Bart Krawczyk

So, you shipped an AI feature that your team spent weeks testing. Internal outputs looked fine. Ready, set, launch. A few weeks later, users start saying the outputs feel “off.” The feedback explains that it’s too generic, occasionally wrong, and not quite natural. You dig in and the problem is… somewhere. The prompt? The context? The model? A data quality issue upstream? You genuinely don’t know. So you tweak a bit of everything hoping that it’ll improve the quality. Sound familiar?

A couple of years ago, I launched a redesign of the ad experience for a platform with over 100 million monthly active users. We showed users more ads, more frequently. And the complaints about ads went down. Counterintuitive, isn’t it? Let me explain. Friction and annoyance are not the same thing In the UX industry, we often treat “friction” and “annoyance” as the same thing. We shouldn’t. Let’s differentiate them. Friction is structural.

When designing and building products, we often use the terms ‘user’ and ‘customer’ interchangeably. That’s a big problem. The distinction might not matter much for simple B2C products — the user and customer are, in most cases, the same person — but as the product’s complexity grows, the distinction between a user and a customer matters more. Let’s take a deeper look at why. Definition of a user A user is a person who — you’ve guessed it — uses your product.