If you work in UX, you’ll know this feeling. You open the company website one morning, and something’s different. Maybe a button’s moved. Maybe a new feature’s appeared. Maybe the whole homepage has been redesigned. And the worst part? You didn’t even know it was happening.
It’s frustrating. Not because of ego, or because we want to control everything, but because we care deeply about the people using that site. UX designers are there to make sure things work for users. We think about accessibility, readability, journeys through the site, and what those experiences feel like. When changes happen without UX input, those things often get missed.
It’s not just about catching typos or tweaking colours. It’s about protecting the experience. We’ve all seen examples where new features go live with confusing flows, buttons that don’t look like buttons, or pages that just feel disconnected from the rest of the site. These things chip away at trust. And fixing them after the fact is always harder than getting it right in the first place.
Another frustration is the missed opportunity to build things together. UX teams don’t want to say no — we want to help make ideas better. When we’re brought in too late, it often feels like we’re just there to patch up someone else’s decision. When we’re involved early, we can help shape those decisions in ways that are better for users and better for the business.
And of course, there’s the risk of duplicated effort. How many times have you seen teams spend weeks building something, only to discover the UX team had already done research on that exact thing months before? Collaboration saves time. It saves money. It reduces stress. Everybody wins.
The good news is that most of the time, this isn’t about bad intentions. It’s usually about people not fully understanding what UX brings to the table, or working in silos out of habit. The solution is building relationships, starting small, showing the value of early involvement, and creating a culture where no one wants to ship something without a sense check from the UX team.
At the end of the day, we all want the same thing — products and websites that people enjoy using. And that’s exactly why involving UX early isn’t just good practice. It’s common sense.
