Is User Experience a Matter of Life and Death?
What Is UX, Really?
UX covers all the touchpoints and interactions between a person and a company — its services, its products, and its communications. Don Norman, the father of UX, put it best:
“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
In other words, UX is not just screens and buttons. It’s how easy your product is to find. How clearly it communicates. How well it works. How it makes people feel.
Good UX is:
- Useful – It solves a real problem.
- Usable – It’s simple and intuitive.
- Findable – People can actually discover it.
- Accessible – It works for everyone.
- Desirable – It looks and feels great.
- Credible – People trust it.
- Valuable – It’s worth their time and money.
Sounds straightforward — but as any designer knows, creating something simple is incredibly complex.
When UX Goes Wrong
Poor UX is more than just frustrating — it can have real-world consequences.
Take Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. Investigations found that the control room interfaces were so confusing they might as well have been designed to fail. As Don Norman observed:
“The control room and computer interfaces at Three Mile Island could not have been more confusing if they had tried.”
Bad UX doesn’t always cause nuclear disasters, of course. Most of the time, it just leads to lost sales, frustrated users, and wasted opportunities. But the principle holds: if no one can use your product or service, you won’t make money.
UX Is Business-Critical
Great design isn’t decoration — it’s survival. If your users can’t complete their tasks, they leave. If they feel frustrated, they switch to competitors. UX is the difference between thriving and disappearing.
That’s why we at Jökulá take UX seriously. We don’t just make things look good; we make them work, for real people, in real life — whether that life is about convenience or, in extreme cases, about safety.
Final Thoughts
User experience isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s the core of how your product interacts with the world. When done well, it can be invisible — smooth, seamless, even delightful. When done poorly, it’s glaring and, sometimes, dangerous.
So yes, UX is a matter of life and death. At least, it’s a matter of whether your product lives or dies.
