Mood is data; vibe is data.

When you use a product there are a lot of perceptions during your experience. Some of these are strong feelings, both positive and negative. Most of them are subtle observations that people would rarely every call out.

Let’s say you’re using an app and there’s this small, almost imperceptible hang at the end of every interaction. You subconsciously notice it but don’t think much of it. Let’s say the same app has a slightly dated UI. Again, you don’t think much of that. But a series of small feelings like this can build into a lackluster feeling about the app. It can feel worse than its pure utility.

The opposite is also true. Maybe you buy a coffee machine that has really nice detailing and finishes. It’s missing a few bells and whistles but you feel like it slightly elevates the beauty of your kitchen. In this case it feels better than it is.

The truth that a lot of product teams seem to ignore is that aesthetics and vibe are an important part of a product. We all want to use products that make us feel good.

Product development teams will hand waive this part away. They think of it as noise at worst and nice-to-have at best. However, vibes drive the disposition people have towards your product, especially over the long run.

Most teams start products from a stance of “make it work, then make it good.” We iterate along and get to a point where it’s ready to release. But in most product cycles you will stop well before good and certainly before feeling good.

There are several drivers that downplay vibes from the engineering side of product development.

• It requires operationalized taste to be cohesive.
• It’s hard to rationalize into value.
• It’s not something you can measure.

The lack of operationalized taste is the blocker I see most often. I’ve been on projects that value “look and feel” on paper but don’t manage to execute on it. There’s no one on the team who actually owns it. And, even if there is someone driving it, they often get overruled by other stakeholders.

To make it work, the owner needs the ability to say “this doesn’t feel right” even though it works. And that has to matter.

Their taste is a dowsing rod for the product’s feel. This needs to get codified into actionable decision heuristics and principles. Taste isn’t something you can create deterministic rules about. Rules may be more like prioritize play in these situations and clarity in these.

All design and copy changes need to go through review. These types of changes can be automatically detected in software pipelines and the PR can be flagged.

Realistically, this is a hard part of product development to fully operationalize. Only one company I’ve worked for bothered with anything like it. Design quality was a core part of their brand.

Organizations that truly value the form and feel of their products are rare. It takes more effort and vision. When they show up, people notice.

Just remember people also notice when you don’t value your product’s vibe.