How to Give Your Product a Soul: Design Principles for Emotional Connection

Advocating "Design with Soul"

Product designers often chase metrics such as increased page visits or longer app usage, but focusing solely on numbers strips away essential qualities. While meeting metrics is the baseline, true success requires creating an emotional connection that makes users love the product.

Adding "soul" means fostering an emotional bond, delivering a distinctive, recognizable experience that solves real problems and improves users' lives, thereby making the product memorable.

Two guiding questions help achieve this:

What truly makes the product useful for users?

What will make users genuinely care about the product?

Beyond functionality, reliability, and usability, a product gains life only when it possesses soul.

Fun Elements

One way to inject soul is by incorporating "fun elements"—features that delight and entertain. Jony Ive’s approach to adding playful functions to a pen illustrates this mindset. Such elements encourage deeper interaction and create a warm, memorable experience.

Examples include:

Cool rotating animation during pull‑to‑refresh.

Playful animation when liking a tweet.

MailChimp’s mascot arm that stretches infinitely when testing responsive layouts.

These subtle touches make products feel more human and engaging.

How to Add Soul?

Adding soul is akin to building a relationship with the product: understand its nature, constraints, and possibilities, just as a potter knows clay or an architect knows wood and steel. This understanding guides appropriate design decisions.

For instance, a whimsical iOS email client might use a spring‑y animation that slides messages up from the bottom, aligning with its “fun” personality on a design‑personality chart.

Designers should avoid over‑designing or forcing unrelated elements; the experience must feel natural.

Other Considerations

Every interaction—buttons, scrollbars, hover states—offers opportunities for fun elements. Think about sound, visual style, and behavior that anticipate user needs, turning the product into a personable companion.

Convincing Your Boss and Team

Stakeholders often worry about deadlines, budgets, and effort. Frame discussions around effort versus impact, emphasizing low‑effort, high‑return ideas that delight users without heavy cost.

Prioritize ideas that provide the greatest user benefit for the least investment, and be prepared to let go of high‑effort, low‑return concepts.

KANO Model

The KANO model categorizes requirements into basic (can it work?), performance (does it work well?), and attractive (why do we love it?). The product’s soul resides in the attractive category. Applying KANO helps identify features that differentiate the product.

Focusing on low‑effort, high‑return attractive features leads to soulful products that resonate with users and even improve employee satisfaction.

Conclusion

Designing solely to meet metrics yields boring products. By establishing principles that add emotional depth—through fun elements, thoughtful animation, and the KANO framework—designers can create products that users truly love and that stand out in the market.

Q & A

Anthony Wijaya (Oct 27, 2016): I love the brand‑personality chart and plan to use it in our next redesign. However, you mention low‑effort, high‑return ideas, yet many consider animation high‑effort, low‑return. What’s your take?

Joshua Mauldin (Oct 28, 2016): First, ask whether animation is the best way to express the product’s soul; sometimes other methods work better. Remember, soul belongs to the attractive KANO category, a small part of the project. Second, leverage existing animation frameworks (e.g., Swift Tweaks) if your team lacks expertise, keeping effort low while still adding value.