Kind Design Do's

'There are professions more harmful than design, but only a very few of them.’

Victor Papanek opened "Design For The Real World" in 1971 with that line. It is one of the finest books on the social responsibilities of industrial design. But outdated nonetheless. We're no longer in the age of industrial design. We're in the age of digital design. And unlike other design crafts, digital design was born for, and nurtured by, business objectives.

Digital design has two components: structure and aesthetics. Figuring out the right structure is like solving a puzzle. Puzzles have answers. Achieving this answer sooner than your competitor gives you an advantage, but it is rarely long-term. Sooner or later, everyone realises what the right answer is. Some through instinct, others through A/B testing. For instance, the chat interface was the right structural answer for consumer-facing LLMs. As the early mover, ChatGPT enjoyed a short-term advantage, but eventually, all LLMs adopted the chatbot format, eliminating it as a strategic edge.

The other part, aesthetics, is where the real competitive advantage lies. Aesthetics is the style you choose to dress the structure. Aesthetics carry your brand personality. For instance, take a spinning loading icon, the usual circular loading sign. Structurally, it communicates one thing: the system is processing/loading/buffering. But change the text from 'loading' to ‘thinking' - and perception shifts. To the user, you are now an intelligent AI, not just a boring machine.

Structure and aesthetics are opposing forces: structure converges toward a single correct layout, while aesthetics diverge toward a unique, recognisable brand style. Both are combined to serve business objectives.

The digital world was primarily built by companies whose success was directly related to the time the user spends on their website. What this led to is a world where every digital product is designed like a cognitive trap. Every element, both structural and aesthetic, is used as a tool, not just to grab attention, but to compulsively hold it.

This made sense for social media and other advertising-revenue platforms. What doesn’t make sense is that the rest of the industries follow these principles as the unsaid norms of digital design. Sensory overload has become an encouraged practice in digital design, even in utility-based use cases like BFSI services, e-commerce, SaaS, marketplaces, and bookings.

Stepping online to do anything means navigating a festival of lights and banners before you can complete a simple task. And since our minds have a fixed working memory (attention) bandwidth, we don't have the mental bandwidth to cope with so many simultaneous sensory signals.

Our brains are already fried. Screens are exhausting. Clinically, screen addiction has degraded our ability to focus. It is continuously affecting our power of sustained attention.

This exhaustion is the reason behind the ubiquitous new feeling of ‘I need a digital detox’. This exhaustion is shifting user preference. Subconsciously, users are seeking calmer digital experiences. Quieter interfaces. Fewer competing signals.

As a responsibility, and even for profitability, avoid sensory overload. Whatever you are designing, in all scenarios, across business cases, minimalism makes sense. Remove any element that doesn't serve your structure or aesthetics. Fewer elements make sense. Fewer colours make sense. Fewer words make sense. Fewer font styles make sense. Having fewer objectives per interaction makes sense. Good digital design is now about reduction, about respecting the user's attention bandwidth rather than exploiting it.

The shift from conventional funnels to conversational interfaces makes sense for the same reason: sensory comfort.

The recent dark mode adoption also isn't accidental. It works because dark mode dims the noise. Developers spend long hours on black screens, but they don’t experience brain pain from it, because those screens are designed to orient the user’s mind, not to disorient. The new builders, Claude, Cursor, Vercel, GPT, all chose dark mode because it is certainly more comfortable for the user’s eyes, ergo mind. The screen is essentially a collection of a million light bulbs; every colour is a light, bright colours are brighter lights. Turning on one million bright lights for every small talk is stupid. This blog doesn’t have a light mode and dark mode; it has four different levels of dark mode because why not.