The Gap Nobody Planned For: A UX Designer's View Across Industries

The design and integration gap, what keeps showing up across industries, and how Tonic helps close it

I've been a Principal UX Designer with Tonic for 4.5 years, and some form of UX designer for over 15. I've worked with many different types of clients, across a number of industries, at different stages of their business's lifecycle. I've worked on blue sky pitches to micro enhancements to full-scale enterprise platform redesigns. All that to say: I've seen a lot of variety in client challenges over the years, and I've also noticed some recurring threads.

Lately, those threads have been showing up across several of our client engagements. The conversations tend to start out pretty focused, as a colleague of mine describes it, "a spotlight on a single issue." A redesigned checkout flow, a confusing navigation, a feature nobody's adopting. But as we dig in, the challenges turn out not to be product or market specific at all. It's something underlying, a thread that connects back to how the team works, communicates, or makes decisions long before it ever shows up in the UI.

What I’m Noticing

Clients I've worked with recently have very similar processes and workflows, even though they span wildly different industries. But the real similarity isn't in the processes themselves, it's in the types of challenges they face while working through them:

• Disconnected tools result in inconsistent data, friction, and confusion across teams
• Communication breakdowns around data, workflows, current state, and historical context contribute to confusion and downtime
• Manually entered data (sometimes duplicated across both spreadsheets and paper) opens the door for human error
• Underutilized software products, both internal and external, implemented in hopes of solving these challenges, often at significant expense

Most importantly, alongside those challenges are employees doing their best to work within technology constraints. Time and effort go into creating workarounds, manually spot-checking data, and developing complicated, time-intensive processes just to get the work done and keep their clients or users happy.

There are technical elements to these challenges, yes, and human experience elements, too. Given how similar they are across such different industries, it's worth stepping back to consider why these challenges keep arising in the first place.

The Gap That Accumulates

The challenges arise not because these companies haven't been thoughtful about their processes and workflows, they have! These are successful, established businesses that have grown and evolved over many years. This isn't a failure of technology, but a design and integration gap that builds gradually, even invisibly, over time. We often see this as a byproduct of success: Growth, acquisition, and decades of solving problems as they arise.

So what exactly is a design and integration gap? To me, it means the lost connection between human needs and the technology meant to serve them. Over time, what once worked independently becomes a rigid patchwork that's increasingly difficult to navigate. You can see it in the small things, countless post-it reminders on workstations, complicated spot-check workflows built to confirm calculations because the data can't be trusted. These are examples of employee ingenuity, workarounds invented to keep things moving. But this is how, as a colleague noted from their experience with these clients, unfortunately,

The workarounds become the process.

As the saying goes, "the cobbler's children have no shoes": It's difficult to stop and address internal needs and systems while also focusing on delivery for your clients. I can relate; as a designer, designing for myself is always last on the list. I'm sure this is a challenge we'll continue to see, and it's exactly why it's worth considering different ways to approach a solution.

Why Technology Alone Doesn't Fix It

When the challenges feel technology based, it seems like there should be a technology solution. But technology alone cannot fix underlying issues and gaps. Clients come to Tonic having tried different tools, project trackers, coordination platforms, dashboards galore, but found those efforts didn't really fix the underlying experience challenges. Sometimes it's the wrong tool, but often it's a lack of adoption. When workarounds persist and the underlying behaviors don't change, it's usually a sign that the human consideration got skipped.

Without a human-centered, strategic design approach, technology implementations often add to existing friction rather than resolve it. We need to first have a clear understanding of how people actually work and what they actually need before we can identify and design for the best technical solutions. While our clients bring the spotlight on a problem, it's our job to bring the lantern, casting more light on the surrounding and underlying issues.

So, how does Tonic do that?

How We Approach It

First, we listen.

We listen to clients who come to us with their spotlight problems, the issues that need help right now. That means active listening, lots of questions, and genuine curiosity about where they're coming from, which often leads us to the larger issues underneath.

Depending on the situation and the desired goals and outcomes, we can recommend different ways to partner. Once we've spent time in the patterned problem and traced it back to what's really going on, we partner with clients in the ways that best provide impact for their business and bottom line.

That might mean design and strategy work to bring clarity to a complex problem and align teams around what needs to change, or technology build and modernization to clear out technical debt and turn legacy systems into a real competitive advantage. When the gap is about visibility, we connect and activate data so teams can see what matters and make better decisions.

Often, this comes together in helping teams turn complex ideas into working systems. The right tools, agents, and workflows that actually improve performance rather than add to the noise.

Whatever the entry point, the work is the same at its core: Closing the design and integration gap between human needs and the technology meant to serve them.

A Partner, Not a Project

At Tonic, we see our client engagements not as singular projects, but as partnerships between two teams working toward the best possible outcomes. A commitment might be short, but even then, we understand the impact and importance of our work.

Scope is one thing. Making sure we advocate for our clients, deliver the best solutions we can, and set them up for future success and growth, that's Tonic’s goal, every time.

The challenges and gaps I’ve outlined are larger than any one industry. Disconnected tools, invisible workarounds, the slow drift between human needs and the technology meant to serve them aren't niche problems. They're the kind that build quietly over time in successful, growing businesses across every sector. Digital transformation and modernization aren't just for the enterprise; they're for any organization ready to close the gap between where they are and where they want to go.

And kind reminder, these are the observations of just one person on our team. When I think about the breadth of experience Tonic has collectively built across industries, company stages, and types of challenges, chances are we've seen something like what you're navigating and helped find a creative, modern path through it.

We've got our lanterns ready, and we'd love to help you figure it out together.