Sameness creates the perfect opportunity for designers to add value
Open any five apps in the same category today. Fintech, food, travel, anything.
Same bottom nav. Same card layouts. Same onboarding pattern. Same illustration style. Same "clean" look.
If you hide the logo, can you tell which app is which?
Most designers look at this sameness and feel depressed. I look at it and see the biggest opportunity our profession has had in years.
How everything became the same
The sameness is not an accident. It got manufactured, step by step:
- Design systems made everyone efficient, and identical
- The same UI kits and component libraries got adopted everywhere
- "Best practices" became a religion. Everyone benchmarks the same three apps, so everyone converges to the same three apps
- A/B testing pushed everyone toward the same local maximum
- And now AI tools, trained on all of this sameness, generate more of it at scale
Efficiency won. Distinction quietly died.
Why sameness is an opportunity, not a tragedy
Think about it from the market's side.
When every product looks the same, works the same, and speaks the same:
- Users cannot tell products apart, so they choose on price. And price wars kill everyone
- Brands lose their memory hook. Nobody remembers the fifth identical app
- Businesses start desperately searching for an edge, and the usual edges (features, speed, price) get copied in weeks
There is exactly one edge that cannot be copied in a sprint: how the product feels. And who owns how a product feels?
We do.
The more the sameness spreads, the more valuable the person who can break it becomes. Our leverage is being manufactured by everyone else's convergence.
Where the value actually hides
Breaking sameness does not mean going weird. Weird for the sake of weird is a portfolio stunt, not a strategy. The real openings:
- The moments benchmarks don't cover. Everyone copied the happy path. Almost nobody designed the error state, the waiting state, the empty state, the "something went wrong with your money" state. That is where feelings are actually formed
- Voice and copy. Ten apps, one interchangeable tone. The product that talks like a person is remembered like a person
- Domain-true patterns. Everyone imports patterns from the big consumer apps. But a pattern that fits e-commerce can break trust in fintech. Designing from your user's actual anxiety, instead of the benchmark, instantly separates you
- One signature moment. You don't need to redesign everything. One ownable interaction, one detail people mention to a friend, carries the whole memory of the product
- Craft in the last 10%. The AI-generated baseline gets everyone to 90%. The last 10% is now the entire difference between forgettable and premium
The mindset shift
Stop asking "what is the standard pattern here?"
Start asking "everyone does X here. What does that make possible for us?"
Sameness means the bar of expectation is fixed and known. Which means even a small, intentional deviation gets noticed at full volume.
For years, designers fought to prove their value while everything was getting standardized.
Now the standardization is complete. Everything looks the same.
And suddenly, the only people who can make something feel different are back in demand.
Don't waste the opportunity by shipping the template.