Software should have soul

Welcome back.

We’ve been a absent the last two weeks while we launched the new UX Tools redesign, design tools survey, and design tools awards.

We also migrated the newsletter to a new platform and upgraded our design.

And now we’re in production for our narrative podcast State of Play and producing a YouTube series called This is Taste.

Whew. That’s a lot.

I’m having fun, but I’m also going to ask for your forgiveness while I learn to build a media company with soul and stumble along the way.

I can’t get Ezra Klein’s interview out of my head, and I’m enjoying Soleio’s interview with Susan Kare.

This is the year of soul-searching in media and in software, so I asked Will King to share his thoughts on soulful software.

Thanks for rocking with us while we smooth out the bumps.

- Tommy (@designertom)

Software Should Have Soul

I’ll die on this hill: shipping software that “works” isn’t good enough.

Why? Because there’s a gaping chasm between solving a problem and making people care about how and who solved it.

The act of infusing a piece of software with a piece of yourself, and giving your product a pulse, a soul. Bridging that gap is the difference between Rosetta Stone and Duolingo.

It’s what turns yet-another-tool into an “I can’t live without it” habit.

So, why is soul-infused software suddenly make-or-break?

“Saturation” Was the Wrong Diagnosis

When I first started chasing this idea, I blamed the obvious villain: market saturation.

Every niche has twelve lookalikes jockeying for positions on Product Hunt and CPM scraps. Distribution must be the bottleneck, right?

Although I had the diagnosed the right symptoms, I was wrong about the patient.

Software in your market is not your only competition.

Fortnite, TikTok cooking hacks, whatever Netflix dropped today, the new life changing AI model release - this is just scratching the surface.

Software isn’t saturated - our attention is. And our collective bandwidth is fried.

People Want Products That Are Soul Good

So what is the solution for being noticed in the endless sea of products, news, and content our audience is presented everyday?

Problem solved + Emotion evoked = Soulful software

Nail both and people don’t just use your software - they evangelize it. Software that was designed for “everyone” ends up feeling like it’s designed for “no one”.

Those days are over.

The best products build cults, not customer bases. New tools that don’t… well, you still haven't heard about them.

You can’t fake emotion, so how can we design for it?

If you want people to care - to really care - you have to give them a reason that goes beyond utility.

That’s where these five emotional levers come in.

Think of them as creative catalysts, tools you can reach for when you’re shaping not just what your product does, but how it makes people feel.

Lever One: Nostalgia

Borrow Yesterday’s Feelings

Memories are a cheat code, but also a trap. Trigger an old emotion and users arrive pre-warmed. However, wholesale duplication is a trap. You may get the reaction you want, but you also transfer 0% of the goodwill onto your brand.

Instead, use cues and nods to trigger recognition.

For example, NES-style sound cues that celebrate achievements (remember that Mario coin “ping”?) but applied to modern workflows.

A great example in the wild is this landing page done by dope friend, Logan Liffick. He was able to take the core messaging for the product, plug and play, and create an experience that tugged on a familiar childhood pastime.

Lever Two: Novelty

Break the Grid

Design guidelines help you achieve default good.

I have plenty of thoughts on the value of rules in design that we can dive into in another article, but the reality that you have to face is to do something noteworthy, you need to bend those guidelines or straight up break them.

New gets noticed, but novelty alone is meaningless.

The meaning is found when you break conventions to solve real frustrations.

An oldie but a goodie: when Discord transformed dead waiting times into moments of connection with inside jokes and product tips, and it wasn't by accident either.

These loading messages kicked off a now common design pattern. Which is a lesson on its own. Novel takes get copied. Keep exploring.

Lever Three: Humor

The ROI of Ridiculousness

Jokes lower defenses. Why?

Because they tell your audience “Relax, humans work here”.

I need to be honest, humor is not one of my strengths, just ask my wife, but thankfully we have plenty of examples to reference. One we all know and love are the “redesigns” from Soren Iverson.

LinkedIn show what they actually contributed to a project when they post about it.

This lever drives home that the best inspiration often comes from looking outside your medium.

Study how comedians structure jokes, how memes evolve, how viral videos capture attention. Then find a way to apply those patterns to your product experience and marketing.

Lever Four: Personalization

The Soul of Control

People treasure what they tweak.

There are few things better for your product than having customers who feel ownership over their “space”. This is one of those times where you can get away with personalized experiences for the sake of personalization.

That being said, the best examples also tie in deeper value:

Superhuman gives you control over your own snippets. More snippets means more efficiency which means more buy in. Basedash is a metrics product that unlocks unlimited personalization. Any metric, organized in a way that makes sense to you.

Lever Five: Gamification

Achievements & Collectibles

Humans hoard achievements: badges, streaks, unlock-able experiences - we love the feeling of progress.

Whether digital or physical, it’s a great way to motivate onboarding, reward early adopters, or incentivize engagement.

More customers engagement is always a W, but the power combo is creating experiences worth sharing.

A much higher bar to reach, but the trust that comes from personal recommendations is worth the effort. Perplexity has crushed this lately with their merch and poster mini-app.

Another favorite of mine is YNAB’s age of money metric:

Age of Money is the number of days between when money comes in and when it is spent. The higher the number the more stable your financial health.

Great, You’ve Stolen a Glance. Now What?

All of these levers provide an entry point. A catalyst for breaking through the noise by infusing more soul into your work, but that is only the first step.

Getting attention, soulful or not, is like striking a match: bright, hot, and gone in seconds. Your mission is to have the kindling stacked and the logs ready so that spark grows into a fire people actually gather around.

Don't waste the effort you put into getting attention. Build a path for connection, an opportunity for your audience to invest a little more into not only the problem solved, but how and who is solving it.

Taste Is the Last Moat

The cost of high-quality production has cratered. The tools being created today are democratizing access to techniques that a few years ago required someone with a big budget and years of experience.

• Unicorn Studio: WebGL, 3D, and shader effects.

• Veo3: Video assets

• MidJourney: Creative and photorealistic image assets

I need to stress this though: new tooling isn't a magic bullet for creative problems.

A friend of mine recently said “What AI gave me was 70% correct so I deleted it.”

Hearing that, your gut reaction is probably, “Why? He only needs the other 30%.” There is a question you need to answer, when you can generate anything what is important?

The Bottom Line

Taste and empathy.

You can train your tooling now, but what are you feeding it?

Choosing the right moment, the small interactions and details that actually land, still requires craft. It requires nuanced judgment that only comes from putting in reps. From living in the same headspace as your customers.

So yes, if there’s no way to bridge the last 30%, then 70% might as well be zero.

I feel very confident that the companies who will succeed with AI tooling will succeed in the same way they always have, solving the right problems and finding interesting ways to do things people don't expect.

So, go inject your roadmap with a little humanity. Give your software some soul, and watch customers repay you with the only scarce currency left online; genuine enthusiasm.

Because the apps we remember are the ones that remember us back.

—Will King