Building Digital Products People Want to Live In

Why good UX decisions can still add up to bad experiences and how “livable” products can help us build more successful businesses

Architects use layered diagrams to integrate various systems and surface clashes before construction. ARCH brings this methodology to product development. Image by bankheadpartners with permission.

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 digital products to catch up. As entrepreneurs and product builders, we need to start designing digital products the way architects design homes: as spaces people inhabit, not as isolated screens or flows.

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.

Three lo-fi variants of a financial product’s home experience, each training a different relationship to the product. Illustrative mockups, not real product screens. Image by author.

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.

Some of the visible and invisible forces shaping Home, along with unintended secondary effects (e.g., absence that trains emotional vigilance). Image by author.

When these forces work together, 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.

The more fluent we become in the language of space, the more deliberately we can create products that are coherent, effective, and delightful.

How we build more livable products

The four layers of experiential architecture

🅐🅡🅒🅗 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.

There are four dimensions to weigh:

🅐 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 abstracts experiential architecture into four dimensions: Atmosphere sets the emotional conditions, Route structures movement, Cue applies pressure to act, and Habit creates long-term behavioral change. Coherence depends on how they resolve together. Image by author.

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, these choices affect billions of people.

Most teams care deeply about ethical design and user impact, but as AI augments the design process and makes it easier than ever to start a company, ethical judgment becomes easier to bypass.

The harder, more human work that we need to nail as we build 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 should shift our priorities 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!