Let me share some of my background with you. I started thinking about writing this book several years ago. At the time, I was working at a startup. The company’s flagship product allowed employees to manage their healthcare and insurance benefits. It had a sophisticated backend, yet the application was unattractive and difficult to use.

The insurance sector is not known for being a bastion of excitement. Compliance, legal, and regulatory issues mire your design work. Add an unhealthy dose of industry-speak, and you get a prescription for a bad user experience.

The application posed an intriguing set of challenges. Our design updates to the application could not move too fast, lest we upset thousands of existing clients. So, the team made lots of small, frequent changes.

After several months of incremental changes, we arrived at a seemingly innocuous page. Users could review or edit their life insurance benefits. It was unremarkable in every way, containing all the excitement and grandeur you might expect from an insurance form. The team and I rewrote a couple of labels, tweaked a handful of inputs, and called it a day.

Jumping ahead a few years, I found myself at a funeral remembering that innocuous life insurance form. I got a sinking feeling, because I had neglected to realize an important fact: the users of that form were not reviewing it to appreciate design or prose. They were there for one reason alone—because a loved one had died. After all, it was a form to review life insurance benefits. They would have likely arrived at the page to review the insurance coverage of their recently deceased spouse or child.

I contemplated a husband or wife struggling through our complicated and convoluted interfaces, searching for information and eventually landing on a cold, procedural-looking web page, all the while being flooded with feelings of sadness and loss. While I had not caused his or her sadness, I certainly was not helping relieve it, either.

The realization embarrassed me, but it also helped me recognize that user experience is about what happens in front of a screen, not within it. We design experiences for other human beings; the software is fine on its own—even bad software. As designers, we ask for users’ time, attention and energy, so we must repay them with a good experience.