The user's confusion is never their fault

When someone can't find a button, misreads a label or abandons a flow halfway through, they've given your team useful information for free, and it points at something you can fix.

They're showing you where the way your product thinks about the world differs from the way they do. Closing that gap is the work.

This doesn't mean blaming the designer or the engineer instead. It's about where the team looks.

Once you decide that confusion is a bug in the product, better questions follow. Why did they expect that to be clickable? What did they think that word meant? What were they trying to do when they got stuck?

The best teams treat every "stupid question" from a customer as a free design review. Support tickets become a list of confusions to design out, and session recordings show where the product failed to explain itself.

None of this needs a research budget. The team just has to agree that when the product and the person disagree, the product is wrong until proven otherwise.

Teams that blame users end up with products that get steadily harder to use, because every confusion is someone else's problem and nothing gets fixed. Teams that take responsibility for confusion end up with products that are clearer and more forgiving.

Over a few years, that's the difference between a product people put up with and one they trust.

This is as much about culture as design. It shows up in how standups discuss support tickets, in whether "the user got confused" closes a ticket or opens a question, and in how customer-facing teams pass on what they hear.

Make "what was the user trying to do?" the first question the team asks about every point of friction, and the product will get easier to use with each release.