when bad ux undoes creativity
bad ux/ui doesn't just slow you down. it literally kills your creativity.
been thinking about this a lot lately. you know that feeling when you have a really good campaign idea, you can see it clearly in your head, you're hyped to build it out — and then you open your martech tool and it's like hitting a creative brick wall? yeah. that's been my life lately.
i work with marketing tools every day. braze, pardot, hubspot — the usual suspects. and look, i get it. these platforms are powerful. they do things that would be impossible to do manually. but here's the thing nobody talks about: bad ux/ui doesn't just slow you down. it literally kills your creativity.
let me explain.
pardot: my first marketing automation rodeo
pardot was my first real marketing automation platform, so maybe i'm being harsh. but also... no. the learning curve was STEEP, and not in a "this is complex but logical" way. more like a "who designed this and why do they hate marketers" way.
everything felt buried. want to edit an email? cool, click through seventeen different menus. want to understand why your automation isn't triggering? good luck finding where the rules are actually set. the UI felt like it was built by engineers for engineers, with marketers as an afterthought.
and here's what that does: it makes you conservative. when the tool is hard to navigate, you stop experimenting. you stick to the one workflow you figured out because the thought of learning a new process is exhausting. your campaigns become formulaic not because you lack ideas, but because the tool punishes exploration.
hubspot's drag-and-drop trap
don’t get me wrong - i LOVED hubspot, and compared to many many ESPs out there it’s one of the most straightforward platforms that are capable of providing an intuitive user experience. i have a petpeeve though, hubspot's email builder looks user-friendly. drag and drop! visual! easy! except when you actually want to do something custom, you hit a wall immediately.
want to adjust spacing between elements? nope, you get the pre-set options. want to customize the mobile view separately? tough luck. want to add a subtle animation or a specific interaction? forget it. the drag-and-drop interface gives you the illusion of control while actually boxing you into their predetermined templates.
and i get it — they're trying to maintain brand consistency, ensure emails render properly, all that. but there's a difference between guardrails and cages. hubspot feels like the latter. you end up with emails that look... fine. professional. safe. boring. everything starts looking the same because everyone's working within the same constraints.
meanwhile, i'm watching brands send gorgeous, hypercustomized emails that actually make me want to engage, and i'm sitting here like "cool, i can change this button from blue to... a slightly different blue."
the confused usagi was mfw i couldn’t make a spacer smaller than 6px (i think it was the hubspot minimum height, but it’s been a while).
the braze incident (or: why auto-save should be non-negotiable)
picture this: you're building a canvas. you've spent two hours mapping out this intricate customer journey with multiple branches, personalizations, the whole thing. you're in flow state. you're cooking. and then — boom. browser crashes. or you accidentally close the tab. or the platform just... decides to refresh itself.
gone. all of it.
braze doesn't auto-save. IN 2025. we have ai that can build entire apps, but a multi-billion dollar martech platform can't auto-save my work? the amount of times i've lost hours of work because of this is genuinely traumatizing. and it's not just about the time — it's about the momentum. when you're rebuilding something from memory, it's never quite as good as the original idea. you start cutting corners. you simplify things just to get it done. your creative vision gets compressed into "whatever i can rebuild quickly before i lose motivation."
that's not how creativity works. creativity needs safety. it needs the freedom to experiment without fear of losing everything.
why this actually matters
here's the thing that bothers me most: these aren't just inconveniences. they're design choices that fundamentally misunderstand how creative work happens.
creativity isn't linear. it's messy. you try things, you pivot, you experiment, you break stuff and fix it. good ux should support that process. it should get out of your way. it should make the technical stuff invisible so you can focus on the strategic and creative stuff.
instead, these tools force you to think like the software instead of the software adapting to how you think. you spend mental energy fighting the interface instead of solving for your audience. you make compromises not because of business constraints or strategy, but because the tool won't let you do the thing you want to do.
and the worst part? when your campaign performs poorly, you can't even tell if it's because the idea was bad or because the execution was hampered by tool limitations. that ambiguity is creativity poison.
what good ux should look like for martech
i'm not a ux designer, but even as just a user, i know what i need:
auto-save everything. if google docs figured this out a decade ago, your enterprise software can too.
intuitive navigation. i shouldn't need a certification course to find basic features. if i'm thinking "where would this logically be?" and it's not there, that's a ux failure.
flexibility without chaos. give me templates and guardrails for speed, but let me break out of them when i need to. trust that i know what i'm doing (or at least let me make my own mistakes).
clear feedback loops. when something breaks, tell me why. when automation doesn't trigger, show me the logic that failed. don't make me guess. i realized this weekend that chrome actually has AI now to help provide detailed explanations for... a 404 error when you're inspecting via console. if a browser can do that for a missing webpage, why can't an ESP do that when my campaign fails? give me that level of clarity.
(personal update: as of November 11, 2025, after having enough of bad experience from poor UX i decided to do some learning on the subject and got my Google UX Design cert. cool course, but why is the curriculum still teaching Adobe XD? the product was literally phased out by Adobe! they should’ve replaced this component of the course with AI in UX Design instead smh.)
the bigger picture
the economics of saas mean these companies can kind of get away with mediocre ux. switching costs are high. you've already trained your team, migrated your data, integrated with everything else. so you just... deal with it. you adapt. you find workarounds. but we shouldn't have to.
these tools should be amplifying our creativity, not constraining it. they should be making us better marketers, not just faster executors of predetermined templates.
building good software is hard. i get that. but also — it's 2025. we have the technology. we have the knowledge. we know what good ux looks like. martech companies just need to actually prioritize it. because right now, the people building our tools don't seem to spend much time actually using them. and it shows.
anyway. that's my rant. back to building workarounds for workarounds until someone builds martech that doesn't make me want to scream into the void.
if you're a product manager at any of these companies and you're reading this: please. i'm begging. talk to your actual users. watch them work. feel their pain. and then fix it.
we're trying to do cool stuff out here. stop making it so hard.