Why Everything Feels Like Product Slop
Steve Jobs introduces “Slide to Unlock” on the original iPhone.
Whatever Happened to Delight?
When was the last time you opened a new app or started using a new product and felt delighted? I mean genuinely surprised by how thoughtful or effortless it felt.
Not “it works,” not “it syncs,” not “it gets the job done.”
The tagline for today’s software should be: Functional. Serviceable. Good enough.
We’ve somehow circled back to the “as long as it works” era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where usability meant it didn’t crash immediately and aesthetics meant someone remembered to add a logo. Back then, no one expected great design from software. It was a mess of gray windows, beveled buttons, and UI patterns invented on the fly. And for a while, that was fine. Software was new. We were still figuring it out.
The Rise of Care
I keep coming back to Steve Jobs because of his status within the tech world. Without him caring about the experience, I’m not sure anyone ever would have. Jobs refused to ship something that wasn’t great. Not “good enough.” Not “done.” Great. That kind of obsessive standard was exhausting to everyone around him, but it worked. The success of Apple’s products forced the entire industry to start paying attention to the people who actually used their software. And from that, an entire field, User Experience Design, exploded into relevance.
Suddenly, care mattered. You could feel it in products like the early versions of Gmail or Google Maps, or the original iPhone, or even the click wheel iPod. You could tell that someone gave a damn. Design became a differentiator. A product wasn’t just about what it did, but how it felt to use it.
But somewhere along the way, we lost that.
The Pandemic Stripped the Veneer Away
When the pandemic hit, the priorities of tech companies shifted hard, and for the worse. The glossy veneer of “customer first” was replaced with the cold reality of shareholder value. It became growth-at-all-costs mentality. Long-term product vision got cut down to “next quarter,” and everyone, from the CEO to the customer, could feel it.
The result? We now live in a world of product slop.
Half-finished features, endless redesigns, every app demanding subscriptions for basic functionality, all wrapped in generic sans-serif optimism. The care is gone. And the users know it.
The Cult of the Next Steve Jobs
What makes this whole thing more frustrating is the number of leaders who genuinely believe they are the next Steve Jobs. They think what made him great was is ability to trust his gut, skip research, and tell his teams to “just build it.” They think his genius was that he knew better.
But that’s not what made Steve Jobs great. He wasn’t a prophet. He was a showman. His genius wasn’t in how much he knew, it was in how much he cared. He understood why customers rejected modern solutions to their problems. He demanded perfection not because he was controlling, but because he knew how hard it was to earn someone’s attention, and how fragile that trust could be once you had it.
If he couldn’t show someone why a product was worth their time, it wasn’t worth his time to build it. His true brilliance was in what he said no to.
Even the Greats Got It Wrong
Of course, even Jobs wasn’t immune to his own blind spots. The Power Mac G4 Cube? A triumph of engineering that didn’t fit in the market. The Apple Hi-Fi? A speaker system no one asked for. These were technically brilliant products that still failed because they weren’t validated.
His hits came from listening, testing, and simplifying until the product could speak for itself. His misses came from skipping that process. Sound familiar?
The Chicken and the Egg
So here we are again, stuck in a cycle where investors want faster returns, and companies want to skip the hard parts to deliver them. Research takes too long. Discovery is too messy. Validation is too expensive. “Just trust your gut,” they say. “Ship it.”
And what we end up with is the modern product landscape: a graveyard of forgettable apps, clones, and “AI integrations” no one asked for. Everything feels like it was designed by committee, or worse, a carbon copy, of a copy, of a copy.
Software today works, but it doesn’t delight.
How We Can Fix It
It’s easy to get cynical about where things are headed. But this isn’t hopeless. We have tools and knowledge that didn’t exist in the early days of UX, and if we use them right, we can fix this.
Use new technology to improve discovery, not replace it.
AI isn’t the enemy of good design. It can help us move faster without skipping the thinking. Finding participants for research used to mean begging people to come to an office or sit through an awkward screen-share. Now we can use AI to uncover relevant studies, identify real pain points, and synthesize insights that would have taken weeks to dig up. Discovery doesn’t need to disappear, it just needs to evolve.
Bring clarity and honesty back to leadership.
Leaders need to state their product vision as something that will happen, not something that might happen if the metrics cooperate. But that confidence should come from real understanding that is grounded in research, validation, and time. Quarterly reporting shouldn’t distort the reality of how long it takes to build something meaningful. The best leaders know that lasting products are a long game.
Return autonomy to the teams.
If you want better software, trust the people building it. The endless Jira boards and metric dashboards don’t make things faster, they make teams anxious, more cautious, and less creative. Give your designers, engineers, and product thinkers real ownership again. They don’t need to be micromanaged, hey need to be believed in. Most of them got into this field because they want to make something great.
The fix isn’t revolutionary. It’s a return to care, clarity, and trust. The same ingredients that made great software great in the first place.
Conclusion
We used to talk about “user delight” like it was the pinnacle of design. Now it feels like a relic. When everything is optimized for speed and quarterly wins, delight is the first thing to go. But that’s exactly why it matters most.
Delight isn’t about surprise and whimsy. It’s about care. It’s about empathy. It’s the signal that someone on the other end of the product still gives a damn about how it feels to use. And until companies start caring again, we’re going to be stuck right where we are, living in the “good enough” era of software all over again.
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