For more than a decade, design thinking has played a central role in how organizations talk about innovation and user experience. It has also become one of the most debated concepts in the design and business communities. Critics argue that it has been overused, oversimplified, or treated as a substitute for deep design expertise rather than a complement to it.
Much of that criticism is fair.
At the same time, it is worth recognizing the original intent behind design thinking and why it gained traction in the first place. The goal was never to reduce design to a checklist. The goal was to make human-centered design more accessible to organizations that had never practiced it before.
In that respect, design thinking succeeded in meaningful ways.
What Design Thinking Got Right
Before design thinking entered the mainstream, many organizations built products, services, and internal tools primarily around technical feasibility or business constraints. Users were often considered late in the process, if at all.
Design thinking helped change that dynamic.
It introduced a shared language around empathy, experimentation, and iteration. It encouraged teams to observe real behavior, question assumptions, and test ideas before fully committing to them. It gave non-designers a way to participate in conversations about experience and value creation.
Across industries such as healthcare, financial services, HR, and professional services, organizations began to:
- Talk more explicitly about user needs
- Challenge long-standing assumptions
- Involve cross-functional teams earlier in problem solving
- Experiment instead of defaulting to fixed requirements
Words aside, the broader impact was clear. Human-centered design became part of the business conversation. That awareness led to real improvements for many organizations and the people they serve.
Where the Momentum Stalled
As design thinking became more popular, many organizations adopted its terminology without fully embedding its principles into how they operated.
Workshops were run. Journey maps were created. Walls filled with sticky notes. But once those activities ended, teams often returned to the same systems, processes, and constraints that caused the problems in the first place.
In practice, design thinking was frequently treated as:
- A one-time initiative rather than a sustained capability
- A creative exercise disconnected from delivery
- A method for generating ideas without a plan to implement them
This gap between insight and execution is where much of the skepticism around design thinking originates. The issue is not that human-centered design is ineffective. The issue is that it is difficult to apply consistently inside complex organizations, especially those built on legacy systems.
The Hard Part: Putting Users First in Reality
Most organizations want to put customers and users first. Very few find it easy to do so.
The challenge is not a lack of empathy or good intentions. It is the reality of operating within environments shaped by:
- Legacy platforms that were not designed to evolve
- Fragmented workflows spread across teams and tools
- Regulatory and operational complexity
- Incentives that prioritize predictability and speed over experience quality
This is particularly true for technology-enabled services organizations. These businesses rely on digital platforms to scale human expertise, whether that expertise supports patients, members, clients, or internal employees.
In these environments, user experience is not limited to a single product interface. It is embedded in service workflows, internal tools, handoffs between teams, and the systems that support daily work.
Design thinking can help organizations identify user pain points. What it does not fully address is how to modernize the underlying systems that create those pain points in the first place.
Moving from Ideation to UX Modernization
This is where the conversation needs to evolve.
Human-centered design remains essential, but awareness alone is not enough. Organizations need a way to translate insight into structural change. At UpTop, this work is framed as UX modernization.
UX modernization focuses on reimagining and updating the digital layer that connects people, processes, and technology. It is not about surface-level redesigns. It is about aligning experience with how the organization actually operates and scales.
In practice, UX modernization involves:
- Simplifying complex service workflows so they match real user behavior
- Modernizing legacy platforms that no longer support growth
- Designing for adoption, efficiency, and accessibility
- Connecting experience improvements directly to business outcomes
For many organizations, this work becomes urgent at a digital inflection point. This is the moment when systems technically still function, but quietly slow innovation, frustrate users, and increase operational friction.
Design thinking may reveal that inflection point. UX modernization is how organizations move beyond it.
Why Organizations Struggle to Do This Alone
From the inside, it can be difficult to see how deeply experience problems are rooted in systems and structure. Teams adapt. Workarounds become routine. Training fills the gaps left by poor usability.
Over time, friction becomes normalized.
Leaders often sense the problem before they can articulate it clearly. The language sounds like:
- “This should be easier by now.”
- “Why does everything take so long?”
- “Our tools do not reflect who we are anymore.”
These are not isolated usability issues. They are signals that experience design and operational reality have drifted apart.
Internal teams are often too close to the problem to fully diagnose it. They are constrained by existing platforms, roadmaps, and organizational boundaries. This makes it difficult to step back and reframe the challenge holistically.
The Role of a Partner
This is where the right partner can make a difference.
An experienced UX modernization partner brings perspective from across industries and service models. They help organizations see patterns, not just symptoms. More importantly, they help translate human-centered principles into practical, scalable change.
At UpTop, that partnership typically includes:
- Reframing challenges through a combined user, business, and technical lens
- Identifying where legacy systems and workflows create unnecessary friction
- Aligning stakeholders around a shared understanding of priorities
- Developing phased modernization roadmaps that balance near-term wins with long-term value
- Measuring success through adoption, efficiency, and satisfaction, not just visual polish
The goal is not to run better workshops. The goal is to embed human-centered design into how the organization builds, operates, and evolves its digital systems.
The Work That Remains
Design thinking helped open the door to human-centered design. It made empathy and experimentation part of mainstream business thinking.
What remains is the harder work of making those principles durable.
That work includes:
- Modernizing the systems that support service delivery
- Designing for employees as primary users, not afterthoughts
- Reducing operational friction that limits growth
- Ensuring technology truly enables human expertise
This is not a rejection of design thinking. It is a continuation of its original intent, applied at a deeper and more structural level.
A More Mature View of Human-Centered Design
Human-centered design was never meant to be a trend or a toolkit. It is a discipline that requires commitment, alignment, and sustained investment.
Many organizations today find themselves caught between good intentions and outdated systems. They understand the value of experience, but struggle to deliver it consistently at scale.
At UpTop, we partner with organizations navigating this transition. We help them modernize their digital experiences so human-centered design is not just discussed, but operationalized.
If your organization feels this tension, or if you are at a point where your systems no longer reflect how your business actually works, Let’s talk.
