“Only a few people can explain why a given design makes them feel a certain way, or why they prefer one space over another[.]” Christian Grosen, Muuto Design Director

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of Luis Barragán’s aesthetic when I first visited Casa Gilardi in Mexico City. The renowned Mexican architect’s austere-minimalist-nearly-brutalist style just wasn’t my contemporary-Mediterranean cup of tea. That being said, I left the tour with a full page of notes, absolutely floored by how masterfully he controlled the space and, well, me.

Of course, every room was artfully designed to support its purpose, centered on an action (cook, sleep, host, work, etc.) — this part is obvious to any architect. But what struck me was how carefully he prepared us for the way each space was meant to be used.

The entryway created a clear separation from the busyness of the outside world — the silence was so profound my shoulders dropped the moment the door closed. Ceilings lowered in the color-flooded corridor before a big reveal of a grand hosting room, creating a moment of suspense before awe. In private spaces, I felt cocooned; in social spaces, I felt expansive, light, drawn in.

Even if I didn’t love his aesthetic, I was awed by how much he could make me feel in less than an hour — both in and between rooms.

This is Atmosphere at work.

It’s fun to see it in action in digital spaces, as well. I sat in on usability interviews last year with a talented designer on my team at Stripe. The moment the designs first flashed up on the screen, users visibly perked up — we even got a few excited ‘oohs’!

This was within the first few seconds, before they’d even read the text or explored the wireframe. Something clicked instantly.

The 🅐 in ARCH: How users feel in a space

Atmosphere is what you feel before you’ve even processed what you’re looking at. It’s the emotional and cognitive conditions that (if designed right) prime you for what the space asks of you — whether to meditate, to connect, to shop, or to scroll. Just as a warm, candle-lit living room might help you relax, every app, flow, and screen creates an atmosphere — whether intentionally or not.

Getting Atmosphere right is critical, because it shapes how everything that follows is interpreted.

A “buy” button, for example, can feel decisive or risky depending on how much confidence the atmosphere has built beforehand. Habits can be either reinforced or discouraged by the emotions users associate with returning. The key question to ask: what kind of atmosphere can best support the interaction ahead?

As the emotional architect of the space, you own these decisions. Your role is to understand the mindset users arrive with and shape the conditions that help them accomplish their goals. So how do you do this?

Shaping Atmosphere

In a home, you’d influence the atmosphere through the interaction of material, color, texture, lighting source (and warmth), compression, spatial flow, and more.

In digital spaces, you have an equally rich toolkit. While color is one of the most recognizable atmospheric signals, atmosphere isn’t limited to branding or visual identity.

Infinite scroll, for example, is an atmospheric decision: it removes natural stopping points, blurs a user’s sense of time, and keeps them in a state of passive receptivity. It can be a strategic choice to boost engagement for social media or news outlets, while products that want to signal calm or intentionality might instead slow the pace by limiting choices and creating deliberate endpoints.

Some of the design signals in the Atmosphere toolkit:
* Visual: color, typography, graphics, iconography
* Verbal: tone of voice, copy, microcopy
* Tactile/interactive: animation, haptics, transitions, swipe patterns
* Rhythm/pace: speed, information density, white space, stopping points (e.g., infinite vs. finite scroll)
* Auditory: sound, ambient feedback 

Let’s take Snapchat vs Tinder to see how Atmospheric decisions can drastically change the vibe.

Snapchat’s value proposition is self-expression and fun with friends; Tinder’s is romantic connections. Both are social platforms, but they prime users for very different kinds of connection.

Snapchat wants to lower the stakes for sharing. To do so, it places users in a playful and spontaneous mindset: ephemeral messages, bold colors, smooth animations, a silly mascot, quick capture. Everything communicates: this doesn’t have to be perfect.

By contrast, Tinder wants to lower the stakes for matching. Its Atmosphere is more flirty and charged: bold and sensual color palette, short and witty copy, swipe mechanisms, endless card stacks, and a celebratory match animation. It even defaults to dark mode — easier on the eyes for late-night swiping and mirrors an intimate late-night date at a bar. It communicates: swipe now, commit later.

Though they both enable connection, they design very different atmospheres to put users in the right mindset for the “room”, and as stated earlier, this impacts everything else that follows: how quickly users create, how much they self-censor, how rapidly they swipe, and how easily they move on.

To make this difference more palpable, let’s look at what Snapchat and Tinder would look like as living rooms. What differences do you notice? What purpose is each space suited for?

How Atmosphere changes within space and time

Like a home, a digital product might have many rooms, each with their own purpose. How does the Atmosphere change as a product grows in complexity?

Atmosphere can (and often should) adapt subtly across moments within the user journey to support the different tasks in each “room”. However, they should all ladder up to a consistent signature, or baseline feeling that defines the product as a whole and supports its value proposition.

The key is coherence. Well-designed homes feel cohesive even as rooms change in purpose. Products should, too.

Importantly, Atmosphere leaves an emotional memory that stays with users. What a product consistently makes people feel becomes part of the association with the brand — whether stressful, calming, energizing, etc. — and is an important part of whether they return.

Assess your products

Audit the apps you’re building, or one you use daily, through the lens of Atmosphere. Which elements of the toolkit are most pronounced, and which are you neglecting? What do they each signal?

Next up: a case study on a popular travel app that missed the mark on Atmosphere, and how it impacts how users perceive everything that follows.

ARCH in practice: Operationalizing Atmosphere with AI

If you’re exploring Atmosphere in your own product, here’s a prompt you can plug into AI to help you gut-check your design choices.

PROMPT

You are a product design strategist focused on emotional experience. Help me define the emotional/cognitive atmosphere and signature of this [product/user flow] so users are in the right mindset to take the desired action.

My product, [product name], is a [product type — e.g., mobile app, web platform] made for [target user — who they are, context, or pain points]. Our mission is to [insert mission statement].

The product helps users [desired goal/behavior], ideally as a [quick task, repeatable ritual, long-form session, etc.] [Optional: Adding what user journey you’re designing for.]

I want the interface and experience to emotionally support that behavior.

Output Format:

• Ideal emotional/cognitive state(s) to support intended action:

• Design mood keywords:

• Brand personality (1–2 sentences):

• Design decisions (visual, verbal, tactile/interaction, rhythm/pace, auditory):

• Design watch-outs (separate thematic and tactical decisions):

• Example inspirations:

• Observable signals that the atmosphere is working (key behavioral metrics or success indicators):

OPTIONAL FOLLOW-UP

Evaluate the attached product screenshot. Help me assess whether the product design aligns with its ideal experiential atmosphere.

Recap of last issue

Most digital products are designed as tools, when in reality, we experience many of them more like places. Like any place we spend time in, these products shape us and our behaviors. Step into a grand cathedral, a cozy café, or a social app, and your body and mind are being quietly guided: how to feel, where to move, what to do next.

Architecture has always understood this influence; it’s time for product design to catch up.

This newsletter helps product builders design digital products the way architects design homes: as spaces people inhabit, not as isolated screens or flows. It explores why good UX decisions can still add up to bad experiences, why we should care, and how treating products as spaces changes how they’re designed and evaluated.

The missing step between strategy and execution

Redesigning Stripe’s mobile home

When I led Stripe’s mobile home screen redesign, our core challenge was figuring out how multiple strategic priorities could coexist on the same screen.

Our product strategy defined which personas, use cases, and behaviors to prioritize across a dozen products. Home didn’t need to surface everything, but rather to support a few critical moments as user intent shifted — often for the same user returning throughout the day: a quick check-in out of habit, a specific issue to resolve, or a payment to create on the go.

How might we design Home as a multi-purpose space that flexes across moments without losing coherence?

However, each moment reframed what the space was for and how the user should behave within it. Elevating alerts framed Home as a place to identify problems. Leading with metrics made it a place of reassurance and control. Promoting payment creation positioned it as a launchpad for immediate action.

None of these choices were wrong on their own. Each path was usable, the screen felt clean, and primary actions were clear; there was nothing for traditional UX checks to fail. But when those choices compounded, the space sent mixed signals: anxiety in calm moments, missed urgency when something went wrong, and action paths that competed for attention.

What we had on our hands wasn’t just an information-hierarchy problem; it was an architectural one.

Experiential architecture in product design

In physical space, an architect’s role is to own coherence. They don’t design walls, lighting, or circulation in isolation (nor are they experienced that way). They layer and negotiate these systems so they work as a whole once people inhabit the space.

Digital products require the same kind of negotiation. Though “architecture” in product development usually refers to technical systems, there’s another architecture at play: experiential architecture. It influences how a space feels, how people orient and move through it, what feels obvious or confusing, and which behaviors are reinforced over time.

Some forces are explicit, like how urgency is signaled, while others are subtle or nearly invisible: pacing that reduces anxiety, friction that affirms intentionality, or white space that encourages focus. Some are intentional; others emerge as interactions compound.

When these forces harmonize, users feel that coherence immediately — and notice just as quickly when it’s missing. As products grow and ownership fragments, clashes between these forces become inevitable as it becomes harder to see whether local optimizations still add up to a coherent whole.

In his book A Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander speaks of a “quality without a name”: a felt sense of coherence and rightness that can’t be reduced to style or function, but is immediately recognizable when present in a building.

Like an architect’s coordination drawing, ARCH helps shape coherence by giving language to these forces and makes their combined effects visible. The more fluent we become in the language of space, the more deliberately we can create products that are coherent, effective, and delightful.

Introducing 🅐🅡🅒🅗

The four layers of experiential architecture

ARCH is a framework for applying architectural thinking to product design, layering the forces that shape user experience so they resolve into a coherent space. It brings a different perspective to how we both design products — approaching them as spaces rather than tools — and assess them, from whether individual elements work to what the cumulative experience teaches.

ARCH breaks down experiential design into four dimensions:

🅐 Atmosphere: How should users feel in the space?
🅡 Route: How do users navigate through the space?
🅒 Cue: What actions should users take?
🅗 Habit: What behaviors should emerge over time?

Together, these questions make it easier to see what’s actually happening in the experience, including the effects certain design choices may create beyond what was intended. It gives teams a shared vocabulary to discuss coherence directly and to resolve failure modes across the design lifecycle.

ARCH sits between product strategy and execution: when decisions about who you’re building for, what business objectives to meet, or what a space is meant to do have to show up as real choices on a screen. Strategy decides what matters; ARCH makes sure those priorities can coexist without breaking the experience.

Why usability isn’t enough

Most UX tools and processes optimize for usability: can users complete tasks efficiently, and do they understand what to do next? But usability, like aesthetics alone, isn’t enough.

ARCH complements these tools, evaluating something different: the type of environment those interactions create.

A product can pass usability tests while quietly training anxiety, avoidance, or dependency. It can be beautiful and easy to use yet reinforce unintended habits. Experienced designers already sense these tensions; ARCH exists to make those tensions discussable and easier to coordinate.

It shifts the questions we ask from whether a feature is usable or a flow converts, to what friction communicates, where momentum should build or slow, what emotional residue remains after use, or what expectations are being set. Over time, how teams and organizations talk about design also shifts, from isolated improvements to shared responsibility for their downstream consequences.

When ARCH dimensions are coordinated, the business impact is tangible: stronger trust, emotional resonance, and healthier engagement that support conversion, retention, satisfaction, and more. When they aren’t, the costs show up just as clearly: low-trust environments or unclear routes that cause drop off, competing cues that reduce conversions, or a tone that discourages return.

Final note: The moral obligation of an architect

When products become environments, builders and designers inherit responsibility whether they want it or not.

Both architecture and digital design leverage the psychology of space to influence people. Environments shape attention, normalize behaviors, and shift emotional states. At the scale of modern software, digital products are one of the dominant forces shaping everyday life, with choices affect billions of people.

Most teams care deeply about ethical design and user impact, but as AI augments the design process, ethical judgment becomes easier to bypass.

The harder, more human work isn’t interfaces, but deciding what kind of space this is to spend time in and what it teaches simply by existing. Thinking about products this way raises the ethical bar, shifting the work from optimizing for the company to respecting attention and agency and building technology that supports wellbeing.

PS, emdashes are a wonderful and necessary part of grammar, and I’m reclaiming them from ChatGPT.

What’s coming up

The next four posts in Interspace will provide a high-level overview of each ARCH dimension, introducing our shared vocabulary before we dive into deeper concepts in experiential architecture.

• Atmosphere

• Route (publish date: 5/28)

• Cue

• Habit

ARCH in practice: Inputs from product strategy

ARCH helps translate product strategy into user experience. Before assessing Atmosphere, Route, Cue, and Habit, gather the inputs below to ground design judgment, always starting with: who are we building for? These inputs don’t dictate design decisions but rather shape how coherence should be evaluated once the layers are in place.

Strategy inputs
Using Stripe mobile home as an example

• Who is this space primarily serving? E.g., Early-stage startup founders

• What user state(s) are being inherited upon entry? (emotional, cognitive, situational) E.g., Always-on, stressed, fatigued from context-switching

• What is are primary and secondary jobs of this space? E.g., (1) give users a quick pulse on their business; (2) help users identify and resolve issues on-the-go

• What is the desired long-term outcome? E.g., Users feel confident they understand their business without constant monitoring, strengthening trust

• What goals or success signals are you optimizing for? E.g., Time to clarity, successful routing to action, trust and satisfaction

• What should this space should not become? E.g., A dense analytics dashboard, a stress amplifier, or a surface that rewards obsessive checking

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“Generative AI puts some kind of simulacrum of a good designer in the hands of everyone with an internet connection.” — Stripe Annual letter (2023)

I’ve been building tech products since I was 12, yet it wasn’t until I designed my first Airbnb six years ago that I realized what sets the best product builders apart: a deep understanding of how humans interact with space.

A few years ago, Google ran a design experiment in Milan where participants walked through three rooms while tracking their heart rate, breathing, motion, and more. Each room showcased a different aesthetic: from soft, earthy tones in one to vibrant colors and sharp angles in another. With the experiment, Google proved that designers can influence our bodies and minds through their design choices — as obvious as the color of the walls or as subtle as the rounded corners of a coffee table.

This field of neuroscience, called neuroaesthetics, studies how sensory stimuli shape our moods, health, decision-making, social behaviors, movement, and more[0]. If you’ve ever instinctively chosen a certain seat in a classroom, felt immediately at ease in a spa, or preferred to linger in some cafes while taking your coffee to go in others—that’s neuroaesthetics in action.

And it’s happening in your digital spaces, too.

“With neuroscience now, you can prove the things that designers and artists have always known – that aesthetics (which is not just making things look pretty, but enlivening all the sensory systems through space, colour, texture, music, and shape) affects our brain, our physiology, and our well-being.” - Google’s vice president of hardware design, Ivy Ross

I started this series to help founders, builders, and designers create better products by applying the principles of physical space design to digital products. As AI makes good design more accessible, the best product builders will hone their mastery of space with strong intuition, moral reasoning, and a deep understanding of the human experience — alongside a clear vision of the world they want to create.

With that comes both an opportunity and a responsibility: how might we amplify the impact of our products by understanding how users naturally interact with space, and how might we do so while also supporting their flourishing?

What our digital spaces tell us

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.” ― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Our minds perceive digital space similarly to the way they perceive physical space[1]. We map and navigate an app just as we would a building or a city: using landmarks, visual cues, and yes — even muscle memory. We associate screens, like rooms, with a clear purpose (or two): to cook, I go to the kitchen; to modify my account, I enter ‘Settings’. We even perceive depth and lighting similarly, as our attention is drawn to what’s “nearest” or in the spotlight.

In fact, the best products don’t require you to think; you intuitively know where to tap, what action to take next, and how to navigate. This isn’t by accident. Regardless of discipline, every design choice is a nudge, encoded with messages that push us to feel, move, act, and behave toward specific outcomes.

We, in turn, are wired to receive them.

In the physical world, we might find that our mood lightens as we walk into a sunny, brightly colored cafe filled with the smell of coffee; or that we tense up as we pass a dark, trash-riddled alley[2]. In the digital world, we might feel cognitive overload in a cluttered app, just as a cluttered room might make us feel overwhelmed; or excitement as a bright splash screen welcomes us in (like Snap’s!)

Take a look at these two rooms below. They have a lot in common, yet invite very different feelings, behaviors, and rituals. Can you pick out what they’re each saying and inviting you to do?

Now compare the two App Store listings below for Instagram and Calm. Both apps provide content, but each has a palpably different “vibe”. Which one invites you to slow down, and which one energizes you?

The designers behind the products above intentionally crafted each nudge using color, font, shapes, animations, and photos at the right place and time in the user journey. Each nudge supports the product’s mission and vision and ultimately helps the user accomplish their goals.

For example, Calm uses natural blues, soft gradients, and sounds and visuals of nature to evoke the app’s emotional signature of tranquility.

Equally important is what these designers chose not to build, as our brains can only process a limited amount of information at once. While Instagram uses infinite scroll to encourage engagement, Calm intentionally limits scrolling to instead nudge users to start a meditation as quickly as possible. Even the most subtle (or invisible) designs are LOUD, comprised of thousands of tiny nudges that guide us in those spaces.

The designer’s challenge is to simplify their interfaces and interactions and remove distractions in order to better guide a user’s focus. After all, the absence of intentional design doesn’t mean silence but rather a message out of our control.

We’ll dive deeper into nudges in a future post, but I’ll tease a bit of it here: nudges fall into one of four buckets — Atmosphere (how a user should feel in a space), Route (how a user wayfinds), Cue (what actions a user should take), and Habit (what behaviors should emerge over time) or ARCH. These nudges apply equally to physical and digital spaces, and you can apply this lens in any app you’re in to try to decode what the product or space is subtly (or not so subtly) telling you to do.

As a fun exercise, try to reverse-engineer the atmosphere of the Calm app into a physical space. You’re an architect, and your client shared their goal of living a healthier and more mindful lifestyle but struggles with the motivation to meditate day-to-day. How might you design a physical space to achieve those goals?[3]

What builders should do with this knowledge

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” — Winston Churchill

I opened this post with a quote from Stripe’s annual letter in 2023 about the role of AI in design. I don’t believe AI will replace the best architects; humans are simply not rational enough to be understood by machines. AI can create “new”, but cannot recognize it as good, beautiful, or meaningful; AI can send a message, but it is not inherently motivated to do so on its own — and can’t understand what will move and surprise us. The same is true for all other types of builders, creators, and designers.

Instead, humans will seek out true mastery — and the stories these masters feel compelled to share.

As product builders and designers, it’s up to us to wield our influence with intention. For instance, AI doesn’t inherently understand why dark patterns[4] are wrong, even if it can be trained to detect them; what sets us apart is not just our ability to morally reason, but also our ability to deeply care about people.

Every product we design is a space that people will inhabit. Like architects, we must balance an understanding of and care for our clients’ needs and motivations with the messages we seek to put out into the world. We must imbue our rooms with purpose and give our users clarity and confidence as they move from room to room.

Simply put, we need to design apps the way we would design our homes.

About this series and why I care so much about it

Despite growing up around blueprints and fabric swatches, I never cared to enter the same career as my parents in real estate development. My interests took me down a different path: I taught myself to code at age 12 and have been building products ever since!

But when I helped my grandmother redesign and rent out her home on Airbnb just six years ago, I realized that the two disciplines had more to learn from one another than not. Later that year, when I launched my startup, the realization solidified: you can’t build a standout product until you begin to see digital products as extensions of physical space.

In this series, I’ll be writing on the intersection of architecture, interior design, and product design—covering everything from the foundations of interior design, Marie Kondo-ing a digital space, “broken balconies”, adaptive design, and more, with case studies from my favorite designers across disciplines as well as products I’ve built across my career — including most recently at Stripe.

In the meantime, here’s a final exercise to leave you with:

Take 10 seconds to look at the space around you. What is it telling you? How do the colors make you feel? Why did you sit where you decided to sit? What does the arrangement of furniture encourage you to do? Where do you spend the most time in this space, and why?

Footnotes

[0] Neuroaesthetics impacts our emotional responses, cognitive processing, physical and mental health (and quality of life), and more. It also combines with behavioral psychology, interaction design, cognitive science, and more to make up the psychology of space or environmental psychology. Related schools of thought: feng shui, works on the psychology of architecture and urban design, and studies on incorporating nature into our spaces to improve creativity and moods.

[1] Our language reflects this too, as we “visit” or “go to” websites and “return home”. See research on cognitive mapping in interface design (incl. information architecture) as well as navigation in virtual reality and gaming. Mixed reality blurs those lines further!

[2] It’s important to note that even in the Google study, the “ideal” environment wasn’t the same for everyone. While we can’t generalize for all, people are more alike than different, and there are many familiar patterns we should lean on. This emphasizes why it’s so important to know who exactly you’re designing for.

[3] Fun fact, the second living room photo above was generated with “Instagram-inspired” living room as the prompt; do you see the similarities between the living room and the app store screenshots?

[4] Of course, humans are responsible for dark patterns, too. I find the companies most likely to use them aren’t users-first and prioritize short-term financial gain at the expense of both the user and the business’s long-term goals (which ought to converge). Here are some common dark patterns to avoid.