Features shouldn’t feel like features

Why (and how) to craft product experiences that feel inevitable

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

Ever use a product where everything just clicked? Where functionality felt so intuitive it was almost invisible? Where every interaction felt natural, as if the product were reading your mind?

It’s a magical feeling, isn’t it? Like the product was designed specifically for you, anticipating your every need. No hunting through menus, no awkward workarounds, no puzzling over how to accomplish whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish — everything just flows.

Now think about the last time you had to learn a new tool. Recall that overwhelming feeling of staring at the endless navigation, the seemingly infinite buttons on every page, the dashboard that seems like it’s trying to tell you an answer, if only you knew how to speak its language.

The difference between these experiences isn’t about having more or fewer capabilities. It’s about how naturally those capabilities fit into the way you work.

That’s the power of experience-driven design, and it hinges on a simple but profound concept:

Features shouldn’t feel like features.

This isn’t just wordplay. This is a fundamental shift in how you should think about building products — one that separates truly great products from the endless parade of feature-rich but painful-to-use tools that dominate most markets.

Think about it this way: When you build features, you’re asking users to learn your product. When you craft experiences, you’re adapting your product to how users already work. The best products don’t feel like collections of features to be learned — they feel like natural extensions of each user’s workflow. By shifting from feature-centric to experience-driven design, you stop adding complexity to your product and start removing friction from your users’ lives.

Features that aren’t

We often think of features as distinct, self-contained units of functionality. They’re the bullet points on a product roadmap, the items in a changelog, the callouts in a monthly newsletter.