Don’t change your app every month

Written on 05/14/2025
Diegovz

Redesigning constantly doesn’t make your product better. It makes it harder to use and easier to forget.

Graffiti on a yellow wall reading “If you’re reading this it’s time for change,” with the word “NOT” added and “CHANGE” altered to “CHANGING” in red paint, symbolizing resistance to unnecessary redesigns.

In many startups, there’s an unsettling ritual: every month brings a redesign, a new feature set, or a completely reinvented flow. It’s like product teams believe that if nothing changes, nothing is improving.

But this constant churn isn’t innovation. More often, it’s anxiety disguised as iteration. And far from making your product better, it may be killing it slowly.

Featuritis: the silent disease of modern product design

Originally coined by Alan Cooper, the term describes the compulsive addition of new features under the false belief that more equals better. Teams keep launching, tweaking, and adding. The roadmap turns into a crowded highway of ideas, none of which are allowed to mature.

This behavior isn’t new. In HCI, it’s known as Featuritis (or creeping featurism), a pattern that leads to bloated systems disguised as progress.

Screenshot of Microsoft Word showing the task pane open by default, illustrating an example of interface change that disrupts the user’s natural flow by imposing unsolicited features.
Visual example of a featuritis (source)
You’re not building a stronger product. You’re building a bloated one.

The result? A busy roadmap, stressed teams, and a product that’s harder to maintain, harder to use, and harder to love.

There are some good case studies on how very basic functionality can end up broken because of this..

The illusion of progress: why more doesn’t mean better

In fast-paced environments, doing more feels like winning. Shipping fast becomes a badge of honor. But quantity ≠ impact.

Great UX isn’t about how much you add. It’s about how little you need to add to make something useful, delightful, and memorable.

An infinite staircase illusion labeled “Adding more features” on each side, symbolizing the never-ending cycle of feature additions without meaningful progress.
When adding more features feels like progress, but leads nowhere.

Ask yourself:

  • How many features are used daily by your core users?
  • When was the last time you removed something from your product?
  • Do you measure usage, or just output?

Too often, teams celebrate shipping without checking if anything actually lands.

The hidden cost of unused functionality

Every new feature comes with a hidden bill:

  • Design time
  • Development time
  • QA testing
  • Documentation
  • Support overhead
  • Maintenance debt

These features don’t just consume resources; they also add sunk costs to your product, making it harder to remove them later, even if they fail.

Image showing a mobile app interface with various elements annotated with extremely low usage percentages (0.2% to 0.8%) and their respective high development and maintenance costs. The image highlights the imbalance between feature usage and resource consumption.
Low usage, high cost. A silent product tax.

Worse, unused features clutter the interface and compete for the user’s attention. They dilute the core value of the product. They make everything feel heavier.

Every unused feature is a lost resource. A tax on clarity. A distraction from what matters.

The confused user: from intuitive to overwhelming

When your product changes every month, your users have to constantly relearn it. That’s not iteration, it’s erosion.

Simplicity is what makes people feel confident. Familiarity builds trust. And trust drives retention.

A tangled path representing a user’s journey from wanting something to getting it, complicated by 100 unnecessary features.
When too many features get in the way.

If your product feels different every time they open it, don’t be surprised when they stop opening it altogether.

So what should you do instead?

Consistency isn’t stagnation. It’s a strategy.

Here’s what teams with clarity do:

  • Listen before you build ✅
     Not all user requests are worth turning into features.
  • Prioritize with data, not opinions ✅
    Well-formed decisions bring greater impact and fewer mistakes.
  • Iterate with intent ✅
    Change with purpose, not pressure.
  • Establish a product vision ✅
     Without one, everything feels urgent (and nothing truly is).

This is the hierarchy great teams follow:

Start with the vision, end with the UI.

Products like Linear, Notion, or Figma haven’t won because they change constantly. They’ve won because they improve with surgical precision, guided by purpose.

Build less. Mean more.

In the race to grow, many teams forget this:

You’re not just building features. You’re shaping perception.

Every decision you make (what you launch, remove, or keep consistent) shapes how users perceive your product.

If you build with intention, they’ll trust it.
If you change too often, they’ll leave it.

So next time someone says “Let’s redesign this,” pause and ask:

Is this better, or just newer?

Have you ever felt pressure to change your product constantly just to look like you’re making progress?
I’d love to hear how you or your team handle this kind of mindset → 💬

Don’t change your app every month was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.