7 apps that need a redesign in 2026 (and what we would fix first)

Every design studio keeps a private list of apps it would love to get its hands on. This is ours, made public, seven products used by millions, each stuck with a UX problem that has survived years of releases and, in most cases, at least one visual refresh that did not touch it.

Two ground rules. First, none of these is a bug of the week: every problem here has been true for years and is structural, which is what makes it interesting. Second, none of these companies is short of designers. Products like this do not go wrong for lack of talent; they go wrong because they grow by addition, and nobody is allowed to subtract. If a few of these are fixed by the time you read this, good. The patterns will still be alive in your product, which is the real point of the exercise.

For each one: the pattern, why it hurts, and what we would fix first, the first move, not the whole roadmap.

1. Jira: configuration as the product

The pattern. Jira’s interface exposes its data model. Every screen is a form, every project starts with a choice you do not yet understand (team-managed or company-managed?), and the board, the backlog and the issue view behave like three different applications that happen to share a logo. A five-person startup inherits the admin model of a 5,000-person enterprise on day one.

Why it hurts. The people who set Jira up are rarely the people who use it eight hours a day. The setup screens serve the first group; the daily screens pay for it.

What we would fix first. Make the simple path the default: a small-team profile that hides the fields, workflows and schemes nobody asked for, with the enterprise model one click away rather than one click in the way. Then make the issue view the one canonical screen and let the board and backlog be views of it, not siblings.

2. Google Analytics 4: the schema on the screen

The pattern. When Universal Analytics was switched off in 2023, millions of small teams were moved to an interface built around events, parameters and Explorations. The first question every founder asks (where did my visitors come from this week, and what did they do?) takes several clicks and, for anything specific, a custom report.

Why it hurts. An analytics tool has one job: answer questions. GA4 answers them, but it makes you learn its vocabulary first, so a lot of teams simply stopped looking at their numbers.

What we would fix first. A question-led home. “Acquisition this week”, “top converting pages”, “where new users drop off” as saved, plain-language reports on the first screen, with the technical metric name on hover for the people who want it. The data model is fine; it belongs under the interface, not on it.

3. LinkedIn: attention spent on the wrong things

The pattern. Notification inflation. Work anniversaries, “X is hiring”, “people are viewing your profile”, a feed that mixes a job hunt, a sales pipeline, industry reading and personal news into one scroll. Every feature that has ever shipped still gets a slot in the bell icon.

Why it hurts. Attention is the scarce resource, and LinkedIn spends the user’s attention on the platform’s goals. The result is a product people visit with a purpose and leave without finishing it.

What we would fix first. Modes. Looking for a job, hiring, reading, three intents with three feeds and three notification defaults, chosen once and changed any time. Then a notification audit that switches everything low-value to off by default, and moves messaging out of the feed’s shadow into a surface of its own.

4. Spotify: your library behind their feed

The pattern. Home is an algorithmic wall: podcasts you did not ask for, audiobooks, “made for you” shelves that change daily. The music you actually saved lives a tab away, behind filter chips, in a navigation that has been redesigned more than once and rarely in the same direction.

Why it hurts. The user’s own things are harder to reach than the platform’s suggestions. That is a business decision, and it is a legitimate one, but it is paid for in the daily friction of people trying to play the album they bought a subscription to hear.

What we would fix first. A library-first home with a clearly labelled “for you” section under it, stable navigation for at least two years, and recommendations that are opt-in per media type, music, podcasts and audiobooks are different relationships and deserve different defaults.

5. Zoom: one setting, two homes, three names

The pattern. Meeting settings live in the web portal and in the desktop client, with different names, different defaults, and no guarantee that changing one changes the other. In the meeting itself the controls you need most sit behind “More”, and the button that ends the call for everyone is a click away from the one that just removes you.

Why it hurts. A meeting tool is used under time pressure by people who are not thinking about the tool. Every second spent hunting for “share screen” or wondering which “End” is which is a second of the meeting.

What we would fix first. A single settings model, one place, one name per setting, synced everywhere. Then controls sized and placed by frequency of use rather than by the year they were added, and destructive actions labelled with their consequence: End for everyone, not End.

6. Booking.com: urgency as decoration

The pattern. “Only 1 room left at this price.” “12 people are looking at this hotel.” Red timers, crossed-out prices, badges on badges. European consumer regulators have pushed back on this style of messaging, and it is still the default texture of the results page.

Why it hurts. Persuasion that does not survive a screenshot costs trust, and trust is what a booking site sells. The more urgency the page performs, the less any single claim is worth, including the true ones.

What we would fix first. Remove the countdowns and the anonymous crowd counters. Keep genuine scarcity, with a source (“2 rooms of this type remain”). Let the comparison be calm: price, location, reviews, cancellation terms, in a layout that does not fight the user’s eyes. The trust dividend shows up in repeat bookings, which is the metric that actually matters at that scale.

7. Microsoft Outlook: two products under one icon

The pattern. For years there have been two Outlooks behind one icon, the classic desktop app and the “new” one: with a toggle between them and a feature list that does not fully match on either side. Users learn one, get moved to the other, and go looking for the switch back.

Why it hurts. A redesign shipped as a fork is not a redesign; it is a migration that never finishes. Every day both versions exist, support costs double and the users’ mental model is split.

What we would fix first. Commit. Pick the version, close the feature gap that matters (offline access, add-ins, the two or three workflows power users refuse to give up), and retire the other one with a date on it. Nothing here is a design-craft problem; it is a decision problem, and the decision is the design.

The pattern behind all seven

Line them up and one thing is true of every product on the list: it grew by addition and never by subtraction. Each new feature arrived with its own tab, its own notification, its own settings page, its own vocabulary, and the old ones were never folded in. That is not a visual problem, which is why visual refreshes do not fix it. Two of the products above have had well-publicised redesigns in the last few years; the complaints survived both, because a redesign of the skin leaves the system underneath untouched.

The constraint is organisational, not aesthetic. When every team ships its own tab and nobody owns the whole, the product becomes a federation of features. The fix is always the same, and it is always unpopular: one mental model per surface, one place per setting, and a hierarchy that puts what the user came for above what the company wants shown.

Is your app on the list? A three-question test

You do not need millions of users to have these problems: we see the same patterns at 1,000 users in the audits we run. Three questions:

1. Can a new user name the one thing your app does within ten seconds of the first screen? If the answer needs a tour, the hierarchy is wrong.
2. Does any setting for the same thing live in more than one place? If yes, you have Zoom’s problem, and it will get worse with every release.
3. When you shipped your last feature, did it get its own tab or notification, or did it join an existing model? If the honest answer is “its own”, you are growing by addition.

Two wrong answers out of three means the problem is structural, and the right response is a structural redesign, information architecture, core flows and defaults first, visuals last. That is what our app redesign case study looks like on a live product with real users, and it is the shape of every UI/UX engagement we run.

FAQ

Why do successful apps get worse over time? Because they grow by addition. Every feature ships with its own navigation, notification and settings, and nothing is ever removed. The product turns into a federation of features with no single mental model, a structural problem that a visual refresh cannot fix.

Does a redesign fix these problems? Only a structural one. A redesign that starts with information architecture, core flows and defaults fixes them; a redesign that changes colours, type and icons makes the same mess prettier. Ask which kind is being proposed before you approve a budget.

How do I know if my app needs a redesign? Run the three-question test above and then look at the numbers: a retention cliff at a specific screen, support tickets about finding things, a feature nobody uses because nobody finds it. If you cannot name the metric that should move, you are not ready to redesign yet.

How much does an app redesign cost? We publish our prices: UI/UX design runs $2k-$15k and mobile app design $5k-$20k, depending on how deep the change goes, from a flow-level fix to a full architecture rework. The full ranges are on the pricing page, no quote wall.

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If you suspect your product belongs on a list like this, the cheapest way to find out is a free 15-minute audit, and the engagement itself is app redesign services, send a link or a screen recording and we will tell you which of the three questions you are failing, and what the first move would be.