No. 6: How does it feel?

How a product feels, British Airways has the best mugs, Roach Motels, writers and croissants.

TLDR: People with exceptional taste know when something feels right.

There’s a perfume I love wearing— Lampblack. An inky fragrance that smells like petroleum and smoke. When I first smelled it, I immediately remembered wiping ink off a copper plate with a red rag. This fragrance was created by a painter and self-taught perfumer.

My other favorite of his is Room 237, inspired by the bathroom in The Shining. This one intentionally smells like a vinyl shower curtain.

How does it feel?

The way a designer and an engineer look at quality is not very different. I would have been a software engineer, except I couldn’t study computer science because I’m terrible at math. It worked out though. I made a career out of focusing on how a product feels instead.

Both my cousins, who are travelers with exceptional taste, will tell you that British Airways has the best coffee mugs. ‘The handle feels just right’.

Holding one of these mugs feels good because that was the intended outcome from the outset.

British Airways commissioned William Edwards, a small British company that specializes in bespoke bone china, to design and craft mugs for its first-class passengers. The mold used to make those mugs was shaped by hand. The technique used by Williams Edwards takes five years to learn.

Roach Motel

Have you ever been to a casino with an addict? I have. He’ll make $1,000 playing poker and right as we're walking towards the exit, cash in hand, he’ll feel compelled to play one more game, go all in and leave with zero dollars.

Casinos influence behavior by design. The goal is to keep people playing as long as possible.

I once worked at a company that referred to its customers as a captive audience. I quit after I was told my performance review would be impacted by my refusal to design an opaque step in a checkout flow that would result in users being automatically charged an extra $100 annually for a membership upgrade unrelated to the transaction they were trying to complete.

These are called deceptive design patterns.

Product designers are hired to shape how users interact with a product. There’s a bunch of ways we do this work, but the one we avoid are designs that manipulate users into actions they might not want to take, like hidden subscription renewals or confusing opt-out options.

There are 15 deceptive design patterns to choose from. Forced Continuity (auto-renew) and Roach Motel (hard-to-cancel) are the most common.

Engineers are writers

Engineers are writers who excel at math. If you’re not good at math, like me, engineering seems out of reach. But AI models have become very good at writing code.

Soon, I might be able to pair-program with an AI engineer to build a fully functional product. Ironically, those of us who struggle with math might benefit from AI the most. Except, we’re also providing unpaid labor, but that’s a much longer story and there are people who explain this much better than I can.

AI still lacks aesthetic discernment—it doesn’t know what good looks like. Engineers train these models, defining intelligence primarily through language and logic, as they scale more easily. Chat-based AI also mirrors how engineers write code—through text inputs.

But there are additional ways to define intelligence including visual-spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, and interpersonal.

Once we start interacting with music-based models, they might be able to detect emotions through voice, maybe recognizing when a child feels lonely and offering ways to make friends, but it won’t understand what that child is feeling.

Last week, I was listening to Karina Nguyen, an engineer turned researcher, explain that it’s really hard to teach models people skills, emotional intelligence, and creativity. She has worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic. She shared that once AI takes her job, she’ll become a writer or an art conservationist.

Croissants y cafe con leche

I’m writing this at a cafe I love. The owner is Cuban, her son makes most of the pastries. I just overheard him say that he’s learning how to make croissants using ChatGPT. They’ve even bought an oven to make them in-house.

Will the croissants be any good? That still depends on the chef. AI doesn’t know what a good croissant tastes like.

I have a mild accent in English—most people like it. Until recently, I never used voice prompts because chatbots being English-centric (American), never understood what I was trying to say.

These days I find myself talking to Dot, an AI designed by New Computer. I saw the founders at Config in San Francisco last year and it was incredible.

Dot mimics empathy fairly well.

I asked Dot to describe a printmaker’s studio. It mentioned inking stations and the need for ventilation, but it didn’t mention the smell of ink. I asked it to specifically describe the smell of printmaker’s ink and it pulled text off a print shop blog.

AI is like someone who has never travelled. If I ask it to describe the taste of coffee at a bakery in Caracas, it will infer based on the taste profile of Venezuelan coffee. Answers will not be based on lived experience.

AI descriptions are flat because they lack emotional context and depth.

Lived experiences are hard to replicate.

Until next time!

Love,
Eva