“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford said this after inventing the car when asked if he used consumer input when creating it. And if you have ever taken a class that has anything to do with User Experience, you’ve probably heard this quote many times. This sentence is supposed to represent everything that makes UX worth working on: people cannot recognize their own needs or how to satisfy them, but we can figure that out with the right research and design approaches. This idea is great, it brought us smartphones, Uber, Airbnb, and likely most of the apps we use today. But it glosses over one key problem: what if people really think they need a faster horse?

🐎 Understanding the “faster horse” mindset

People are famously bad at understanding what they need, but that doesn’t stop us from holding tight to opinions on what we think we need. This makes us resistant to innovation that strays from what we are expecting. This idea of resistance to change is anything but new. It comes down to inertia, a founding physical property of the world: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest. We like continuing to do things the way we’ve been doing them.

The technologies we will go out into the world to redesign are systems that users interact with daily, at least. This creates a familiarity that translates to muscle memory. Finding some function on a janky menu you have been using for a year is legitimately quicker than finding that same function on a beautifully streamlined menu you’ve never seen before.

Resisting change isn’t just about avoiding discomfort; the current solution feels more efficient in the short term since adjusting to a new system takes effort. Using a faster horse will get you to your destination right away, but switching to a car requires learning how to drive first.

🤔 How do great ideas make it through?

Implementing a change for a user group who doesn’t think they need it is an extraordinarily tough problem. While I don’t claim to have the solution, here are a few strategies to consider:

1. Make sure you are really solving a user problem.

   This one perhaps goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Being self-critical is certainly not fun, but necessary. Take stock of your user research, and maybe do some more! Spend the time to confirm that you have an accurate understanding of the user need and that your design is a valid solution.

2. Take baby steps toward your bigger change.

   Even the strongest innovations might be too much for users to handle all at once. But, we can create a roadmap to gradually introduce smaller aspects of a bigger change to make it easier for users to adapt to. As an added benefit, we can continue to learn about the idea at each baby step to start iterating and improving sooner.

   

   Take Instagram Reels as an example. Short-form content was doing well on TikTok and Instagram wanted in. A designated spot for vertical content appeared first on the Explore page. Once this proved successful, the Reels tab was introduced (my screen time really took a hit with this one). A Reels tab was likely the plan from the get-go, but adding an intermediate step allowed users time to get used to the concept and prevented early backlash about trying to copy TikTok.

3. Explicitly tell users how you made it better.

   Sometimes a great change can be hard for users to understand well. In that case, we can tell them exactly how we’ve made their lives easier. A clear explanation can be what users need to be convinced to give the change a try.

   The Browser Company did this in a pretty extreme way with Arc. When they were first launching their browser, every new user would be invited to get on a call with someone at Arc to be onboarded “by hand”. This way, Arc could ensure that every user knew how to use the browser and could be explicitly told how Arc is a huge improvement over their old browser. While this approach doesn’t scale, something as simple as a blog post explaining the rationale behind a change can go a long way.

4. Stick to your guns.

   At the end of the day, you will sometimes just have to trust yourself that you have done the right research and designed something strong. If you believe in the change, you might have to ride out the rocky adjustment period. This will take time (and maybe restraint from responding to angry complaints on X and Reddit). But if your change is truly better for the user, holding to it might bring success in the long run.

   

   Duolingo did this two years ago with the transformation of their home page. Language units used to follow a “tree” model, with different nodes that you could work on as you wish. They changed to a “path” model where there was a single linear way to complete each unit because they believed it would produce stronger learning outcomes. Duolingo users were not a fan of this change, but the company held strong to this new version, and 18 months later, they proved that it was indeed better for learning.

🚗 Be willing to try the car

In a world where people share all of their opinions loudly, no iteration is safe from backlash. Just take the Reddit posts titled “iOS 18: a disaster” and “UI3 is a nightmare” as starting examples. But as the self-proclaimed UX People of the World, we can be willing to forgo the faster horse and try the car instead. Download the update or the new app everyone is using and be an early adopter. There is a ton to learn from products by starting early and forming your own opinion on them. And maybe we can help make the tech world just a little bit less resistant to change.