12 Signs Your Digital Experience is Holding Back Growth

Direct answer

When a digital experience is holding growth back, it means your website or product technically works but introduces friction that quietly slows conversion, adoption, and trust. Users hesitate, abandon flows, or fail to reach value fast enough. Leaders often feel the slowdown before analytics clearly explain it.

Key takeaways

• Growth friction usually hides in experience details, not strategy or spend.

• Declining conversion and adoption often signal clarity and usability issues.

• Small, targeted UX changes can unlock outsized results.

• Experience improvements compound when built into the system.

12 warning signs your experience is hurting growth

1. Conversion rates are slipping without a clear reason

What it looks like:
Traffic remains steady and demand exists, but conversion trends down quarter over quarter.

What it’s usually caused by:
Homepages and core pages designed for internal understanding instead of how users think about their problem. These experiences are often content heavy, hard to scan, and unclear about how you actually solve the user’s problem.

What to do next:
Rewrite your landing page around the user’s problem and desired outcome. Reduce reading. Make the story scannable in seconds.

ANML example:
For Flock Safety, we refreshed the homepage look and feel while clarifying the narrative, hierarchy, and calls to action. By aligning the experience to how customers think about safety and risk, conversion doubled within five months of launch.

2. Users hesitate at key decision points

What it looks like:
Drop off spikes on pricing, demo, sign up, or checkout pages. Users arrive with intent, then pause, scroll, second guess, or leave altogether.

What it’s usually caused by:
Decision moments that ask too much of the user. Information is fragmented, reassurance is missing, or multiple options compete for attention. Instead of guiding users forward, the experience forces them to evaluate, compare, and think through details they are not ready to decide on yet.

Often, teams try to answer every possible question at once, when what users actually need is confidence, clarity, and a clear next step.

What to do next:
Design decision points to reduce thinking, not add it. Clarify the primary action, remove competing options, and provide just enough context to help users feel confident moving forward.

3. Product adoption is slower than expected

What it looks like:
Users sign up, explore briefly, and then plateau without reaching meaningful usage.

What it’s usually caused by:
Overloading users during initial onboarding and assuming they will remember features later. When everything is introduced up front, nothing feels timely or relevant. The experience stops guiding users once onboarding ends.

What to do next:
Shift from one-time onboarding to contextual onboarding. Introduce features and meaningful moments when users need them, not all at once.

When guidance shows up at the right moment, the experience feels thoughtful. Over time, the product becomes valued, trusted, and easier to adopt.

4. Support volume grows as usage grows

What it looks like:
As adoption increases, support requests rise instead of falling.

What it’s usually caused by:
The experience only works when everything goes right. When users make mistakes, hit edge cases, or get interrupted, the product offers little guidance. People are left in dead ends of frustration instead of being helped back on track.

What to do next:
Design for failure, not just success. Anticipate where users will struggle and build recovery paths that guide them forward when things go wrong.

5. Stakeholders are not aligned on who the experience is for

What it looks like:
Internal debates focus on opinions, preferences, or departmental goals. Decisions drift and progress slows.

What it’s usually caused by:
Teams lose sight of the user’s real needs and how the experience is meant to solve them. Without a shared understanding of the customer and the business outcome, even good ideas fail to move the needle.

What to do next:
Realign stakeholders around who the experience is for, what problem it must solve, and the shared business outcomes it is meant to drive. If the experience does not clearly serve the user, it is unlikely to drive growth.

6. Users struggle to understand what makes you different

What it looks like:
Users bounce, skim, or leave with a vague sense of what you do but not why it matters.

What it’s usually caused by:
Navigation and information architecture structured around internal teams instead of how users think about their needs. Complex language and jargon make content harder to consume. Products and solutions are described in abstract terms, leading to information overload and messaging that sounds like everyone else.

What to do next:
Reorganize navigation and content around user problems and outcomes. Use plain language. Make your differentiation unmistakable by clearly showing how you solve problems differently, not just what you offer.

7. The product experience does not live up to the promise

What it looks like:
Strong interest at the top of the funnel followed by disengagement, drop off, or disappointment once users enter the product.

What it’s usually caused by:
Marketing sets expectations the product experience does not fulfill. The handoff from brand and acquisition to product is disjointed, and the user journey falls flat. When the experience does not deliver on the promise, trust erodes, growth stalls, and marketing alone cannot compensate.

Branding lives in the experience. Loyalty is earned through what users actually feel and accomplish, not what they are told.

What to do next:
Create a seamless, frictionless handoff from marketing to product. Carry the core promise deep into the product experience so it is reinforced throughout the journey.

8. Critical actions are buried inside the experience

What it looks like:
Users explore, scroll, and navigate, but conversion actions lag behind engagement.

What it’s usually caused by:
Primary calls to action competing with global navigation, secondary links, and interface noise. When everything is visible, nothing stands out.

What to do next:
Make the primary action consistently available and visually distinct across the experience, separate from navigation clutter.

ANML example:
For ServiceNow, our goal was to keep the primary call to action visible without competing with the global navigation. By introducing a floating demo button that stayed present across the experience, demo clicks increased by 95 percent. The pattern proved durable and is still in use eight years later.

9. The experience feels dated and uninspiring

What it looks like:
The site or product technically functions, but it feels stale, predictable, and interchangeable with competitors.

What it’s usually caused by:

Experiences that are dated not just in how they look, but in how they are delivered. Cumbersome interaction patterns, overused layouts, limited white space, long hero carousels, and generic stock photography make the experience feel slow and lifeless. Over time, this sameness creates the perception that the product is not cutting edge or leading the category.

What to do next:
Audit the experience for unnecessary interactions and visual noise. Simplify layouts, create space to breathe, and express your product with originality and intent.

10. Mobile is treated as an afterthought

What it looks like:
Mobile traffic is high, but engagement and conversion lag behind expectations.

What it’s usually caused by:
Designing desktop first without understanding where the majority of your traffic actually lives. Mobile experiences are often scaled-down versions of desktop instead of being designed around the core tasks users complete on that device.

What to do next:
Start where your users are. Identify which device carries the most traffic and design that experience first. Define the core tasks for each device and remove friction from those flows. In some cases, consider adaptive experiences rather than purely responsive ones.

11. The experience is too complicated to use

What it looks like:
Users require training, documentation, or repeated support just to complete basic tasks.

What it’s usually caused by:
Overcomplicated interfaces that surface too much at once. Flows expose every option instead of guiding users through the task at hand. Visual noise and clutter distract users from their core objective.

What to do next:
Simplify relentlessly. Design flows that guide users step by step. Adopt a “what you see is what you need” approach. Reduce noise when a user is engaged in a task. The best interfaces feel natural, get out of the way, and become almost invisible.

ANML example:
For BILT, we simplified the app so users could complete tasks without instruction. By reducing clutter and guiding users through focused flows, NPS increased from 5.2 to 9.2. The product did not change. The experience did.

12. Teams work in silos and the journey never comes together

What it looks like:
Different parts of the experience feel disconnected. Marketing, product, and platform improvements happen in isolation. Redesigns ship, but growth does not meaningfully improve.

What it’s usually caused by:
Teams focus on individual pages, features, or channels without zooming out to see the full customer journey. Siloed ownership leads to experiences that optimize locally but fail to ladder up to a cohesive, end-to-end story aligned to business goals.

What to do next:
Step back and map the entire customer journey. Reground the work in a shared understanding of who you are designing for and what business outcomes matter most. Ensure every touchpoint supports the bigger picture. Run focused tests to identify where friction actually occurs. Make smaller, informed refinements and validate messaging and positioning with your target audience. Growth comes from improving the system, not isolated pieces.

If you only do 3 things this month

1. Watch five real users navigate your product or site end to end.

2. Simplify one critical decision point to a single obvious action.

3. Align leadership on the one experience metric that matters most right now.

Clarity compounds faster than complexity.