Kind Design Don'ts

'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 most influential 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 But outdated nonetheless.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 earlier design disciplines, 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 conversational structure, 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 personality; the design’s personality shapes the perception delivered. 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.

Both structure and aesthetics are combined to serve business objectives.

The digital world was primarily built by companies whose business 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. Theatre, films, music, architecture, literature are all designed to orient attention. Digital interfaces, by contrast, fragment attention and force the mind to bounce constantly between competing elements on the screen.

This made sense for social media and other ad-revenue platforms. What doesn't make sense is that these principles have become the unspoken norms of digital design across every industry. Sensory overload is now encouraged even in utility-driven products like banking, e-commerce, SaaS, marketplaces, and booking platforms. What began as a business need for ad-revenue websites has quietly become the default for digital design.

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 capacity to cope with so many simultaneous sensory signals.

Our brains are already fried. Screens are exhausting. It is now clinically proven that mobile screen addiction degrades our ability to focus. It is continuously affecting our capacity for sustained attention.

The now-familiar feeling of "I need a digital detox" is a symptom of this exhaustion. It is also quietly reshaping user preferences. 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 all business cases, minimalism makes sense. Remove any element that doesn't serve your structure or aesthetics. Good digital design is now about reduction, about respecting the user's attention bandwidth rather than exploiting it. In an economy obsessed with capturing attention, the real opportunity may lie in respecting it.

The shift from conventional funnels to conversational interfaces reflects the same need: sensory comfort. The recent adoption of dark mode isn't accidental either. It works because dark mode dims the noise. Developers spend hours every day staring at dark interfaces, yet rarely experience the same fatigue, because those screens are designed to orient the mind rather than fragment it. The new builders, Claude, Cursor, Vercel, GPT, all default to dark mode because it is more comfortable for the eyes. The screen is essentially a grid of a million tiny light bulbs; every colour is a light, bright colours are brighter lights. Turning on one million bright lights for every small talk is stupid.