The Shift Design Created

October 22, 2025 · 755 words · 4 min read

What changed in my work once I learned to see the structure of experiences.

I was out for drinks a few days ago with a couple of designer friends, people who say things like "spatial hierarchy" unironically, and at some point the conversation turned to work. They were going back and forth about some layout problem and I found myself jumping in, holding my own, actually having opinions about type weight and visual flow and where attention falls on a screen. Someone asked me when I started caring about this stuff and I didn't have an answer. It happened in the background, and I've never really tried to figure it out, so here's my attempt.

For context, these days I spend a weird amount of time looking at screens I'm not supposed to spend too much time looking at. Restaurant websites, banking apps, checkout flows at 1am when I should be asleep. I can't turn it off! Every interface is a set of choices someone made, and sometimes those choices are subtly wrong, often in ways that nobody on the team probably noticed. I've learned to notice and I wish I didn't, sometimes, because it makes using crappy software more stressful than it used to be.

Five years ago I didn't see any of this. I'd look at interfaces the way I looked at code, as systems. Does the data flow correctly? Do the states resolve? Are the edge cases covered? If yes, then we're done, let's ship it. I am a PM who came up through engineering and I thought understanding the machine was understanding the product. I remember sitting in meetings where the one designer that worked at our company would raise flags about spacing or hierarchy or visual weight and I'd nod along thinking, sure, make it pretty, but the important thing is the logic underneath. I didn't say that out loud but I'm sure the guy could tell.

Then we got a new director of product who'd also been a head of design at his last place, and he had this habit that truly fascinated me. After product reviews he'd just sit with a screen open and look at it. He would not even click around, or work his way through it in any way, he'd do nothing other than look at it, then he'd say things like "this section is competing with that one" or "there's no clear entry point here" and at first I thought it was just fancy designer talk. Then at his initiative we started watching users navigate through the UI and I started seeing the exact things he described, like eyes bouncing around with no anchor or hesitation in the exact spots he'd flagged. He could read the damn interface the same way you'd read a badly structured document, and he was right, consistently, about where it just didn't work.

And I could see he was right but I couldn't do what he did. I'd stare at the same screen and just see a screen, so I started bothering him about it, probably more than he wanted. I'd pull him over before reviews and ask him to walk me through what he saw, and I was lucky that he was generous about it. He'd point at something and explain why it was pulling focus, or why two elements next to each other were creating a relationship we didn't intend. Over a few months it started clicking, like when a foreign language starts to make sense after you've been hearing it long enough. You just realize one day that you understood a sentence without translating it first. I started catching things on my own, stuff like a label that didn't sit right against the elements around it, or a group of actions that looked like a sequence when they weren't. Every layout communicates something whether you plan it or not, and if you get it wrong, the person using it will feel lost and often won't care enough, or won't be able to tell you why. They'll just say "it's confusing" and leave, and you'll look at the ticket and think, but it works. Trust the user, it doesn't!

The work is slower now and I like it more. I spend real time on things that would have seemed pointless to me before, where a confirmation message sits, what a button says, whether a flow gives people enough room to breathe. Tiny, boring decisions! But in time they always compound. Also, once you can see them you can't go back. The government portals are ruined for me forever though. Small price.