In The Dimensions of Loveable Products, I argued that a loveable product needs three qualities. Utility, usability, and craft. Utility and usability are well understood. Most product teams don't debate that a product needs to be useful and usable. We've evolved entire disciplines and career ladders to achieve them.
Craft is different. It's more elusive. It's viewed as subjective. Many decision-makers don't notice it and certainly weren't trained on it. When you talk with an executive about an MVP (useful and usable) they nod their heads. But craft? That's where you lose them.
And yet craft is what separates a product people use from a product people love. Craft is how the product feels. A well-crafted product elicits a positive emotional response. A poorly crafted product elicits a negative one, or at best, nothing at all.
So let me make the dimensions of craft concrete. Because once you can name them, you can see them. And once your executive peers can see them, you can build them together.
The Five Dimensions
Craft isn't one thing. It's five things working together.
Visual design. This is the foundation. Color theory, typographic standards, spacing, information density, hierarchy, icon clarity, the contemporary nature of the application chrome. Most humans still interact with computing in two dimensions, and every pixel-level decision contributes to how the experience registers. This is the dimension most people associate with craft, but it's only one of five.
Animation. Software objects move. The question is whether they move well. Do elements snap instantly from point A to B, or do they transition smoothly? Great animation mimics the best of the physical world. Think of a soft-close cabinet door. It moves fast at first, then eases to a gentle close, then clicks shut. That feels amazing. It feels categorically different from a door you slam. The same principle applies to every transition, expansion, and collapse in your interface.
In the best apps, every element departs a screen in an elegant sequence when you navigate away. Every element on the new screen arrives with intentional choreography. It feels satisfying. It's the difference between tripping over every threshold and gliding through them. Most teams ignore this entirely. The best teams obsess about it.
Voice. The words in your product are a design material. Voice and tone shape whether the software feels human or mechanical, warm or clinical. At Slack, we cultivated voice as seriously as any other part of the UI. People loved our release notes because they were witty and unconventional. That wasn't an accident. It was a design decision made with the same rigor as our color palette. We thought of our product voice as a friendly, intelligent coworker. Clear, concise, and human.
LLMs are proving just how much voice matters. When people describe why they prefer one AI over another, they talk about voice before capability. Claude feels like a thoughtful colleague. ChatGPT feels like an eager assistant. The underlying models are increasingly similar, but the voice creates a fundamentally different relationship. In April 2025, OpenAI shipped an update that made ChatGPT noticeably more sycophantic, validating everything users said. Users revolted. OpenAI rolled it back within days. The incident exposed something Anna Pickard understood when she built Slack's voice. Voice isn't decoration. It's trust infrastructure. When a product's voice feels dishonest or flattering, users lose faith in everything underneath it. As software increasingly talks to its users, voice becomes the dimension of craft with the highest stakes. The principles haven't changed. Clarity, warmth, honesty, respect for the user's intelligence. What's changed is that every AI interaction is now a voice interaction.
Tactility. This is where industrial design meets software. Industrial design marries ergonomics (the way something feels to be used) with materiality, the combinations of materials that go into a product. In software, the result is an experience that feels physical. My favorite example is setting the alarm on the Apple Watch. When you turn the digital crown, you feel bumpy haptic feedback as you pass each five-minute tick. It's fidgety in the best way. You want to play with it even when you have no alarm to set. That's tactility in software done right.
Interactivity. This is what separates software from every other medium. Roll over a button. Does it feel alive? Click a form field. Does it respond in some unique way? Movies have visual design, animation, and voice. The best movies have all of those at the highest level. But movies aren't interactive. Software is. Interactivity is your unique material. Use it.
When all five dimensions work together, you have craft. When craft serves a clear product purpose, you have the conditions for love.
Why These Dimensions Are Timeless
These five dimensions aren't a framework I invented for software. They're the same dimensions through which humans have always experienced the made world. How it looks, how it moves, how it speaks, how it feels in the hand, and how it responds to your actions.
Two thousand years ago, Vitruvius wrote that architecture requires firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (durability, utility, and beauty). The same triad. In the early 1900s, the Gestalt psychologists documented how humans innately organize visual information through proximity, similarity, closure, and continuity. These aren't cultural conventions. They describe the architecture of human perception itself. Every design system from Bauhaus to iOS is an application of principles that describe how our eyes and brains work.
Don Norman mapped this to neuroscience in Emotional Design. His three levels of design processing explain why craft operates beneath rational thought. Visceral (the immediate, pre-conscious sensory reaction), behavioral (the feel of use), and reflective (meaning and story). You don't decide a well-crafted interface feels right. You just feel it. Daniel Kahneman would call this System 1. Fast, automatic, pre-rational. The judgment happens to you before you can articulate it. This is why users often can't explain what's wrong with a poorly crafted product. They just know something feels off.
Research on processing fluency confirms the connection. Things that are easier to perceive feel more beautiful and more trustworthy. Visual clarity, rhythm, and harmony in software aren't decorative. They build trust at a neurological level.
Animation follows the same logic. In 1944, Heider and Simmel showed participants a silent film of two triangles and a circle moving around a rectangle. Observers almost unanimously invented stories. A romance, a chase, an escape. We're hardwired to read intention and emotion into motion alone. Disney's animators codified this in their 12 Principles of Animation in the 1930s. Squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through. These principles work because they map to how we experience physics. We expect objects to have weight and inertia because we evolved in a world governed by those forces. Software animation that violates these expectations feels wrong at a level beneath conscious thought.
Tactility runs deeper still. Research on C-tactile afferent receptors shows that specific types of touch activate dedicated neural pathways that register as pleasant and build trust. The satisfying click of a physical button, the haptic confirmation of an action. These activate reward circuits that evolved for physical interaction. When software simulates them well, the same circuits fire.
Dieter Rams said it best. "Good design is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated." The line from his 1958 Braun radio to Ive's iPod is direct and well-documented. Christopher Alexander spent decades finding patterns in architecture that emerged independently across cultures and centuries. He called the result "a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit... objective and precise, but it cannot be named." The patterns recur because they respond to the same human being.
These dimensions won't change with technology. They can't, because they're grounded in the human nervous system. In how we perceive visual harmony, how we read motion, how voice builds trust, how tactile feedback creates reward, how interactivity creates agency. The tools and materials change. The species doesn't.
Craft With Purpose
The most satisfying checkbox ever built wasn't an exercise in indulgence. It was a product strategy.
Andy Allen of Not Boring Software built a habits app. The core loop was simple. State a habit, complete it, check it off. The checkbox was the entire product experience. So they decided to make it the most satisfying checkbox in the world.
They used all five dimensions of craft. Graphic design, 3D design, motion, sound, and interactivity. The result was a checkbox that felt like a reward. And that was the point. When you feel a reward, your brain releases dopamine. Your mind associates the action you took with that dopamine hit. That's the neuroscience of habits. Dopamine reward loops.
The craft wasn't decoration. It was the mechanism by which the product achieved its goal. The satisfying checkbox made people want to complete their habits again and again. Craft with a purpose and a goal in the product.
This is the principle that separates meaningful craft from polish for its own sake. Craft should accentuate the core goal of the software.
Examples That Earn Love
Google Maps understood craft with purpose when they designed Pegman. When you drag Pegman across the map, he wiggles. It's fun. But the craft isn't just fun. It communicates that the map view will change when you drop him. The physicality of the wiggling character blends with the realism of street view, creating a smooth conceptual bridge between the abstract map and the photographic world below. The craft accentuates the core goal.
Robinhood understood this when they designed their options trading education. Options trading is genuinely complex. They used motion, animation, voice, and interactivity together to make each step comprehensible. Well-written copy combined with animated infographics combined with smart interactive elements that engaged the user in the learning process. To do this well, you need a clear understanding of what matters most to communicate. That's seriously hard design work.
At Slack, the team that built mobile Catch Up invested significant time making the onboarding experience feel fluid and natural. The primary actions were swiping one direction to mark a message read and the other to keep it unread. Small icons at the top filled in as you swiped. When you committed to a direction, you could feel it snap. Every one of those details helped you make the right decision as you moved through your messages. Catch Up became one of Slack's fastest-adopted mobile features. The craft reinforced the primary action.
And then there was hold music in Slack Huddles. When you were waiting for someone to join a Huddle, we played smooth jazz. If you didn't like jazz, you could change the channel. We hired musicians to custom-make the music. We invested engineering effort because the engineers were excited to build it. We did not need to build this feature. We wanted to take a moment when someone might not be having a good experience and make it great. We tried to be a good host.
Our customers noticed. They told us. When you deliver great craft, customers appreciate it. They love your product for it. We didn't do it for the press, but internally the praise helped encourage the team to see that craft matters.
Why Craft Matters to the Business
Craft isn't a luxury. It's a retention strategy.
At Slack, early success came from word of mouth. People loved the product and shared it with others. That love wasn't an accident. It was the result of deliberate craft. At Linear, Karri Saarinen made quality the first principle and grew to 10,000 paying customers with effectively zero marketing spend. People came to Linear because they liked the design. As Saarinen put it. "Even today, we still have people that come to our product just because they like the design. They don't necessarily have any other justification. They're just like 'I like it, and that's why I use it.'"
Patrick Collison at Stripe makes the rational case for why this works. Observable craft is a trust signal. His argument. When someone cares about the superficial details you can see, you infer they cared about everything you can't. "If you care about the infrastructure being holistically good," he says, "indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do." Stripe invests dramatically more effort in their website and public-facing experiences than most companies would consider reasonable. The craft signals that the API underneath is equally well-built. Katie Dill, Stripe's head of design, quantified the return. Upgrading the aesthetics and content of a single email increased product conversion by 20 percent. A redesigned checkout experience increased revenue by 11.9 percent on average.
Tobi Lutke of Shopify puts it more bluntly. "Every product in the world, at the end of the day, is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit."
I love craft for two reasons. First, it's about the senses. It's how we excite and connect with our customers in the most human way possible. It's where the product comes alive. It's the soul. Second, craft is really hard to do. And when done well, it demonstrates to your customers that you love them. That you care for them. That you're willing to go the extra mile. Not every company invests in craft. Not every company sees it. Apple cares about it. Airbnb cares about it. When customers compare a crafted product to an uncrafted one, they know which company respects them more.
Technology is always evolving. Your competitor's next release will be better crafted than their last. Your customers use other products that keep raising the bar. Their dissatisfaction with your product grows not because your product got worse, but because everything else got better.
What Comes Next
The five dimensions of craft don't change. They're rooted in how humans perceive, feel, and make meaning. Patterns that predate software by millennia and will outlast any particular technology. Visual harmony, natural motion, trustworthy voice, satisfying touch, responsive interaction. These are ancient. Software is just the latest material through which we express them.
What does change is how teams express craft. How they explore, build, iterate, and prioritize. AI is fundamentally reshaping that process. It doesn't alter what humans find beautiful, satisfying, or emotionally resonant. It can't, because those responses are hardwired. But it transforms the way designers and engineers work, the speed at which they can prototype, and the decisions they need to make about where human judgment matters most.
In a companion piece to be published next week, Craft in the Age of AI, I explore what that means. How AI amplifies and threatens craft, the failure modes to watch for, and how to build a culture that uses AI to accelerate the pursuit of craft without surrendering the human taste that craft demands.