Why (and how) to craft product experiences that feel inevitablePhoto by Dev Asangbam onUnsplashEver 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 yourmind?Its a magical feeling, isnt 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 youre trying to accomplisheverything justflows.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 its trying to tell you an answer, if only you knew how to speak its language.The difference between these experiences isnt about having more or fewer capabilities. Its about how naturally those capabilities fit into the way youwork.Thats the power of experience-driven design, and it hinges on a simple but profoundconcept:Features shouldnt feel like features.This isnt just wordplay. This is a fundamental shift in how you should think about building productsone that separates truly great products from the endless parade of feature-rich but painful-to-use tools that dominate mostmarkets.Think about it this way: When you build features, youre asking users to learn your product. When you craft experiences, youre adapting your product to how users already work. The best products dont feel like collections of features to be learnedthey feel like natural extensions of each users workflow. By shifting from feature-centric to experience-driven design, you stop adding complexity to your product and start removing friction from your userslives.Features thatarentWe often think of features as distinct, self-contained units of functionality. Theyre the bullet points on a product roadmap, the items in a changelog, the callouts in a monthly newsletter.And they are indeed all thosethings.Experiences can also be all those things, of course. But what makes them different is the way we think aboutthem.When you just list out the things youre building (in those aforementioned roadmaps, changelogs, and newsletters), its easy for it all to become a jumbled mess disconnected from the most important part of the product-building equation: theuser.But when you start from the perspective of the user, its not about the lists of things youre doing anymore. It becomes not just about the problems being solved, but how the pain points are being addressed and the feeling of how it all comes together into a cohesiveproduct.A feature is something usersuse.An experience is something users seamlessly engage with as they accomplish theirgoals.Both solve the problem. But one does it on the usersterms.An exampleLet me illustrate by way of example. (Im sure youve seen the below competing concepts in various tools youve usedyou tell me which isbetter.)Imagine youre writing a comment in your task management tool, and you want to add an image for context. You drag from your desktop into the description area, and its addedin-line.Lets go to the other end of spectrum. You try to drag & drop, but you get a little you cant drop that here icon. You realize theres an upload media button, which you click, and a select-your-file modal pops open. You navigate through your computers file hierarchy, double click, and your image is loaded as an attachment to the task, available at the bottom of the description with no context whatsoever as to what it relates to or why itsthere.Both of these are features, of coursea product manager prioritized solving a pain point, a designer conceptualized the idea, an engineer built the functionality into thetool.And both solve the need (to add images to atask).But one is a feature that very much feels like afeature.Whereas the other? The other is a feature you barely feel because its an experience. It just feels right like a natural extension of the context youre already in exactly what youd expect to happen if you performed thataction.That difference is features vs. experiences in a nutshell.Feature factoriesbadGo pull up your product roadmap. I imagine it has a pretty specific list of things you plan on building, something likethis:Calendar integrationCustom databasefieldsAlerts systemExport toolDashboardDark modeEtc.Each item is a feature that someone asked for, or that a competitor already has, or that seemed like a good idea during that one meeting where everyone was hopped up on caffeine and enthusiasm.The problem isnt that these are bad ideasIm sure theyre great! The problem is that youre thinking about them as features to be shipped rather than experiences to becrafted.Go back to that listdoes any of that really tell you whatsneeded?What does the calendar integration need todo?Do you need a custom fields features, or do you just need to add a few common fields that were left out of the initialscope?What are those alerts going to alert about? Will users actually see them in your tool, or should they end up in Slack (or wherever else your usersare)?Do people need to export their data, or just get it into their BItool?What questions are going to be answered by the dashboard? Is a dashboard the right place to answer those questions?Are your users the highly technical kind that expect dark mode in all their tools, or is it just that your CEO wants dark mode because they heard its all therage?Youre creating a product that feels like it was assembled from a box of random parts rather than designed as a cohesivewhole.And as such, you keep ending upwithFeature bloat: Every piece of functionality that a single person ever wanted (and yet somehow, paradoxically, nobody can do what they need todo)Inconsistency: Each feature feels different than the last, because each one was built to function in a way perfectly ideal for itself on its own, without consideration for how it fits into the biggerpictureDecreased usability & horrible UX: A cluttered interface with too many options, and nobody can find the functionality theyneedIf you think about features in terms of raw functionalityjust adding more buttons, pages, capabilitiesyou end up with a feature factory. This is where products become bloated, complex, unusablemesses.Experience-driven designgoodThe best features are the ones which users dont even realize theyre using as they use them. Theyre the ones that feel so natural, so obvious, that users would be surprised to learn they werent alwaysthere.Think about your smartphones keyboard. Remember when it didnt have swipe-to-text or speech-to-text? When it didnt autosuggest the perfect emoji? When it didnt automatically correct your typos? Ducking right youdo!Those arent feature anymoretheyre just how keyboards work.Emoji keyboardfeature. Emoji autosuggestexperience.Old school autocorrect (replace specific sets of characters with specific other sets of characters)feature. Current autocorrect (just do it)experience.Individually press every single individual letter like a plebeianfeature. Swipe- or speech-to-textexperience.Technically possiblefeature.Just worksexperience.Thats what you need to aim for. Not features that users have to seek out and learn to use, but experiences that just work the way users expect them towork.Some more examples foryou:Documents that save automatically, instead of requiring a save button (remember when youd lose your 20-page essay if you forgot to hit ctrl-s? Pepperidge Farm remembers)Search results that update as you type, instead of requiring you to hit enter (minimize thoseclicks)Copying on your phone and pasting on your laptop (i.e., universal clipboard), instead of texting yourself or sending yourself anemailForms that remember what you entered even if you accidentally navigate away, instead of losing your work and having to start over (or just give up and neversubmit)Code editors that format your code as you type, instead of wasting time debating the entire engineering team on the virtues of tabs vs.spacesDashboards that adjust their time range to automatically include today, instead of having to press in the last month every single damn time you open the dashboardAgile task management tooling that reminds you about upcoming holidays during Sprint Planning, instead of starting the sprint and realizing immediately after that youre destined to fail to hit your goals(sigh)Notice the pattern? None of these feel like features because theyre not adding new things for users to dotheyre removing friction from things users are alreadydoing.If you think about features in terms of experiences, you focus on providing value in the most natural and intuitive way possible. You find the best way to help users help themselves, as opposed to just adding yet another button amidst a sea ofbuttons.How to make features disappearOkay, so features bad / experiences good. How do you turn a feature factory into an experience studio?1. Understand the story behind theneedStop asking what features do our customers want?thats like asking what tools to buy before you know what youre building.Instead, digdeeper:What is the user actually trying to accomplish? Not just the immediate task, but the broadergoal.Why is this particular need so important to the user? This goes beyond the what do they say they want and into the but seriously, why do they actually wantit.What is it about the user that makes them them? What is their role? How does that impact what they need or what they know or how theythink?How does this need fit into the users broader workflow? What are they trying to do right before and after this particular task? This can easily influence the understanding of the why and the solution that becomes thehow.[If youre astute, you may have noticed really this all comes down to understanding the jobstory.]The best product experiences come from understanding the complete context of user needs, not just the specificrequest.2. Look for frictionpointsThis is your treasure mapX marks the bad-user-experience-that-could-be-better. While users might not be great at telling you whats wrong, their behavior leaves clues everywhere. Your job is to be a product detective, hunting down these moments of frustration before users have to complain aboutthem.Flow disruptions: Every time a user has to stop what theyre doing and think about a next step that needs taking (especially seemingly unnecessary ones), youve found a friction point. Why should they have to remember to save? Why should they need to manuallysync?Cognitive overhead: What are users forced to remember or track? Those task ids they keep copying and pasting everywhere? The three difference places they need to update every time something changes?Repetitive actions: If users are doing the same thing over, and over, and over againthats a red flag. These are ripe opportunities for behavior that could at least be simplified, if not fully automated.I wish it just moments: These are pure gold. This is users telling you exactly where your product is falling short, where potentially even a slight tweak or tiny improvement could turn the unnatural into magic. (Though, be sure to pay attention to not just what theyre wishing for, but also why they wish forit.)Every point of friction is an opportunity to transform a clunky feature into an invisible experience.3. Remove before youaddThis may be counterintuitive for most product teams, but its absolutely crucial. Before you add anything, think:Can we eliminate (or hide) a feature without causing any heartache? Are there features which are used by effectively 0% of your user base (or low enough that youre not worried about it)? Other features will automatically be easier to discover/locate and use simply by getting rid of features that are in theway.Can we automate what users are doing manually? Look for patterns in behavior that could theoretically be handled by the system, automatically. If users always the same three actions in sequence, maybe that should be one automated flowwhether requiring one button press somewhere, orevenCan we make this happen in the background? Features that require user intervention feel like features. Things that just happen feel likemagic.Can we combine multiple features into one seamless experience? Instead of having a whole feature for each related item, can we create one intuitive flow that handles everything? (In its simplest form, this can come down to solutions like putting like functionality into a single overflowmenu.)The most elegant solutions often involve removing complexity rather than adding features.4. Make it feelnaturalThis is where we get more into art than science. You want your product to feel it couldnt possibly work any otherway.Think in terms of magic: If you had a magic wand, how would a given feature work? That idea you have in your head is probably closer to what users actually want than whatever specific feature they may be requesting. And then, the toughest part: how can you close the gap between magic andreality?Maintain context: Features that pull users out of their flow feel like features. Can the-thing-theyre-trying-to-do happen right where they alreadyare?Embrace progressive disclosure: Not everything needs to be visible all the time. Yes, creating a single page with a button for every possible user need means that every possible user need is only a single click awaybut that doesnt sound like a good experience, now doesit?Design as if documentation doesnt exist: Users shouldnt need a manual to figure out how to use your product. The right action should feel obvious at the righttime.Natural experiences feel like they were designed specifically for each users uniqueneeds.5. Test the invisibilityHeres how to know if youve succeeded, or if you still have more work to do (but note you always have more work todo):Watch new users: If they have to ask how to do something, it probably still feels too much like afeature.Listen for silence: The best features often generate the least feedback because they justwork.Track feature discovery: How are users finding particular functionality? Through documentation (bad), or through exploration (good)?Look for natural adoption: Are existing users organically discovering and using the feature without prompting? (I.e., get rid of those look over here, new feature alert banners and callouts andmodals.)Monitor feature mentions: In user interviews, do they talk about a capability as a feature, or just as part of how they work? This comes down to the specific wording they useand then I check our progress on the home screen is indicative of an experience, whereas and then I open up the dashboard, change the time range to include today, and click on the revenue metric icon sounds like afeature.The truest sign of success is when users cant imagine how they worked without a feature, yet also cant remember specifically when they started usingit.Break freeYour product doesnt need more features. It needs more moments where users, instead of asking how do I do that?, say of course it works that way (or ideally, never say anything atall).The next time youre running through your roadmap of features, try this exercise: Take each item, and ask how can we make the need for this disappear? Not by ignoring it, of course, but by so seamlessly integrating it into the user experience that nobody even notices itsthere.This is going to require a mindset shift, but youll be able to get there if youtry.Dig into why your users need certain functionality in the first place (its often not what theyre explicitly askingfor)Figure out where theyre struggling or frustrated (even if they dont tell you with theirwords)Get out of their way by removing stuff they dont need (you dont have to solve every problem for everyuser)Make everything that remains feel natural (akamagic)Prove to yourself that the changes are working (and then go back to step1)All this might mean shipping slower. It might mean saying no more often. It might mean completely rethinking parts of yourproduct.But the payoff? A product that users love without knowing why. Tools that feel like they were built just for them. Experiences so natural that users cant imagine any other solution.Because the best features arent features at alltheyre just the way things shouldwork.Speaking of seamless experiences (and the opposite) Are you tired of fighting with Jiras UI? I get it. Thats why were building Momentumits Jira on the backend, but with a UX that actually helps you do agile. No migration necessary. Curious? Join the waitlist.Features shouldnt feel like features was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.