I find myself worrying with ever greater frequency that students with UX expectations formed by mass commercial social media platforms will inevitably find projects developed by academics lacklustre. Academic projects will lack the resources (e.g. UX researchers, data scientists, masses of transactional data and the time/space/resources to exploit it for minute UX improvements) to create the frictionless experiences which contemporary platforms offer. This means they will always experience academic-led projects as clunky to various degrees and that this is a non-trivial constraint on their engagement.
