Design Inspiration vs. Copying: Where the Magic Gets Lost
Every designer knows the tension: the desire to create something original while constantly scanning the work of others for cues. It's not that anyone sets out to clone Airbnb or Stripe — it's that these products set such a high bar that their influence seeps in, sometimes without conscious intent. But there's a real problem with replicating another product's experience: the magic that made it work rarely survives the transfer.
The core question isn't whether you're allowed to be inspired. It's whether you actually understand why the original design works — and whether you can innovate on top of it rather than just reproduce its surface.
A Case Study in Copying: UK Banking
Consider the UK banking industry, which has spent years trying to catch up with agile challenger banks. A 900-day study of 12 UK banks, published as The UX of Banking, shows what happens when incumbents try to mimic the new guard.
In 2020, the study was highly critical of how most established banks handled basic card management. Freezing a card or viewing your PIN was buried as a settings row — the predictable outcome of bolting new features onto a legacy interface without rebalancing the core experience.
Monzo, Starling, and Revolut — unburdened by legacy — designed card management that felt intuitive for a mobile-first world. This is true not just in the UK; Robinhood, Venmo, N26, and CashApp followed similar trajectories. Since 2020, the incumbents have made a visible effort to replicate those challenger experiences, and the results are looking increasingly similar.
The order and positioning of card management features, as demonstrated by Monzo in 2020, has clearly become a template for other banks.
That imitation extends to both the visual design (how it looks) and the functional architecture (how it works). Barclays, with more than 80,000 employees, appears to have the same grey Figma habits as everyone else.
The Hidden Cost of Click-Parity
Copying gets even more dangerous when the copied flow is simple on the surface but complex underneath. The number of clicks to order a new card across those 12 banks illustrates the trap:
At first glance, Metro appears to have the best journey — fewest clicks. But click count is the wrong metric here. There is little positive correlation between the number of clicks and the quality of the experience. Too few clicks usually signals that context is missing or crammed into a single screen. The "cheat codes" of good design — more padding, more space, more room for explanation — often mean more screens, not fewer.
Ordering a new card is a specific journey with its own constraints:
- Infrequent usage: Most people order cards rarely, so efficiency isn't the priority.
- Negative connotations: The trigger is usually a lost, stolen, or damaged card — the user is likely anxious and frustrated.
- Time sensitivity: The relevant speed is delivery, not the ordering flow itself.
People who have lost their card need reassurance and comfort, not efficiency. That's the tone the journey should set. Metro's two-click flow is essentially one screen with two buttons — and it skips a critical preference: whether you want to keep your current PIN. If your card was damaged at home rather than stolen, you're forced to wait for both a card and a new PIN to arrive. The two "saved" clicks cost two extra days of unusable card.
Two metrics matter for this journey: how good the experience felt (qualitative) and how quickly the user could use their card (quantitative). If you copy Revolut's 11-click flow but strip out features your product doesn't have, the process won't feel nearly as seamless. If you take inspiration from Monzo's card selection screen but merge it with a step that Monzo doesn't have, the rationale behind the original design falls apart.
This is an industry where feature sets are largely identical — yet the replication quality varies enormously, proving that copying the surface is easier than copying the thinking.
Practical Rules for Borrowing Ideas
None of this argues against using the Familiarity Bias — the tendency to prefer products that feel familiar. The goal is to build familiar-feeling products without losing originality.
Things to Do
- Identify the psychological biases in play. Is the user frustrated or sad? Are they trying to avoid loss? Do those biases apply to your product too?
- Lean into well-known interaction mechanisms. TikTok's "swipe to watch" navigation became standard because familiarity is a shortcut to learning. There's no shame in borrowing a pattern your users already know.
- Be inspired by execution, not visuals. Rather than copying Shopify's checkout screen, study how they solved a specific subtle problem, like handling global delivery addresses without a page reload.
Things to Avoid
- Don't copy outright. You are likely seeing only 5% of the complexity — the other 95% (the edge cases and the reasons behind visible decisions) is hidden.
- Don't chase feature parity. Just because a company you admire has certain features in its main navigation doesn't mean your users want them.
- Don't skip education. Airbnb can assume users know what Airbnb does. Your product likely can't afford that assumption — spend the clicks teaching users, rather than imitating a household name's sparse interactions.
The excitement of blank canvases is real, but blindly following the competition isn't the answer. The answer is understanding why a competitor's design works, and then figuring out how to make the same psychological principles serve your own users' context.
