As a designer, you’ll face this dilemma more often than you think. A new product or feature launches, but instead of placing it front and center, the team tucks it somewhere below the fold or deep in the menu. The logic is safe: let’s release quietly, see if it gets traction, and then decide whether to scale. But here’s the paradox-you bury the feature, adoption is low, and the assumption quickly becomes that it isn’t working. What if the placement, not the idea, was the problem?

I’ve seen this happen in real projects. A vertical launched with little visibility showed disappointing numbers. Weeks later, the same concept was given prime space, and usage instantly jumped. Nothing else had changed-the design, the flow, the functionality were all the same. What changed was the importance we signaled to users. Visibility drives behavior, and hiding features skews the data you rely on to make decisions.

This is why you can’t take low adoption at face value without questioning the setup. If you don’t test placement, you may write off ideas that could have succeeded. Worse, you may misinterpret the problem as poor design or execution when the real issue was that users never had a fair chance to discover it.

The way I’ve learned to handle this paradox is through small, deliberate steps. Running A/B tests shows the difference between a feature placed prominently and one that’s hidden away. Balancing risk and visibility by soft-launching internally or with a subset of users provides clarity without overexposure. Looking beyond surface data helps you see whether adoption is a placement issue rather than a product flaw. And communicating clearly with stakeholders ensures they understand that placement is part of the experiment, not just the design itself.

As a design leader, you have to remind teams that discovery is part of usability. Features don’t succeed or fail in isolation-they succeed when they’re seen, understood, and given a fair chance. Placement shapes perception, and perception shapes data. Before dismissing an idea, test the context. The difference between failure and success might not be the design-it might be where you decided to put it.