Why 99% of new tech product design is totally useless.

The High Cost of Aesthetic Varnish over Practical Function

I have spent fifteen years watching bright teams chase "disruption" when they should have been focusing on verifiable utility. The fundamental misconception driving the 99% is that design success correlates with novelty. It does not.

Most designers are hired to create difference, not improvement. This results in an endless cycle of parasitic features and gratuitous aesthetic complexity that increases manufacturing risk and decreases net utility for the user. Design, when executed poorly, is simply a local optimization- a slight visual improvement on a dashboard or a minor material change- without addressing the systemic, global failure of the product's premise.

I see this constantly: companies mistake innovation theater for actual progress.

• They design products that solve problems nobody has.
• They introduce unnecessary functional complexity, requiring the user to expend higher cognitive effort for tasks already solved by established methods.
• The primary goal is often to capture investor attention, not to reduce the Cost of Ownership (TCO) or the Cost of Interaction (TCI).

The result is landfill fodder wrapped in glossy press releases. It is time waste.

The Technical Reality of Utility Minimization

Design utility is a calculation of friction reduction vs. implementation cost. The 99% fail this core calculation because they ignore the constraints of human cognition and mass manufacturing economics.

Design for Manufacturing (DFM) as a Utility Metric

A design that is difficult or expensive to produce is inherently low-utility unless the resulting benefit is exponentially higher than the complexity introduced. Most of the 99% introduce complexity for minimal benefit.

• Tolerance Stacking: Over-reliance on tight geometric tolerances for non-CRITICAL aesthetic joints drives up scrap rates and increases assembly time. If your enclosure requires a +/- 0.05 mm tolerance simply to make two surfaces look perfectly flush, and that tolerance does not impact ingress protection (IP) rating or structural integrity, it is useless design. It is costly vanity.
• Material Selection Failure: Choosing exotic or multi-layer materials for subtle visual texture rather than for thermal dissipation, durability, or end-of-life recyclability. I see teams specify specialized polymer blends when standard ABS or PC would perform adequately, simply to achieve a slightly "softer" hand feel that is forgotten after 48 hours. This is an amortization nightmare.
• Interface Overload: Adding buttons, screens, or customization settings because the software team could implement them, not because the user needs them. This violates the principle of minimizing required interaction points, directly inflating the Bill of Materials (BOM) and increasing long-term maintenance overhead.

Cognitive Overhead and Hick's Law Violations

The most useless designs generate friction in the user's mind. Useful design must leverage System 1 (intuitive, fast) thinking. The useless 99% forces the user into slow, taxing System 2 thinking.

• Mapping Issues: Poor spatial mapping between the controls and the results (e.g., a physical dial that controls a setting in a completely unrelated quadrant of the screen). This requires the user to constantly build and reference a mental model, wasting milliseconds of processing time which compound over high-frequency tasks.
• Lack of Affordance: Ignoring established design affordances (e.g., a flat surface that looks like a button but isn't, or a clickable element that provides no tactile or visual feedback). This introduces uncertainty, forcing the user to stop, analyze, and test the interface.
• The Feature Creep Debt: Every added, non-CRITICAL feature increases the complexity of the instructional manual, the onboarding process, and the long-term support infrastructure. Useless design is expensive technical debt paid for by the user’s attention and the company’s support budget.

The Bottom Line: Business Impact is Waste

When I evaluate a product, I am looking past the render. I look at the cost center the design creates. The economic impact of poor design is simple: wasted capital expenditure (CAPEX) on tooling that produces failure.

• Sunk Tooling Costs: A useless product means millions spent on P0/P1 steel tools, injection molds, and jigs that never reach full amortization because the product fails market adoption or is scrapped due to unforeseen manufacturing complexities introduced by the design team. This is capital erosion.
• Inventory Writedowns: Products that offer low utility sit in warehouses. The costs associated with storage, inventory management, and eventual disposal (writedown) are direct results of a product failing to solve a real, substantial problem efficiently.
• Brand Corrosion: Repeatedly releasing products that require high effort for low reward damages the cognitive link between the brand and "utility." Users quickly learn to ignore or mistrust subsequent releases, making future market penetration exponentially more difficult and expensive. Design is reputation engineering; 99% of it destroys the reputation.

Practical Application

If your objective is to design for the 1% threshold of utility, you must operate within harsh, verifiable constraints. I instruct my teams to adopt a mindset of aggressive reductionism.

• Define Utility as Frequency x Impact: A product must solve a high-frequency problem (daily/hourly) or a high-impact problem (life or death/saving significant capital). If the problem is low-frequency and low-impact, the design is useless. KILL IT.
• Enforce Subtractive Design: Before adding a feature or optimizing an aesthetic detail, force the team to remove two existing features. The design is finished when there is nothing left to remove, not when there is nothing left to add.
• Prioritize Manufacturing Simplicity: Design your part geometry to use the fewest possible mold cores and slides. Every added action or complexity in the mold is a direct cost multiplier. A simpler mold geometry often forces a cleaner, more readable functional design.
• Test Task Completion Rate, NOT Satisfaction Scores: Measure the time (in seconds) required for a novice user to complete the core function successfully, versus a pre-existing standard. Ignore subjective feedback like "how much do you like the color?" Utility is quantifiable performance.
• Question The Medium: Does this solution need a new piece of hardware? Could this problem be solved with a firmware update, a software patch, or a simple analog tool? If hardware is not a CRITICAL differentiator, do not design hardware.

Related Fields

Industrial Design - Design for Manufacturing - DFM - Cognitive Load - Human Factors Engineering - UX Metrics - TCO - Tooling Amortization - Product Lifecycle Management - PLM - Systems Thinking - Affordance Theory - Lean Manufacturing - Value Engineering - Behavioral Economics - Frictionless Design - Prototyping - Tolerance Analysis - System 1 Thinking - Quality Control - Supply Chain Optimization