I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes

I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes to existing products' UI. Sometimes the best option is to create a new sibling product with a new UX. > Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.