You know the moment.
You are about to join an interview. The window opens. Then it freezes. A mandatory update. No postpone button. No way out.
Or, you and your partner finally have two hours to unwind. Wine poured. Cheese tray assembled. The final episodes of your favorite show are queued up, until your TV declares: “Firmware update required. Now.”
These are not glitches. They are the unintended consequences of decisions made with good intentions, such as security, compliance, and system health, but without sufficient attention to the human context.
Designed for Metrics, Not for Moments
That forced update likely served several real goals: meeting security patch targets, reducing organizational risk, and maintaining platform consistency.
But in the process, something else was left behind: your moment, your urgency, your life.
And it is not just happening during job interviews or movie nights. This kind of friction is everywhere.
Travel: Your airline app restarts mid-flight, just as you are trying to access your boarding pass.
Enterprise Software: Your collaboration tool logs you out while you are drafting a critical client proposal.
Media & Entertainment: Your streaming service blocks playback for "essential maintenance” just as the finale begins.
Retail: Your shopping app forces an update right before you complete payment.
Healthcare: Your telehealth portal freezes while you are in the virtual waiting room.
Finance: Your banking app demands re-authentication during a time-sensitive fund transfer.
Here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: these systems are working precisely as intended, just not for the people using them. They are built for metrics, not for real lives.
When Metrics Mislead: The Cost of Misalignment
As a design leader, I believe deeply in the value of metrics. I have worked with outstanding product, engineering, and security partners to use data in the service of progress. But what we choose to measure shapes what we prioritize. And when we measure in silos, users carry the cost.
To create systems that support both human needs and organizational goals, we need to examine three critical lenses—and understand how internal dynamics can subtly distort them.
1. The Behavioral Lens: Can users do what they need?
In the video meeting example:
Did the user make it to their interview?
Rarely considered is how often updates block essential tasks, and what it costs to recover from interrupted workflows or abandoned intent.
Inside organizations, ownership is often fragmented. Engineering owns uptime. Security owns patching. The product team owns feature delivery. The Design team owns sentiment. When each team focuses only on its metrics, friction becomes no one’s responsibility.
The human cost: the candidate misses the interview. No one is accountable for the outcome.
2. The Strategic Lens: Does this serve the business?
In the video meeting example:
Are 99 percent of users patched by the end of the quarter?
What is often missed is whether these interruptions quietly erode trust, loyalty, and long-term retention. A patch may be deployed on time, but the cost of that compliance is often paid in lost users.
Internally, short-term metrics take priority. Quarterly goals reward visible wins. A completed rollout is easy to track. A slow erosion of trust is not.
The human cost: the user finds a workaround or moves to a competitor who does not interrupt them.
3. The Emotional Lens: How does this feel?
In the video meeting example:
Did this build or erode trust?
What is often overlooked is the emotional impact: the anxiety of missing an opportunity, the frustration of being treated as an endpoint, and the cumulative effect of being interrupted repeatedly.
We monitor server load, not life load. We optimize for internal efficiency, not emotional timing. The system performs, just not in the ways that matter to the person using it.
The human cost: a parent loses their only hour of peace to a firmware update. A job seeker panics as the interview clock runs out.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of coordination. Each team is doing its job, meeting its goals, and shipping on time. But the system as a whole is misaligned with the people it claims to serve.
When that happens, metrics not only fail to reflect reality, but also fail to do so. They help create a worse one.
So What Can We Do? Co-Create in the Trenches
As design leaders, we cannot just advocate. We need to operationalize empathy. That means embedding it into the systems, rituals, and goals we share across functions. Here’s how to begin.
1. Redefine Success Structurally
The problem: Teams celebrate narrow wins while ignoring collateral damage.
What to try:
Create shared OKRs across functions. For example: “Security and Design co-own the goal to reduce high-stakes task interruptions to less than one percent while maintaining over 95 percent patch compliance."
Reward tradeoff thinking. Recognize the engineer who delays an update to protect a virtual classroom experience.
2. Build Moment Guardrails into the Workflow
The problem: “Critical user moments” are abstract until they explode into support tickets.
What to try:
Map recurring pain. Partner with Support to identify the top ten rage-inducing interruptions.
Add context checks. Before any forced action, require teams to ask: “What high-stakes moments could this disrupt? What is our mitigation plan?"
Require escalation pathways. If an update must proceed during a sacred moment, such as a live event, it should be reviewed and approved at the leadership level.
3. Measure What Hurts and Make It Visible
The problem: Emotional debt compounds quietly until loyalty collapses.
What to try:
Track friction signatures. Monitor behavioral fallout, such as abandonment after forced logouts or the frequency of support tickets mentioning “update rage."
Humanize data. Share user stories in team standups. Example: “Maria, ICU nurse: ‘Your update made me redo 47 minutes of patient notes at 2 AM.’”
Connect trust to dollars. Collaborate with Finance to model the impact of a one percent reduction in trust incidents on retention and support costs.
The Invitation: Redefining “Working as Designed”
That video meeting interruption was not just inconvenient. It was a warning. A sign that our internal systems may be functioning correctly on paper, but are failing to serve the people they were built to support.
Too often, companies with dominant market share operate as if their users are captive. They prioritize speed, compliance, or operational efficiency, assuming people will tolerate friction because they have no other option.
But history shows otherwise.
BlackBerry once owned over 40 percent of the smartphone market. It failed to evolve beyond enterprise-first logic while Apple and Android delivered more intuitive, touch-friendly interfaces.
MySpace dominated social networking but neglected usability and user experience. Facebook, by relentlessly improving flow and simplicity, took the market.
Windows Vista prioritized system health but became notorious for intrusive prompts and performance issues. Microsoft had to rebuild trust with a swift redesign.
More recently, X (formerly Twitter) is a case study in what happens when internal goals override trust, continuity, and emotional connection. Even loyal users have started to walk away.
These are not just strategic missteps. They are failures of experience stewardship.
Exceptional experiences are not a luxury. They are the moat. They create emotional loyalty. They reduce friction. They convert passive tolerance into active trust. They are the reason people stay, return, and advocate—especially when alternatives are just a download away.
Whose Metrics Are These? Let’s Make Them Ours
To my product and engineering partners:
You build extraordinary systems under real constraints. Let’s make sure they land well in real moments. That begins with shared accountability.
Acknowledge the tradeoffs. Security matters. So does the parent attending a virtual IEP meeting without disruption.
Build organizational muscle. Replace “That’s not my metric” with “How does this serve the whole person?”
Treat context like a first-class citizen. Build it into requirements, planning, and post-mortems.
Define shared goals that reflect both reliability and experience.
Conduct user impact assessments before launching system-wide actions.
Treat emotional friction like technical debt. It compounds invisibly until trust is gone.
The best systems do not force a choice between operations and experience.
They respect both.
They protect critical moments.
They earn trust through care, timing, and thoughtful design.
So again, ask yourself:
Whose metrics are these?
Let’s make them ours.