I paid to have user testing done on the website and have been doing a lot of thinking about how I can make the user experience of the site better. Why am I doing this? Because if people have a hard time using my site they won’t buy from us. If I’m lazy about user experience it costs me money and the market will reward my competitors.
Contrast this to the hell my wife had to go through to register our youngest for kindergarten. The school acknowledged that the user experience was terrible but no one is motivated to fix it because the costs are borne entirely by my wife and other parents who are filling out the form. They are a captive audience to the government.