Hunting White Elephants with UX
UX doesn’t just make products more enjoyable — it saves and generates money. User research helps guide early decisions that align with real needs, while well-designed ergonomics ensure a smooth and intuitive learning curve.
Yet, many projects are launched without a real purpose. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — experimentation fuels innovation. But it becomes a problem when a product, not as groundbreaking as it seems, is released without UX studies like benchmarking or competitive research, under the guise of being disruptive. Worse, when it sets an overly ambitious vision that, instead of enhancing usability, actually hinders it.
The White Elephant
In architecture, the term white elephant refers to an extremely expensive building project that fails to deliver on its function or becomes very costly to maintain, such as airports, dams, bridges, shopping malls, or football stadiums.
A white elephant is a project that consumes enormous resources but delivers little value. In the digital space, this often takes the form of:
- Overengineered features that users don’t care about.
- Disruptive redesigns that confuse existing customers.
- Tech-first rather than user-first innovations that fail to gain adoption.
- Misguided bets on emerging trends without validating real demand.
Three White Elephants
1. The Metaverse: A Market That Wasn’t Ready
Meta’s Metaverse aimed to revolutionize digital interactions through VR. The problem? Users weren’t ready to spend hours in headsets, and the value proposition was unclear — why use VR for meetings when Zoom works fine? Despite billions invested, adoption remained low, while AI innovations like ChatGPT quickly took center stage.
2. Quibi: A Streaming Service No One Needed
Quibi was a short-form video platform, failed with a flawed paid model competing against free giants like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Lack of social sharing further doomed its chances, leading to $1.75 billion wasted in months — a textbook case of poor UX and market misalignment.
3. The EV Charging Pre-Booking That No One Used
At an EV charging company, a CEO pushed for an 8-day advance booking system to be first on the market, ignoring competitors’ 30-minute limit. Research showed why: high cancellations and no real user demand. Despite this, the project consumed six months of development, delaying key features.
The outcome? Only four reservations in six weeks. Another costly white elephant that proper validation could have prevented.
The Birth of a White Elephant
White elephants thrive in diverse environments. In large corporations, they are often born from top-down decisions, where leadership — detached from user realities — pushes ambitious yet misaligned projects. In startups, they emerge when investors prioritize hype over genuine market demand, funding innovations that lack real-world adoption potential.
Regardless of the setting, the common denominator is a failure to validate assumptions. When market research, user testing, and competitive analysis are overlooked, white elephants find fertile ground to grow — often at great financial cost.
How UX Prevents White Elephants
Many digital failures could have been avoided with proper validation before development. Instead of rushing into costly projects, companies should take these critical steps:
- Interrogate the origins of the project: Who initiated it? Is it a genuine response to user needs, or just an ambitious vision without validation? Engage stakeholders early to clarify assumptions.
- Conduct user research to confirm real pain points and demand.
- Use prototypes and MVPs to validate key assumptions with minimal risk.
- Perform usability tests to refine the experience before scaling.
- Analyze competitive benchmarks to ensure differentiation and avoid redundant efforts.
💡 Case Study: Apple’s Touch Bar aimed to revolutionize MacBook input but disrupted workflows, lacked third-party adoption, and failed to enhance efficiency. Apple eventually removed it, proving that not all innovations improve UX — some introduce unnecessary complexity.
Design for Adoption, Not Just Innovation
A product’s success isn’t measured by how advanced it is, but by how well it fits into existing user behavior. UX ensures innovation is practical and accessible:
- Align with existing mental models to reduce friction and ease adoption.
- Simplify — more features don’t mean better UX.
- Solve a real problem rather than chasing trends.
WhatsApp — Reinventing SMS Without Changing User Behavior
When WhatsApp launched in 2009, SMS was still the dominant way to text, but it had major limitations — high costs, no multimedia support, and no real-time status updates. Instead of introducing a completely new messaging experience, WhatsApp built on existing habits and improved them.
- Familiar experience, enhanced → WhatsApp felt just like sending an SMS, but without the drawbacks. No character limits, no extra fees, and support for photos, videos, and voice messages.
- No friction in adoption → Unlike MSN or Skype, there were no usernames or logins to remember — just a phone number, exactly like SMS.
- Solved a real, universal problem → People wanted a simple, affordable way to stay connected globally, without worrying about international texting fees.
The result? WhatsApp became the default messaging app in many regions, proving that the best UX innovations don’t always require changing user behavior — sometimes, they just need to make what already exists work better.
Conclusion: Balancing Innovation with Reality
Innovation drives progress, and bold ideas have the power to reshape industries. Taking risks is part of the game — but blind leaps without validation can lead to costly missteps.
White elephants aren’t just expensive — they can drain resources, stall growth, and erode trust in decision-making. The goal isn’t to stifle creativity but to channel ambition into impact-driven solutions that truly resonate with users.
By embedding user research, iterative design, and adoption-focused thinking, companies can innovate smarter — ensuring their next big idea isn’t just disruptive, but meaningful and sustainable.
Before you launch your next big thing, ask yourself: Is this solving a real user need, truly groundbreaking, or are we just creating a white elephant?
