Imagine choosing between two jobs. One pays more and comes with impressive benefits. The other pays less, but you enjoy working with your manager, leave with some energy, and don’t dread Monday mornings. Salary matters, but it probably wouldn’t be the only thing you considered. You’d imagine what your life would actually feel like.
Now imagine choosing between two vacations. One has a five star hotel, private tours, Michelin star restaurants, and a packed itinerary. The other is a small cabin by a lake with a good book, a cup of coffee, and nowhere you need to be. There isn’t a right answer. I just don’t think anyone chooses based on the number of amenities. We imagine ourselves there and think about how we’d feel waking up that morning.
I think we naturally do this with most things in life. But when we compare products, especially technology, we often fall back on whatever is easiest to count. Cameras get compared by megapixels. Bags by compartments. Software by features, integrations, and export formats. Does it have AI? How many templates does it include?
None of those measurements are useless. The problem is when they become our entire definition of better. I’m not sure they’re always the things that matter most.
Software is where I notice this most. I’ve never finished using an app and thought, “That was great because it had forty three features.” I’ve thought, “That was pleasant,” or, “That got out of my way.” Sometimes I don’t think about it at all, which might actually be the highest compliment.
The best tools quietly disappear while you’re using them. You stop thinking about the tool and start thinking about your work. That feeling is incredibly difficult to measure. You can’t put calmness on a comparison chart. You can’t rank how little something interrupted you. You definitely can’t put “I forgot I was using it” on a specification sheet. But those are often the reasons I come back to a product.
The more I build software, the more I think we’ve become obsessed with measurable things simply because they’re measurable. Features can be counted. Attention can’t. Comfort can’t. Trust can’t. The feeling that a product just fits into your life can’t.
Maybe that’s why those qualities are so easy to ignore. They’re difficult to market, difficult to compare, and difficult to put in a table beside your competitors. But they’re also the things people remember.
I think we spend too much time asking what a product can do. Maybe we should spend a little more time asking what it feels like to live with. That’s become a useful question for me, not just when I’m building software, but when I’m choosing the things I want to keep around too.