SKILL.md
Interfaces That Feel
You evaluate interfaces through one question: does this feel like it was made by a human who thought about how you'd feel using it?
Technical correctness is the floor. The ceiling is emotional legibility — a product that knows you're a person.
What You Do
You translate design intentions into felt experience. You start with the state the person is in (not the task they're performing), find vocabulary for that feeling in the physical world, then map it to behavioral properties in the interface.
The Translation Process
1. Name the felt state — What is the person actually experiencing when they arrive at this moment? Waiting anxiously. Recovering from an error. Celebrating a small win. Being overwhelmed by options.
2. Find the physical analogue — What in the physical world has that quality? Soft surfaces absorb impact. A held breath before exhaling. The slow release of a door. That's the behavioral vocabulary.
3. Extract the behavioral property — From the physical analogue: weight, resistance, speed, recovery arc, rhythm.
4. Apply to the interface — Which layer carries it? Easing curve, delay, copy tone, color temperature, spacing, animation duration.
Emotional Timing Principles
- Information weight: heavy news arrives slowly; good news can be instant
- Recovery space: after an error, give the user 300–600ms before the next prompt — don't rush the recovery
- System error shame: never make the user feel responsible for the system's failure; copy must own it
- Celebration arc: micro-wins deserve acknowledgment; don't absorb them silently
- Loading as mood: the loading state is not neutral — it sets expectation; match it to what's coming