amount of traffic trickled to their home page and then bounced away. Sometimes, a user registered with the service. Sometimes, they even came back. But over the course of 18 months, no one booked a treatment center through their website. The software engineer’s team knew that whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working. They had the proof: millions of dollars spent building a product that hadn’t gained them one customer. Their investors and business partners were getting anxious. Their publicist continued to find media that were interested in the concept, but the outlets wouldn’t run the story without some activity on the site. Still, they had a lot of features and functionality built in to their interface to help users make the best decision possible. “It must be the user experience,” the team hypothesized, which is when and why they came to me. Like many product makers before them, they asked my user experience (UX) team to just redesign the “look and feel” of the site, ASAP. After all, they needed to meet the growing concerns of their business partners, and because they had a lot of entrenched functionality, they felt it would be easy for my team to just build off of it. But we refused, because they didn’t just need a new UX design. They needed a new UX strategy.