66 • Low-Hanging Fruit
Low-Hanging Fruit is used to describe doing the simplest thing first. Teams prioritize the easiest problems to solve rather than the most important ones. Which, at first, makes perfect sense. Quick wins build momentum, demonstrate progress, and make roadmaps wonderfully satisfying places to move little boxes into the "Done" column. But ease is not the same as value. When teams repeatedly choose what is easiest to reach, they can spend enormous amounts of energy making small improvements while the difficult problems - the ones that could fundamentally improve the experience -remain safely untouched. In UX design, low-hanging fruit refers to minimal effort design fixes or optimizations such as fixing broken links, adjusting button contrast, or improving a confusing form field.