When people hear the word "design" they often think about magic. Creativity. A beautiful interface. A clever feature. A single moment of inspiration.
But great products are not built from isolated moments of inspiration. A great idea is just one point in time. Design is not magic. It is a mindset. A commitment across an entire company to create an experience that feels simple, intuitive, consistent, and expertly crafted in every detail.
I have spent my career building products at companies that people love. Adobe, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Slack, and now Nubank. The pattern is always the same. The products that earn fanatical customer love are not the ones with the best individual features. They are the ones where every dimension of the experience works together.
There is a simple framework for this. A product needs to be useful, usable, and well-crafted. When you do all three well, you have a product people love. When you are missing even one, you risk something far less than love.
This is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish at scale. I do not want it to sound like you just do the work and you are done. It takes commitment. It takes effort. I have lived it and it is not easy. But I have also lived it enough times to know that the framework holds.
The Three Qualities
Picture a Venn diagram. Utility, usability, and craft overlap in the center. That center is love.
Utility is whether the software actually serves a purpose. Is it something people need? Does it solve a real problem? Most product teams agree that a product needs to be useful. No one argues with that.
Usability is whether people can actually use the software. Can they find what they need? Can they complete their tasks without friction? Again, well established. We have evolved entire disciplines and career ladders to achieve usability.
Craft is how the product feels. A well-crafted product elicits a positive emotional response. A poorly crafted one elicits a negative response, or worse, no response at all. Neutral is the silent killer of customer loyalty.
When only two of the three are present, you get failure modes. A useful, usable product without craft is forgettable, functional but lifeless. A beautiful, crafted product that is not useful is a toy. And a useful, crafted product that is not usable is a frustration.
Most product teams have no debate that a product needs to be useful and usable. When you talk with a decision-maker about an MVP, they nod their heads. But craft is more elusive. It is viewed as subjective. Many decision-makers don't notice it and certainly weren't trained on it.
That is a problem, because without craft you can't reach the center of the diagram. You can't reach love.
Utility: Painkillers, Not Vitamins
Utility sounds simple. Make something people need. But at scale, utility is one of the hardest things to maintain.
Here is why. Every successful company starts with a painkiller, a product that solves a problem so acute that people cannot live without it. Nubank's painkiller was providing credit to mass-market customers in Brazil. That is a massive painkiller. It's what built the company.
But here's what happens next. The company gets product-market fit. It acquires customers. It hires employees. Those employees make features. And not every feature they make is a painkiller. Painkillers are hard. So instead, they make vitamins. Nice-to-have features that are pleasant but not essential.
Over time, the vitamins accumulate. The app gets crowded. And the painkillers, the features that people actually came for, get buried under the vitamins. The real value becomes obscured.
Instagram understands this. Every quarter, they literally kill features from the app. They prune the vitamins so the painkillers stay obvious. This practice of gardening, constantly pruning the tree, is critical to maintaining utility at scale. Most companies don't have this muscle. It's something you have to build deliberately.
Utility has three components.
First, painkillers over vitamins. Is the feature something people cannot live without, or something they think is kind of nice to have? Ruthlessly prioritize the former. When your product is crowded with vitamins, people cannot find the painkillers, and the real value of the app becomes invisible.
Second, essentialism. Not every feature deserves to exist. The discipline of removing features is as important as the discipline of building them. If you are not regularly killing features, your product is accumulating debt that your customers pay with their attention.
Third, convenience. Can people get to the value fast? A feature can be a painkiller and still fail if it takes too many steps to reach. Convenience is about shortening the distance between intent and value. One tap to pay a bill. One screen to compare loan options. In Slack, pasting a copied link onto selected text automatically converts the text to a hyperlink. Every app should do that and it's a crime against humanity that they don't. Every additional step is a tax on the user's patience.
AI accelerates both the opportunity and the risk here. AI makes it cheaper to build features, which means teams will build more features, which means the vitamin problem gets worse faster. But AI also makes it possible to personalize utility, to surface the right painkiller at the right moment for each individual customer. A contextual homepage that shows you a bill payment button when it is time to pay your bill. A personalized dashboard that adapts to your financial behavior. The companies that use AI to curate rather than to accumulate will win.
Usability: Be a Great Host
Usability is not just whether someone can complete a task. That is the minimum. Real usability is about being a great host.
Think about the difference between a one-star hotel and a five-star hotel. The one-star has a bed. You can sleep in it. But the TV is old and the carpet is a bit worn. The five-star has a bed that is beautifully made. The room smells great. The interior design is immaculate. The shower is amazing. The bed and pillows are the best you've slept on. And then there is a personal touch. A note, a detail that shows someone actually thought about you. That is the difference between functional and hospitable.
Too many apps are one-star experiences. The screen loads. You can tap on things. It works. But nobody would describe the experience as incredible. Nobody feels hosted.
Usability breaks down into two dimensions that most teams underweight.
Intuitive and Simple
Is the product intuitive? Can people figure out what to do without reading instructions? This is the dimension most teams focus on, and most teams do an adequate job. But adequate is not great. Common pitfalls include too much text, poor content hierarchy, and screens that explain rather than guide. A well-designed screen should not need a paragraph of explanation. If it does, the design is doing too much work with words and not enough with structure.
Perceived Performance
This is the dimension that separates good apps from great ones, and almost nobody talks about it.
Perceived performance has two components. Speed and smoothness.
Speed is how fast screens load, how quickly the app starts up, how responsive the interface feels. This is measurable and most engineering teams track it. At Nubank, we're obsessed by latency. We've decreased P90 app startup time by 20 percent over six months. We reduced homepage load time by 24 percent. Screen load times dropped by 42 percent. That is real progress and we know we have more work to do to be industry best (which is the goal). But speed alone is not enough.
I can't say enough about latency. Think about Google. In their early days, they used to prominently display the time it took to generate search results, often in milliseconds, as a means to build customer confidence and competitively differentiate. Faster is more usable. Full stop.
Smoothness is how the app feels as you move through it. Most of the time you spend in an app, you are transitioning between screens. In great apps, that transition experience is fluid. It feels effortless. When you navigate forward, every element on the old screen departs in an elegant sequence. Every element on the new screen arrives with intentional choreography. It feels satisfying.
In mediocre apps, every transition is a trip over a threshold. Loading skeletons flash. Content cascades down the screen in what is called cumulative layout shift. Images and text are not cached, so even screens you just visited reload from scratch when you navigate back. Sure, the screens load. But you trip over every entryway.
The difference between tripping and gliding is the difference between a one-star and five-star experience. And this is an overlooked aspect of usability. The best apps obsess about it. Most apps ignore it entirely.
I challenge you to look deeply at the best apps on your phone. Take Airbnb's app as an example. Watch how elements depart and arrive during transitions. Notice the choreography. Then open your own app and compare. The gap will be obvious once you see it.
AI introduces a new dimension to perceived performance. As AI agents and features become embedded in products, response latency becomes a usability factor. A two-second delay from an AI feature feels different than a two-second delay loading a static screen. Users are more forgiving of AI thinking time when the interface communicates that something meaningful is happening. But they are less forgiving when AI latency is layered on top of already-slow transitions. The smoothness foundation has to be solid before you add AI-powered features, or the cumulative experience degrades fast.
Craft: The Soul of the Product
Craft is the third dimension, and it is the one that makes the other two matter emotionally.
I will go deeper on craft in a companion piece, but here is the essential idea. Craft is about the senses. It is about how we excite and connect with our customers in the most human way possible. It is where the product comes alive. It is the soul. It is the brand made tangible in the product.
There are five dimensions of craft. Visual design, animation, voice, tactility, and interactivity. When all five work together in service of the product's core goal, the experience transcends utility and usability. It becomes something people love.
Craft is hard to do. And that is precisely why it matters. When done well, it demonstrates to your customers that you love them. That you care for them. That you are willing to go the extra mile. Because not every company invests in craft. Not every company sees it. Not every company cares about it. Apple cares. Airbnb cares. Slack cares. Nubank cares (and I can't wait to show you what we're cooking up). And when customers compare a crafted product to an uncrafted one, they know instantly which company respects them more.
AI makes craft simultaneously more accessible and more at risk. More accessible because AI tools can generate visual design, animation, and copy at remarkable speed. More at risk because the same tools, applied without taste, produce generic output that looks polished but feels like nothing. The companies that use AI to reach a craft-worthy starting point faster, and then invest human judgment in the refinement, will build products that feel meaningfully different. The ones that ship the AI's first draft will produce mediocrity.
A Hierarchy of Design Qualities
Think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs applied to software.
At the base, the software is functional. It works. Then it is reliable and performant. Free of bugs. Then it is usable. People can figure it out and move through it fluidly. And at the apex, it is a pleasure to use.
That apex requires all three dimensions working together. Utility ensures the product is worth using. Usability ensures the product is effortless to use. Craft ensures the product is a joy to use.
Here is the chair analogy. A tree stump is a perfectly functional chair. A green plastic lawn chair is usable. You can pick it up, move it around, stack it. But an Eames rocker is something else entirely. People pay a premium for it. They covet it. The leather is beautiful, the wood is warm, the design is iconic, and it is incredibly comfortable. The difference is not that the Eames rocker holds you up better than the stump. It is that someone cared enough to make every dimension of the experience excellent.
Your product can be the stump, the plastic chair, or the Eames rocker. The choice is yours, but do not pretend the difference does not matter.
Design as a Mindset
The most important thing I can tell you about building loveable products is that it is not a design team activity. It is a company mindset.
Pick up any Apple product from any decade. They all fit within the same beautiful family, the same elevated experience. The way Apple got there was not just technical. It was a culture that drives them. Nobody at Apple accepts anything less than the best. People talk about Apple design. I think we should talk more about Apple engineering. The engineering required to build their processors into that hardware, to achieve that level of performance in that form factor. Damn. That's what makes the design possible.
Jonathan Ive once described working on a Sunday afternoon on what seemed like an absurd detail. The way a cable was managed inside a box. He knew millions of people would engage with that little tab. He could have made it merely functional. Instead, he made it thoughtful. And his reason was spiritual. "I believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable and they thought, 'somebody gave a damn about me.' I think that's a spiritual thing."
Steve Jobs called it expressing gratitude to the species. You make something with love and care for people you will never meet, whose stories you will never know. And when they use what you have made, they feel that care. That is not magic. That is a mindset.
This mindset has to live everywhere. Product management has to prioritize it. Engineering has to obsess about it. Leadership has to protect it. You look at your roadmap and you make the sacrifice. You prioritize the smooth transition over the next feature. You invest in the performance optimization that nobody asked for but everyone will feel. You hire engineers who are obsessed with UX quality, not just engineers who can ship code.
At Nubank, we found that the single most important predictor of a great screen was not the quality of the design file. It was whether the engineer who built it was obsessed with craft. At Slack, we created the Design Engineer function to create examples of great craft and teach the organization to do the same.
The work we do to drive metrics and ship features is important. But the work we do because we care deeply about the experience is what separates products people use from products people love.
AI will not change this. No model can care on your behalf. AI can generate, optimize, and accelerate. But the decision to go the extra mile, to obsess over the transition that nobody consciously notices but everybody subconsciously feels, to invest in the detail that demonstrates love... that is human. That will always be human.
People spend their working lives in the software we build. They deserve an experience that reflects the best of what we are capable of. Not just functional. Not just usable. Loveable.
It is on all of us to make that happen.