Tony Le separates a usability problem from a clarity problem before the team starts redesigning screens:

A usability problem is when the user understands the promise but struggles to complete a task.

A clarity problem is when the user never forms a confident mental model in the first place.

They hesitate. They guess. They bounce. Not because the UI is hard, but because the product is not making a clear argument.

Le’s example shows the distinction in practice:

A few years back, I worked with a company building an internal SaaS product, something they planned to launch within about a year.

They did a lot of things right early on. They invested in research. They poured real money into development, easily in the five-figure range. The team was shipping.

Then onboarding came up.

The owner tried to use the product and got stuck.

Instead of treating that moment like a signal to test the build, align on how the system worked, and validate the onboarding path, the conclusion was immediate.

This is a UX and UI problem.

So the team did what teams often do under pressure. They rebuilt.

They revamped the system once.

Then they revamped it again.

And after all that effort, the real issue came into focus. The UI was not broken. The product lacked a shared, plain language model of how it worked. Key concepts were obvious to the people building it, but not obvious to the person trying to onboard into it. So when onboarding started, confusion showed up as hesitation and wrong clicks, and the team assumed the interface was the culprit. They revamped the system twice, only to learn the real fix was clarity, clearer concepts, clearer naming, and a clearer first win.

That is the part teams miss. The stuck user is real, so the design critique feels real too. But if the product has not made a clear argument, every screen-level fix is downstream of the wrong problem.

I see this most often in products that have accumulated internal language. The team knows what a feature is for because they have lived with the roadmap, the sales narrative, the customer calls, and the implementation details. A new user gets none of that. They get a label, a blank state, a primary button, and maybe a tour.

So clarity is not just better copy. It is the product choosing what it is asking the user to understand first. The interface can make that choice visible, but it cannot make the choice for you.