges for a UX resurgence.

Picture a team wrapping up a sprint. Another feature delivered, tests passed, release completed. The expectation? Customer excitement and better KPIs. The reality? Silence—users barely notice. This is the trap of mediocrity: digital products becoming indistinguishable copies of each other. Today, AI is an additional accelerator of this spiral. AI-driven product design promises speed and efficiency, but without a strategic approach it quickly becomes a machine churning out even more generic solutions.

The following audit checklist allows you to quickly assess whether a digital product meets these standards. It can be used both to evaluate an existing website or application for improvement and as a guide during the design of a new solution to ensure that key aspects of neuroinclusive design are considered from the start.

Why We Fall Into the “Good Enough” Trap

In the digital market, spectacular failures are rare. Most products “work”—they meet basic expectations and do what they’re supposed to do. And that is precisely the problem. Instead of delivering genuine value, many teams get stuck producing one feature after another, reinforcing the status quo without meaningfully changing user behavior.

This doesn’t happen by chance. It is the result of recurring mechanisms that show up in organizations across industries. They push design away from differentiation and toward compromise and sameness. Let’s look at them one by one.

Market pressure pushes companies to copy.
A pioneer who launches an innovation enjoys a brief advantage. But competitors quickly close the gap, and the industry enters a phase of feature wars. The goal shifts to matching others. Teams replicate solutions to avoid being left behind, and real design is replaced by a checklist of features. The outcome is commoditization—banking and insurance apps that all look alike and offer essentially the same thing.

Compromises instead of craftsmanship

Under pressure to ship continuously, teams settle for shortcuts. Simplifications creep in wherever speed matters most: in the quality of interactions, in interface details, in the microcopy. The result is something functional but devoid of character. In doing so, we abandon the essence of UX craft—design that fits seamlessly into people’s everyday contexts and communicates in ways aligned with their specific needs.

Deliverables over outcomes

Success is measured by shipping another feature. Rarely do we ask whether it actually changes user behavior or solves a meaningful problem.

Standardization through patterns

Design patterns and best practices help scale projects faster—more screens, more features, more apps. But the more heavily we rely on templates, the more products lose their identity. Sameness seeps into everything: interfaces, communication, problem-solving. UX becomes part of commoditization, reducing offerings to standardized market clones.

The absence of a business language

When UX teams focus solely on aesthetics or functionality and ignore the organizational goals their work should advance, they also neglect the language of numbers, metrics, and strategic arguments. In boardroom conversations, this creates a gap: without hard data on how design impacts revenue, retention, or cost reduction, UX is dismissed as decoration—or at best, as “the user’s voice,” which leadership often sees as irrelevant to business priorities. As Alex Kreger, Founder and CEO of UXDA, aptly puts it: “UX can’t be treated as embellishment—it must become a strategic asset.” [Alex Kreger, Unlocking Executive Buy-in for UX and Digital Branding in Banking, UXDA Blog, link↩]

Where the Real Advantage Lies

A lack of business language and endless backlogs of features are only half the story. Markets—especially banking and insurance—have their own momentum that keeps pulling products into repetitive patterns. You can see this clearly if you map the typical life cycle of any digital category.

It begins with innovation: the moment someone introduces something entirely new. It may be immature, but it’s fresh enough to capture attention.

Soon, however, innovation morphs into feature wars. Competitors pile in, chasing feature parity and throwing money into the race. The goal becomes catching up, not carving out a distinctive value.

Only in the third phase—experience value—does real differentiation re-emerge. Here, advantage comes not from what you offer, but how it works and how it changes users’ daily lives. This is where the true opportunity lies for banks and insurers: not in adding more features, but in designing experiences that are smoother, more coherent, and genuinely more meaningful.

#AI-driven product design and the UX Resurgence

AI has become the fuel of the next wave of digital innovation. Companies rush to announce “AI-powered search” or intelligent assistants. The result? Markets flooded with solutions that, as Jared Spool—renowned usability expert and founder of UIE—calls them, amount to an “AI mess”: a jumble of features launched without strategy or real user value. [Jared Spool, “How AI Will Bring on a UX Resurgence”, 2025/09/01, session on https://leaders.centercentre.com/]

Looking ahead, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where algorithms generate all repeatable elements of design—from UI components to recommendations to entire interaction flows. At that point, the functional baseline becomes invisible and universal: every banking or insurance app offering the same capabilities, wrapped in nearly identical packaging. This is the culmination of commoditization, this time supercharged by #AI-driven product design.

And this is precisely where the chance for a UX resurgence appears. If algorithms can handle the foundations, designers can return to what matters most: creating experiences rooted in empathy, tuned to human needs, and expressed through a distinctive language. As Jared Spool put it: “AI will be a gift to UX professionals. Just not in the way we think.” It’s not that AI will replace designers. Rather, it will free them from repetitive work and allow them to focus on strategic design—crafting experiences that live in the realm of genuine emotion and real change in users’ everyday lives.

How to Reach the Level of Experience Value

Recognizing where advantage truly lies is just the first step. Awareness alone won’t change a product. What’s needed is a set of deliberate actions to escape the “good enough” trap and intentionally design experiences that create real value. These aren’t revolutions, but practical steps that, applied consistently, can shift a product from functional adequacy to experiences that truly matter.

Step 1: Identify a value node.
Instead of trying to fix everything at once, focus on one critical user task—sending a new payment, filing an insurance claim. These are the moments that shape how the product is perceived.

Step 2: Build an Experience Spike.
Once you know the key moment, redesign it without compromises. You don’t need a full overhaul. Show that a single process can be simpler, faster, more considerate. That slice of excellence becomes proof that change is possible.

Step 3: Define your “Definition of Awesome.”
“Definition of Done” tells you when a feature is shipped. UX needs a higher bar: the “Definition of Awesome.” It spells out the conditions that make an experience truly exceptional—fluid interactions, coherent communication, graceful handling of edge cases. It ensures you don’t stop at “working,” but aim for “working beautifully.”

Step 4: Measure and prove impact.
Even the best solution needs evidence. Combine UX metrics—task completion time, error rate—with business metrics like retention and adoption. As UXDA’s experts stress: “We must stop pitching and start proving.” Numbers are what convince leadership that UX is not a cost but a source of tangible value.

Step 5: Scale without losing DNA.
The toughest test comes with repetition. Scaling success can quickly dilute quality and drag you back into “good enough.” That’s why guardrails matter: principles that protect the essence of the experience. They ensure every new rollout carries forward the same character, not a watered-down compromise.

Are You Ready to Create Beyond AI-driven product design?

In today’s digital world, advantage no longer comes from adding more features but from how those features transform users’ daily lives. The ability to deliver such transformation—something automation still cannot promise—is what opens the door to UX resurgence. Before you step into it, ask yourself a few uncomfortable questions:

→ Has your team, in the past year, created a feature that truly changed user behavior?

→ Is your roadmap shaped more by competitors than by your customers’ actual problems?

→ Do you measure success by the number of features shipped, or by the impact they have on users—NPS, task success, retention?

If any of these questions make you pause, it’s a sign it’s time to rethink your approach. We long for the return of design that makes a genuine difference—especially in the age of AI-driven product design.

We believe UX is not a cost but a source of competitive strength, because it enables design at a level that rises above mediocrity. Our mission is to choose the right value node, craft an Experience Spike, and set our own “Definitions of Awesome.” We can measure the real impact of our work and demonstrate to organizations that we are ready for a UX resurgence. The only question that remains is whether the world is ready to move from “good enough” to truly exceptional.

If you’re seeking value beyond commodities, get in touch with us, and let’s create something impactful together.

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Paulina Tyro-Niezgoda

_{UX Designer}

Bartosz Balewski

_{CO-Founder, UX Consultant}