Build like you care

I’m not a designer by trade. I don’t speak in grids or Figma components. But I do build things. And in the process of building—especially scrappy side projects—I’ve started noticing something weird.

Most products feel… dead.

Even the ones that “work” feel transactional. Cold. The copy is dry. The buttons do their job. The flows are logical. But there’s no moment that makes you pause and go, “Oh. That was nice.”

That feeling—that tiny flicker of surprise or warmth or cleverness—is what I think of as delight. And I’m starting to believe it’s not a layer you add. It’s a layer you bake in.

The default mindset is “just ship it”

I get why delight doesn’t make it into most roadmaps. I’ve worked in product teams where even fixing broken tabs took a quarter. When you’re juggling bugs, metrics, and deadlines, “make it delightful” sounds like a luxury. A post-launch nice-to-have. Like dry-cleaning your hoodie before a pitch.

And when you’re not a designer, you assume delight means some pixel-perfect animation or a color theory class. But it doesn’t. Most of the time, it’s in the tiny, thoughtful stuff. A forgiving input field. An empty state that’s actually helpful. A shortcut you didn’t expect. Something that anticipates you.

One of my first projects was radiocast.co→ - a minimalist radio player with 8,000+ stations. The concept was simple: click and play. But I obsessed over how it feels a lot. And when it launched, users didn't mention the technical specs or station count. Instead, they kept saying "it feels so polished" - exactly the kind of delight I was aiming for.

Delight is a side effect of care

You can’t really "design for delight" as a checkbox. It’s more like a byproduct of caring—of going one step further than necessary. It’s what happens when you build with curiosity instead of just KPIs.

But here’s the tricky part: you can’t optimize for delight with a metric. You can’t pin it to a dashboard. Which means it doesn’t show up in most prioritization frameworks. And when it’s not tracked, it’s usually not shipped.

That’s how it becomes invisible. Teams cut it first, hoping to “add it later.” But later never comes, because there’s always something more measurable to chase. Eventually you have a perfectly functional product that nobody really likes.

How I’m trying to do it differently

Now, whenever I’m building something—whether it’s for work or one of my weird side apps—I try to ask: What’s the one moment in this flow that could surprise someone in a good way? Not with glitter or confetti. Just… with care.

Sometimes it’s a smooth animation. Sometimes it’s removing friction. Sometimes it’s just not being a jerk about error messages.

I don’t always get it right. Half the time I forget until I’m already halfway through shipping. But when I remember to make space for delight early on, everything else feels easier. People notice. They remember. They come back. And most importantly, I enjoy building it more.

Not because it converts better. But because it feels like craft.