A practical decision workshop
How Should Your Product Feel?
Turn a handful of honest adjectives into coherent decisions across voice, visuals, motion, naming, and product behaviour.
Start the workshop
The outcome
Leave with a decision system, not a mood board.
By the end, you will have three or four defining words, a boundary for each one, a translation across five product surfaces, a contradiction audit, and four questions your team can use when a new decision appears.
Feeling is not decoration.
“Warm” is not an orange palette. “Calm” is not extra whitespace. A feeling becomes useful only when it changes what the product says, does, and refuses to do. Especially when the easy path would break the promise.
Start here, no design experience required
This is for anyone whose work meets another person.
You do not need to be a designer to use this guide. It works for an app, website, service, newsletter, course, shop, community, or personal project. The only requirement is that someone has to encounter what you make.
- Product
- Anything people encounter through your work.
- Surface
- One place they encounter it: its words, appearance, movement, names, or behaviour.
- Boundary
- A simple test for what one of your chosen words means, and what it does not mean.
- Mood board
- A collection of visual references. Useful for inspiration, but not enough to make decisions.
Step 01
Choose three or four words.
Begin with the experience, not the interface. Write quickly and keep the words human enough that two sensible people could disagree about them.
Desired feeling
How should someone feel after five minutes with the product?
Calm, capable, curious, reassured, energised
Relationship
What kind of presence should the product have beside them?
Coach, colleague, librarian, instrument, quiet expert
Under pressure
Which quality must survive when something goes wrong?
Candid, steady, forgiving, precise, resourceful
Memory
What should they remember when the interface is gone?
Warmth, clarity, momentum, confidence, possibility
Step 02
Give every word a boundary.
An adjective without a boundary becomes permission for taste. Define what it means, what it does not mean, and what evidence would make it true.
Running example · deployment review tool
For each of your words, finish this sentence: “We will know this is true when…”
Step 03
Translate the words across the product.
Take one adjective at a time. Ask what it changes on each surface. The goal is coherence, not repetition: the same principle can produce different expressions in writing, motion, and behaviour.
Running example · deployment review tool
- 01
Voice
What does this adjective change about rhythm, vocabulary, certainty, and error messages?
Candid → say what happened, what is known, and what remains uncertain.
- 02
Visuals
What does it change about density, colour, typography, imagery, and evidence of making?
Calm → fewer simultaneous demands, stable hierarchy, room to think.
- 03
Motion
Should movement reassure, energise, explain, celebrate, or quietly get out of the way?
Steady → predictable transitions that preserve spatial context.
- 04
Naming
Do feature names carry the same metaphor, level of formality, and emotional temperature?
Companionable → familiar language without forced cuteness.
- 05
Behaviour
What must the product actually do for the adjective to be true?
Capable → recover gracefully, remember context, and expose useful control.
Step 04
Audit the contradictions.
The most revealing question is not “Where do we express the words?” It is “Where does the product currently prove the opposite?” Audit a real flow, not a presentation.
- Where does the product sound unlike itself?
- Which surface is polished in a way that hides useful truth?
- Which interaction creates the opposite feeling under pressure?
- Which feature name belongs to a different metaphor or voice?
- What promise does the brand make that the product cannot yet prove?
Write the contradiction plainly
“We say the product is ________, but when ________, it makes the user feel ________.”
Step 05
Choose how much of the making to reveal.
Imperfection is a dial, not a style. Decide where evidence of a human hand builds trust, and where precision is the more humane choice. Return to your chosen words and ask which of them visibility serves on each surface.
Neutral frame, polished transitions, few traces of process.
Texture, annotation, personality, and evidence of judgement.
Choose deliberately by surface. A payment confirmation may need precision; a learning prompt may benefit from warmth and visible thought.
Step 06
Write the decision filter.
Put these questions where decisions happen: the design critique, pull request, launch brief, naming conversation, and incident review.
- 01Does this choice strengthen at least one of our words?
- 02Does it contradict any of the others?
- 03Can a user experience the principle, or only read about it?
- 04Would we still make this choice if the current visual trend disappeared?
A strong principle should help you reject a plausible choice, not only explain a choice you already wanted to make.
Your one-page system
Keep the result short enough to use.
The qualities every surface must recognise.
What each word means, rejects, and proves.
Voice, visuals, motion, naming, behaviour.
The promises the product does not yet keep.
Where making should be visible or invisible.
The reusable test for the next decision.