Kind Products Win

Why do so many products feel soulless?

The next wave of great products won’t be defined by what they do, but by how they make us feel.

We made technology powerful. Now it’s time to make it kind.

We Optimized Ourselves Into a Corner

For the past decade, design has worshipped at the altar of efficiency. Make it faster. Remove every ounce of friction. Optimize the conversion funnel. A/B test the button color. Shave milliseconds off the load time.

And it worked spectacularly. Products became sleeker, smarter, more powerful. We built interfaces that could anticipate our needs before we articulated them. We reduced complex workflows to single taps.

But somewhere along the way, we optimized out the humanity.

Walk through your daily digital routine. Check your email: a barrage of notifications, each demanding immediate attention. Open your task manager: an endless scroll of incomplete obligations. Browse social media: an algorithmic feed designed to keep you scrolling, not satisfied.

Most software today is ruthlessly functional but emotionally vacant. It gets the job done, but it doesn’t care how you feel while doing it. You close the app productive, perhaps, but depleted. Never peaceful.

We’ve become so good at designing for efficiency that we forgot to design for emotional well-being.

The Intelligence Ceiling

Here’s what’s changed: we’re approaching the ceiling on raw capability.

AI can now write, code, design, analyze, and create at human levels. Within a few years, most products will have access to similar intelligence. The chatbot in your banking app will be as “smart” as the one helping you write code. Every tool will be able to understand context, learn preferences, and execute complex tasks.

When intelligence becomes commoditized, differentiation moves elsewhere.

The question is no longer “Can your product do the thing?” It’s “How does your product make me feel while doing the thing?”

This is where empathy becomes the new frontier. The next differentiator isn’t IQ but emotional intelligence.

Kindness will become the new usability.

Think about the products you genuinely love. Not just tolerate, not just find useful, but actually love. Chances are, they do something beyond their stated function. They make you feel capable. Or calm. Or quietly encouraged.

What Kindness Actually Looks Like

Kindness in design isn’t about adding smiley faces or writing cheerful copy. It’s deeper than tone. It’s about intent embedded in every interaction.

And most products fail at this completely.

It’s welcoming. After every iOS update, you’re greeted with “Hello” in gentle, oversized type across dozens of languages. Not “Setup Complete” or “System Ready.” Just “Hello.” Like the device is reintroducing itself, acknowledging the relationship rather than treating you as a user ID.

It’s frictionless. AirDrop doesn’t make you type email addresses or phone numbers. You don’t attach files to messages. You just tap a name and the photo arrives, like handing something to someone in the same room. Compare that to texting photos: compression artifacts, MMS failures, “file too large” errors. AirDrop assumed the kind way was the invisible way. People who know me know how passionate I am about AirDrop. My first company after high school was built around this exact idea: instant photo sharing with a simple tap. As kind as it gets.

It’s generous. Your friend visits and asks for your WiFi password. Instead of dictating a string of random characters, iOS detects the request and offers to share it with a tap. No awkwardness. No friction. The device handles the social burden for you. It anticipates not just what you need to do, but how you’d prefer to feel while doing it.It’s probably one of my fav apple features.

It’s in the forgiveness. Gmail’s “Undo Send” isn’t just a feature but a recognition that humans make mistakes, and technology should protect us from them. iOS assumes you’ll change your mind, which is why nearly every destructive action can be undone with a shake of your phone: a physical gesture that feels almost apologetic. Kindness is building in second chances.

These aren’t edge cases or nice-to-haves. These are the moments that transform tools into companions.

Kindness shows up in the patience of an empty state that doesn’t rush you. In the warmth of micro-interactions that acknowledge your actions without demanding attention. In error messages that guide rather than scold. In defaults that assume good intent rather than user incompetence.

These moments seem subtle, even trivial, in isolation. But they accumulate. They shape how we feel about a product over weeks and months. They turn interfaces into relationships. They build trust.

Most designers ignore this entirely. They ship features, not feelings.

The Business Case for Kindness

Let’s be pragmatic: kindness isn’t just ethically right. It’s strategically smart.

And if you’re ignoring it, you’re leaving money on the table.

People return to products that make them feel safe. They recommend products that make them feel seen. They forgive mistakes in products that have built up goodwill through hundreds of small, kind interactions.

Think about the products with cult-like followings. Superhuman’s email client. Obsidian’s note-taking. Linear’s project management. These aren’t the most feature-rich options in their categories. They’re certainly not the cheapest. But they’ve built fiercely loyal communities because they respect their users’ time, attention, and emotional state.

Kindness reduces churn not through dark patterns that make it hard to leave, but through genuine care that makes you want to stay. It increases word-of-mouth because people love sharing things that made them feel good. It creates pricing power because people will pay more for products that treat them well.

There’s a misconception that kindness requires sacrifice: that being gentle means being slow, that caring means compromising on power. This is false.

Kindness and capability aren’t opposing forces. They’re complementary. A kind product isn’t a weak product. It’s a confident one, confident enough to not need to shout, to not need to manipulate, to not need to create artificial urgency.

Kindness doesn’t slow products down. It makes them timeless.

The Designer’s New Mission

If you’re building products today, your job description just changed.

Whether you like it or not.

You’re no longer primarily designing screens or optimizing flows. You’re designing emotional experiences. You’re shaping how millions of people will feel during the hours they spend inside your interface.

That’s an enormous responsibility.

And most of you are treating it like an afterthought.

Every choice you make, from the weight of your typography to the cadence of your notifications to the tone of your empty states, is a choice about emotion. You’re deciding whether to make someone feel anxious or calm. Judged or supported. Rushed or respected.

This requires a different set of questions:

• Does this notification create value or just demand attention?

• Does this onboarding educate or overwhelm?

• Does this error message help or blame?

• Does this feature make users feel powerful or inadequate?

• Would I want to interact with this when I’m tired? Stressed? Distracted?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’re not designing. You’re just arranging pixels.

It also requires different metrics. We need to start measuring what actually matters: not just engagement, but fulfillment. Not just time-on-site, but time well-spent. Not just conversion rates, but emotional residue.

What if we tracked how calm people felt after using our product? How confident? How supported? These might seem like soft metrics, but they predict the hard outcomes we actually care about: retention, referrals, brand strength.

The best designers are starting to think like emotional architects. They’re not just solving problems but crafting the feeling of the solution.

The rest are building forgettable products.

A Different Future

Imagine opening your work tools tomorrow morning and feeling welcomed, not overwhelmed. Imagine making a mistake and having the software respond with patience, not punishment. Imagine ending your day with technology and feeling energized rather than drained.

As AI handles more of the functional heavy lifting, the human experience becomes the primary battleground. The products that win won’t be the ones with the most features or the fastest performance. They’ll be the ones that understand us: not just our tasks, but our fears, our aspirations, our need for rest and encouragement.

We’re at an inflection point. We can continue down the path of ruthless optimization, building ever-more-powerful tools that leave us feeling hollow. Or we can choose a different direction.

We can build technology that enhances our humanity rather than exploiting it. Products that make us feel more capable, not more anxious. Interfaces that respect our attention instead of fighting for it. Tools that care about our well-being, not just our productivity.

But this requires courage. It requires conviction and most importantly designers who are willing to fight for emotional well-being in rooms full of people optimizing for engagement.

We’ve made technology powerful. Now we have to make it kind.

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