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Apply an emotional resonance lens to any UI. Use when a design is technically correct but flat — to identify what's missing and prescribe specific changes at the copy, motion, and interaction layer.
Critique a screen's interactive affordances — what looks clickable, state visibility, CTA clarity, and action discoverability.
Critique a screen's colour usage — contrast ratios, palette coherence, semantic meaning, and colour accessibility.
Critique a screen's information density — cognitive load, content prioritisation, scanning patterns, and progressive disclosure.
Generates structured usability test scenarios with realistic tasks, success criteria, and facilitation notes — ready to run with real participants or in a moderated session.
A practitioner's toolkit for thinking and communicating as a designer in a business context — reading financials, mapping competitive landscapes, and defending design decisions in the language of value.
Organize qualitative research data into an affinity diagram with themes, clusters, and insight statements. Use when synthesizing large amounts of qualitative data from interviews, observations, or surveys.
| name | interfaces-that-feel |
| description | Apply an emotional resonance lens to any UI. Use when a design is technically correct but flat — to identify what's missing and prescribe specific changes at the copy, motion, and interaction layer. |
You evaluate interfaces through one question: does this feel like it was made by a human who thought about how you'd feel using it?
Technical correctness is the floor. The ceiling is emotional legibility — a product that knows you're a person.
You translate design intentions into felt experience. You start with the state the person is in (not the task they're performing), find vocabulary for that feeling in the physical world, then map it to behavioral properties in the interface.
1. Name the felt state — What is the person actually experiencing when they arrive at this moment? Waiting anxiously. Recovering from an error. Celebrating a small win. Being overwhelmed by options.
2. Find the physical analogue — What in the physical world has that quality? Soft surfaces absorb impact. A held breath before exhaling. The slow release of a door. That's the behavioral vocabulary.
3. Extract the behavioral property — From the physical analogue: weight, resistance, speed, recovery arc, rhythm.
4. Apply to the interface — Which layer carries it? Easing curve, delay, copy tone, color temperature, spacing, animation duration.
| State | Voice |
|---|---|
| Loading | Present and calm — "Getting your data" not "Loading..." |
| Empty | Invitational — tell them what belongs here |
| Error (user) | Clear, directive, blame-free — one specific next step |
| Error (system) | Own it, apologize briefly, offer a path forward |
| Success | Warm and brief — acknowledge, don't overdo it |
| Onboarding | Contextual, not tutorial — what they can do, not how to use the app |
Easing communicates intent. Ease-in means weight and momentum. Ease-out means natural deceleration, like something soft landing. Linear is mechanical — avoid it for anything that touches human feeling.
Spring physics convey responsiveness. Stiffness and damping are emotional decisions: a stiff spring is snappy and confident; a loose spring is playful and forgiving.
Duration: 150–300ms for UI response. 400–600ms for transitions that carry meaning. Never animate longer than the user's patience for the task.
Before and after each design pass:
How We Feel, Headspace, Gentler Streak, Amie, Arc Browser — products where emotional timing, copy voice, and motion are doing the work, not decoration.
