Marginally Better S01E06: The Screen We Ignore, The Skills We Discard, and When Organizations Forget Why They Exist

July 18, 2025
Marginally Better, Podcast
15 min read

Struggling to check out on your phone? You’re not alone. In this episode of Marginally Better, host Joe Taylor Jr. uncovers why most mobile experiences still fall flat despite making up the majority of web traffic. From jaw-dropping statistics on e-commerce conversion gaps to the dramatic downturn in UX hiring, Joe explores the widening disconnect between user needs and business decisions. Plus, a personal story about a beloved Philadelphia music venue reveals what happens when organizations forget their purpose — and what it takes to rebuild from the inside out. If you care about customer experience, workplace culture, or the future of digital design, this episode is a must-listen. 

Episode Links:

Transcript:

You’re standing in line at your favorite coffee shop, phone in hand, trying to order ahead on their app. The buttons are tiny, the text overlaps, and somehow you’ve accidentally ordered twelve lattes instead of one. Sound familiar?  

Today on on the show: Why companies keep designing for the screens we don’t use, how thousands of UX professionals went from indispensable to unemployed, and the story of a Philadelphia music venue that forgot why it existed in the first place. 

That’s all up next, on Marginally Better. 

Joe Taylor Jr.: Welcome to Marginally Better, a show about business, innovation, and the American economy. I’m Joe Taylor Jr. 

Today we’re starting with a number that should make every business owner sit up straight: Seventy-three percent 

That’s how much of all e-commerce traffic now comes from mobile devices. Three out of every four people browsing online stores are doing it from their phones. You’d think companies would be falling over themselves to make mobile experiences amazing, right? 

Wrong. 

Here’s what actually happens. The Baymard Institute — they’re basically the Consumer Reports of online shopping — spent over 150,000 hours studying how people use mobile commerce sites. They tested 138 major retailers, the big names you shop from every day. And they found something shocking: Not a single mobile site earned a “good” rating. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

Think about that for a second. These are companies spending millions on digital transformation, hiring armies of developers, and somehow they’re all failing at the same thing. 

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Desktop conversion rates — that’s the percentage of visitors who actually buy something — sit at about 3.9%. Not bad. Mobile? 1.8%. Desktop literally converts twice as well as mobile.  

So we have this bizarre situation where most people are shopping on their phones, but they’re half as likely to actually buy anything. It’s like opening a store where 73% of your customers come through the front door, but you’ve only bothered to put proper lighting in the back room. 

Let me paint you a picture that’s playing out in boutiques across the country. A clothing store owner notices something odd in their analytics: Mobile traffic is up 40%, but sales are flat. They hire a consultant who discovers the mobile checkout process requires seventeen separate taps to complete a purchase. On desktop? Five clicks. 

As one frustrated retailer put it: “I was literally making it harder for the majority of my customers to give me money. It was like I’d hired a bouncer to stand at my cash register.” 

The numbers tell the same story everywhere. According to new data from 2024, 19% of small businesses still don’t have mobile-friendly websites at all. That’s one in five businesses essentially hanging a “closed” sign for mobile users. 

But here’s the kicker — and this comes from VWO’s research — every dollar invested in fixing these mobile experiences returns $100. That’s a 9,900% return on investment. You could mess up 98 times out of 100 and still come out ahead. 

The psychology here is fascinating. Companies design on desktop computers, approve designs on desktop computers, and present to bosses on desktop computers. Then they’re shocked when their mobile users — remember, that’s 73% of their traffic — can’t figure out how to use their sites. 

Smart Insights found that in India, mobile traffic is now over 80%. In the US, it’s 57%. Even in desktop-friendly markets, mobile dominates. Yet businesses keep optimizing for the minority of their users. 

Here’s what actually works: Start with mobile constraints. Design for thumbs, not mice. Test on actual phones, not desktop browsers pretending to be phones. Because here’s the brutal truth: 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poor mobile site. That’s not just a lost sale — that’s negative word of mouth in a world where everyone has a megaphone. 

The path forward is surprisingly simple. Audit your mobile experience. Actually use your own website on your phone. Time how long it takes to find a product and buy it. If it takes more than two minutes, you’re hemorrhaging money. 

Because in the end, this isn’t really about technology. It’s about meeting your customers where they are. And increasingly, where they are is standing in line, sitting on the bus, or lying on their couch — phone in hand, credit card ready, just waiting for someone to make it easy to buy. 

After the break, we’ll talk about the people who usually fix these problems for a living, and why they’re having such a hard time MAKING a living. That’s up next, on Marginally Better. 

It’s Marginally Better, I’m Joe Taylor Jr. 

Joe Taylor Jr.: Now, let’s talk about the people whose entire job is to fix these problems — User Experience professionals. The folks who are supposed to make sure you don’t accidentally order twelve lattes. 

If you’d asked me two years ago about career advice, I might have suggested UX design. Good pay, remote work, every company needs one. Fast forward to today, and the landscape has completely shifted. 

According to data from Quarterinchhole and UX Collective, senior designers with fifteen years of experience are finding themselves unemployed for months, sometimes over a year. They’re applying to hundreds of positions with minimal response. One designer shared on UX forums that after 200 applications, they’d managed only three interviews. 

The sentiment across the industry is stark. As one designer put it in a widely-shared post: “I’m not competing with other senior designers anymore. I’m competing with bootcamp graduates willing to work for half my salary. I’m competing with AI tools that promise to do my job for pennies. I’m competing with CEOs who’ve decided design is a luxury they can’t afford.” 

The numbers are staggering. According to Nielsen Norman Group, UX job postings have dropped 70% from their 2021 peak. Research positions specifically? Down 73%.  

Jared Spool, who’s been tracking the UX industry longer than almost anyone, calls it a “perfect storm.” See, during the pandemic, when interest rates were near zero and everyone was going digital, tech companies went on a hiring spree. UX teams doubled, tripled, sometimes grew tenfold. 

Then interest rates shot up. Suddenly, that free money wasn’t free anymore. And guess which departments got cut first? The ones executives never really understood in the first place. 

“For twenty years, there were more UX jobs than people to fill them,” Spool explained in a recent analysis. “Now it’s completely flipped. We have far more unemployed UX professionals than open positions. It could take a decade for this to reverse.” 

But here’s where the story gets complicated. Remember those mobile problems we just talked about? They’re getting worse, not better. Companies need UX help more than ever. They just don’t want to pay for it. 

The bootcamp graduates entering the market face an even steeper climb. According to Academy UX and industry reports, those who graduated in 2023 entered the worst job market in decades. Many report spending $15,000 or more on bootcamps, building portfolios, then facing a brutal reality: hundreds of applications with minimal response. 

The common refrain from bootcamp graduates on industry forums is painfully consistent: “The bootcamp promised job placement help. What they didn’t mention was that there’d be 300 other applicants for every position, half of them with ten years more experience.” 

The irony is brutal. We’re living in an age where user experience makes or breaks companies, where one bad interface can tank a product launch, where customer expectations have never been higher. And simultaneously, we’re telling the people trained to solve these problems that we don’t need them. 

Some UX professionals are adapting. They’re becoming “fractional” consultants — working 10 or 20 hours a week for multiple companies instead of full-time for one. Others are specializing in AI collaboration, learning to work with the tools that threaten to replace them. 

According to CaffeinatedKyle and other sources tracking the fractional work trend, many UX professionals who pivoted to this model after months of unsuccessful job searching are finding unexpected benefits. They report seeing more variety, having broader impact across multiple organizations. But as many note, “the stability… that’s gone.” 

The business solution is hiding in plain sight. Remember that $100 return for every dollar spent on UX? That doesn’t require a full-time hire. Companies are discovering they can get 80% of the value through UX audits, design sprints, targeted consultations. 

Here’s what smart businesses are doing: They’re hiring fractional UX help for 10-20 hours a week. They’re running quarterly UX audits instead of maintaining full teams. They’re training existing staff in basic UX principles. 

One marketing agency in Chicago trained their entire team in user research basics. Cost: $5,000. Result: Client satisfaction scores up 40%, project revision rounds cut in half. Their creative director summed it up: “We couldn’t afford a full-time UX person, but we couldn’t afford to ignore UX either.” 

The old model — where every company had a UX team mimicking big tech — is dead. The new model is more fluid, more fractional, more integrated. It requires businesses to be smarter about when and how they access UX expertise. It requires UX professionals to be more entrepreneurial, more flexible, more business-savvy. 

Because here’s the truth: The need for good user experience isn’t going away. If anything, as AI handles more routine tasks, the uniquely human ability to understand and design for other humans becomes more valuable, not less. 

The question isn’t whether businesses need UX. It’s whether they’re smart enough to find new ways to get it. And whether UX professionals are adaptable enough to deliver it in new forms. 

This market is messy. The old certainties are gone. But in that mess, there’s opportunity — for businesses willing to experiment, for professionals willing to evolve, for anyone who remembers that at the end of the day, someone still needs to make sure you don’t accidentally order twelve lattes. 

After the break, a story with a deeply personal connection that will probably get me disinvited from one or two holiday parties. That’s up next, on Marginally Better. 

It’s Marginally Better, I’m Joe Taylor Jr. 

Joe Taylor Jr.: Let me tell you about my one of my favorite music venues. One with a deeply personal connection to my life and my career. 

World Cafe Live sits on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, at the eastern edge of the University of Pennsylvania. This beautiful Art Deco building used to be a plumbing showroom, and it sat vacant for decades. Then, for twenty-one years, it was magic.  

You could catch jazz legends on a Tuesday night, grab a beer that didn’t cost fifteen dollars. Shows usually started on time at 8 PM — except for the time Matthew Sweet kept us all waiting until about 11. 

Adele played there in one of the last gigs she did in a “smaller” room. I’ve seen the Bangles there, David Gray, Brandi Carlile, Mavis Staples — I may have been to a hundred shows there since Lori and I moved back to Philly in 2012. 

I was even there before it was World Cafe Live.  

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked as a producer and as the head of digital at WXPN, the Philadelphia public radio station that’s NOT a news, or classical, or jazz outlet.  

Our station, like many others at the time, wanted deeper connections with its listeners. It wanted to get into placemaking, and wanted to build a kind of clubhouse where members could gather and celebrate the music we played on the air. 

That disused industrial building became something special. For a bunch of business reasons, the station couldn’t run the venue directly. So it set up shop in one half of the building and sought out an entrepreneur with the skill to achieve this vision. 

Hal Real took on the task because he was tired of sticky floors and terrible sightlines. He wanted, in his words, “the acoustics of a symphony hall but for jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.” 

For two decades, it worked. That building became the beating heart of Philadelphia’s music scene. During COVID, Hal even co-founded the National Independent Venue Association, helping secure federal relief funding for OTHER venues, not just his own. This was a place that understood its mission: be the clubhouse for Philadelphia’s music community. 

Because I got to spend a little time with Hal as he was getting WCL off the ground, I felt a wave of relief when he announced his retirement a few months ago. Nobody worked harder than him to turn this place into a true institution. After 21 years of seven-day weeks, he’d earned his rest. 

Enter the new CEO, Joe Callahan — a tech entrepreneur with big ideas about virtual reality concerts and digital transformation. His first move? He looked at the books. He told reporters and board members the venue was losing $45,000 to $70,000 every month — despite $5 million in annual revenue. 

His solution was… bold. A ten million dollar fundraising campaign. Using the stage for virtual reality events. Replacing bar staff with automated service. “World Cafe Live 3.0,” he called it. 

The staff had a different perspective. See, they’d been there through everything — the lean years, the pandemic, the comeback. They knew every regular, every artist’s favorite drink, which nights to book jazz versus indie rock. 

The breaking point came in June. During a Suzanne Vega concert — right as she was singing “Marlena on the Wall” — eighteen employees walked out. Servers, bartenders, box office staff. They stood on Walnut Street with signs: “Respect Philly Music.” 

Their core complaint? Callahan had allegedly said, “Philadelphia is nowhere in our mission statement.” 

Think about that. A Philadelphia music venue, built by Philadelphia, for Philadelphia, suddenly deciding Philadelphia didn’t matter. 

Callahan fired everyone who walked out. Banned them from the building. Threatened federal criminal charges. Called the workers entitled, said they suffered from a “culture of complacency.” 

The Philadelphia music community’s response was equally swift. Shows started canceling. Artists pulled out. The punk band The Taxpayers moved their show to a church. Jazz great Orrin Evans took his monthly sessions elsewhere. 

At a town hall meeting meant to smooth things over, the technology failed — the livestream wouldn’t work. As soon as Callahan closed out the event talked about “human capital,” a band started playing behind him. The crowd erupted. 

Here’s what breaks my heart: World Cafe Live is still open. But it’s a shell. The calendar that once burst with 550 shows a year has thinned to a trickle. So many members of the staff who made it special are gone, some of them now working at competing venues, taking their relationships and knowledge with them. 

This isn’t just about a music venue. It’s about what happens when organizations forget why they exist. Callahan saw a business losing money and thought technology could fix it. He missed that World Cafe Live wasn’t really selling tickets — it was selling community.  

You can’t VR stream in-person community, plenty of way bigger companies have tried that and nobody’s figured it out yet. You can’t use a robot arm to replace the bartender who remembers your name and what you like to talk about during the changeover between the opening act and the headliner. 

The lesson here is brutal but important: Culture isn’t what you do when times are good. It’s what you protect when times are hard. 

Every organization faces this moment. The founder leaves. The money gets tight. Someone new comes in with fresh eyes and sees inefficiency everywhere. And sometimes, what looks like inefficiency is actually the whole point. 

Those workers who knew every regular’s drink order? That’s not inefficiency. That’s relationship building. Those shows that started at 8 PM so people could go home and sleep? That’s not leaving money on the table. That’s understanding your community. 

The path back for World Cafe Live — if there is one — isn’t through VR headsets or automated beer taps. It’s through humility. Admitting mistakes. Rebuilding trust one show, one shift, one relationship at a time. 

Right before I sat down to record this episode, we got news that the venue agreed to voluntarily recognize the union formed by its front of house workers, and to begin a collective bargaining process. It’s a good start. 

Because in the end, every business is in the relationship business. Whether you’re designing mobile websites, hiring UX professionals, or running a music venue, the question is the same: Do you understand why you exist? And are you brave enough to protect that purpose when the spreadsheets suggest otherwise? 

Thanks for listening to Marginally Better. If you like what you heard, please help us out. Leave a quick review on Apple podcasts. It will help us spread the word about the show to people like you who care deeply about great customer experiences. 

If you want to get behind the scenes notes from me and the rest of the team, go to marginallybettershow.com or follow the link in our show notes. 

Marginally Better is a Calufrax radio production. Our producer is Nicole Hubbard with research by Connie Evans. 

I’m Joe Taylor, Jr. 

After a decade in broadcast media, Joe developed early online platforms for NPR, PBS, and AOL. Today, he helps our clients tell compelling brand stories through audio, visuals, and software.

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