Why the next opportunity in software UX isn't another feature, but a better understanding of how people experience digital products.
Choong Whan Park USC's work in consumer psychology and sensory branding raises an interesting challenge for software companies: if memorable brands are built through meaningful experiences that engage the senses, how can a digital product create that same emotional connection when several senses are effectively unavailable?
Think about the difference between walking into your favorite coffee shop and opening its mobile application. The physical location offers an experience that extends beyond the menu. There is the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, the warmth of a cup in your hands, the surrounding conversations, and the visual character of the space.
The application, by comparison, exists primarily on a screen.
It can display photographs, communicate information, play sounds, and sometimes produce vibrations. But it cannot ordinarily deliver the smell of roasted coffee beans, the actual texture of a ceramic mug, or the taste of a freshly prepared cappuccino.
Does that mean digital brands are inherently disadvantaged when it comes to creating memorable experiences?
Not necessarily.
The more interesting question is how developers can use the senses available to them to communicate qualities that users would otherwise experience physically.
And the answer goes considerably beyond adding animations or choosing attractive colors.
1. Stop Thinking About Interfaces as Collections of Screens
Software teams typically organize their products around functionality. Developers build features, designers create interfaces, and product managers optimize workflows.
But users do not experience an application as a collection of tickets completed during a sprint. They experience it through a continuous sequence of interactions.
Consider a banking application. From an engineering perspective, transferring money involves authentication, validation, transaction processing, and confirmation. From the user's perspective, however, the experience also involves anticipation, uncertainty, and relief when the transfer succeeds.
A well-designed confirmation screen can communicate security and completion through clear language, stable visuals, and immediate feedback.
Compare that with an application that displays a spinning indicator, briefly flashes a success message, and then returns to an unchanged screen. The transaction might have completed perfectly, yet the experience leaves the user wondering what happened.
The difference is not necessarily better functionality. It is better communication through the interface.
This is where sensory design becomes relevant.
Visual feedback, timing, motion, sound, and tactile responses can work together to help users understand what has happened and how they should feel about the interaction.
The goal is not simply to make software look beautiful. It is to make interactions understandable, coherent, and satisfying.
2. Making Software Feel Physical Through Touch
Touch is one of the most interesting challenges in digital design because the sense itself is not completely absent.
Users physically touch smartphones, tablets, keyboards, mice, and controllers. What is often missing is the rich tactile information that accompanies interaction with physical objects.
A mechanical button provides resistance and movement. A physical switch clicks into position. A book has weight, texture, and pages that respond to the reader's fingers.
Most digital interfaces cannot reproduce these qualities directly.
However, developers can create a sense of physical responsiveness.
A button might visually depress when pressed. An item may follow the user's finger during a drag operation. A slider can provide clear feedback as it reaches a significant value.
The critical ingredient is an understandable relationship between an action and its response.
Haptic feedback: Making interactions tangible
On supported devices, haptic feedback adds a genuine tactile dimension to software.
Apple's Core Haptics framework supports custom tactile patterns, while Android provides haptic APIs and predefined feedback effects.
These capabilities can help communicate actions such as selecting an item, completing a gesture, or reaching a boundary.
For web developers, the Vibration API provides a more limited option on supported devices and browsers.
For example, a web application could use a brief vibration as an additional signal after successfully saving a preference:
function confirmSave(statusElement) {
statusElement.textContent = "Changes saved";
if ("vibrate" in navigator) {
navigator.vibrate(20);
}
}
The status element could be defined as:
The application would call confirmSave() after the save operation succeeds.
This approach keeps the visual and accessible status message as the primary confirmation. Vibration is an optional enhancement, not a requirement. Browser support is limited, and successful tactile output is not guaranteed.
There is also a design lesson here: more feedback is not necessarily better.
Vibrating after every interaction would quickly become distracting. Thoughtful haptics should reinforce meaningful moments rather than decorate routine actions.
The best tactile feedback helps the user understand what happened without demanding additional attention.
3. How Do You Design for Smell When Screens Cannot Produce It?
Smell presents an even more unusual problem.
Ordinary computers and smartphones have no built-in mechanism for delivering fragrances. Specialized scent-emitting hardware exists, but it is not a practical assumption for mainstream software products.
So should software companies simply ignore smell?
No. They should distinguish between physically delivering an aroma and communicating information or associations connected with it.
Imagine an online store selling specialty coffee.
A conventional product page might display a photograph, weight, price, and an Add to Cart button. The information is functional, but it offers little sense of what makes the coffee distinctive.
A more considered experience might include close-up photography of roasted beans, clear descriptions of the roast, tasting notes, and a brief story about how the coffee is prepared.
The software cannot produce the aroma, but it can help customers imagine the product and make a more informed choice.
This approach is especially relevant for food, fragrance, travel, and lifestyle applications.
Consider a travel-booking interface showing a cabin in a mountain forest. Photography, thoughtful descriptions, and a short optional video might communicate the character of the setting more effectively than a generic list of amenities.
A cooking application can use close-up imagery and clear descriptions of ingredients to communicate freshness, texture, and preparation methods.
An online fragrance store can describe top, middle, and base notes while explaining familiar scent associations.
These techniques do not recreate smells. They provide contextual information and familiar references that may help users form expectations.
And that distinction matters.
A product interface should help customers understand what they are buying, not manufacture sensory promises that the product cannot fulfill.
The most useful question for developers is therefore not "How can we simulate smell?" but:
"What information normally communicated through smell could we help users understand through other channels?"
4. Sound Can Add Meaning, but Silence Is Also a Design Choice
Sound is technically easier to incorporate than smell or physical texture.
An application can play notification tones, instructional audio, environmental recordings, or subtle responses to user interactions.
But availability does not make sound automatically beneficial.
Think about a meditation application. Gentle audio might help users establish a relaxing routine. A navigation application may use spoken directions to reduce the need for constant screen attention. A game can use spatial audio to communicate the location of important events.
In each case, sound serves an identifiable purpose.
Now imagine a project-management application that plays an elaborate sound whenever someone completes a task, changes a deadline, or opens a menu.
What initially seems entertaining may become exhausting during an eight-hour working day.
Sound design should account for context, repetition, user preferences, and the practical environment in which an application is used.
For web products, browser autoplay restrictions also make user-initiated playback an important consideration.
The broader lesson is that sensory design should be guided by usefulness rather than novelty.
A silent interface can be exceptionally well designed. For productivity software, clarity and calm may be more valuable than an elaborate audiovisual identity.
5. Visual Design Can Suggest Physical Qualities Without Imitating Them
Sight carries much of the sensory responsibility in digital products.
Developers and designers use typography, contrast, color, spacing, imagery, and motion to communicate information and brand identity.
But visual design can also suggest qualities that users associate with physical experiences.
Consider an online furniture store. Detailed photography can communicate the grain of wood, the softness of upholstery, and the proportions of a chair within a real room.
A well-designed interface might allow users to zoom into materials, examine dimensions, and compare finishes. These features help compensate for the inability to handle the furniture before purchase.
Similarly, a fashion retailer can use close-up fabric photography, fit information, and videos showing how garments move.
These are not merely decorative additions. They help reduce uncertainty about characteristics that customers would normally evaluate through touch.
For software products themselves, visual responses can also create a sense of interaction.
A draggable card that moves predictably, a progress indicator that reflects actual system activity, or a button that clearly changes state can make an interface feel more responsive.
However, motion must remain purposeful. Designers should honor system accessibility preferences, including the CSS prefers-reduced-motion setting.
The objective is not to imitate the physical world at every opportunity. It is to borrow useful principles from physical interaction when they make digital experiences easier to understand.
6. The Secret Is Sensory Consistency, Not Sensory Overload
An application can have beautiful visuals, engaging sounds, and sophisticated tactile feedback while still feeling strangely disconnected.
Why?
Because individual sensory elements need to support a coherent product experience.
A financial application emphasizing trust and reliability should communicate those qualities through its interface, language, timing, and feedback.
A creative design tool might appropriately use more expressive motion and interaction patterns.
An educational application for young children may benefit from playful audiovisual cues that would be completely unsuitable for enterprise accounting software.
This brings us back to the principles of consistency and complementarity discussed in Professor Choong Whan Park's work on sensory branding.
Consistency means that repeated interactions reinforce recognizable product qualities. Complementarity means that different design elements support rather than contradict one another.
For developers, this suggests treating sensory feedback as part of the design system.
A successful action should produce a recognizable confirmation pattern. Errors should be communicated consistently. Optional sounds and haptics should reinforce the same events rather than convey conflicting meanings.
And importantly, no essential information should depend on a single sensory channel.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines emphasize that instructions should not rely exclusively on characteristics such as shape, color, or sound.
Multisensory design is most useful when it gives people additional ways to understand an experience, not when it creates new barriers.
7. A Practical Sensory Design Audit for Software Teams
Before introducing new effects, software companies should examine where sensory design could genuinely improve the user experience.
Start by identifying the interactions that matter most. These may include onboarding, completing a purchase, saving important work, navigating complex information, or recovering from errors.
For each interaction, ask what the user needs to understand and what uncertainty the interface should remove.
Then assess the available channels:
Visual: Does the interface clearly communicate state, hierarchy, and completion?
Sound: Could optional audio convey something useful without becoming distracting?
Touch: Would supported haptic feedback reinforce an important action?
Smell and taste: Are there physical product qualities that photography, accurate descriptions, video, or contextual information could help explain?
Accessibility: Can users understand and complete the task when sound, motion, haptics, or other sensory cues are unavailable?
Next, test whether the proposed changes improve outcomes that matter: task completion, errors, confidence, comprehension, and user satisfaction.
Avoid treating engagement metrics alone as proof of success. An animation that attracts attention without helping users accomplish anything may increase interaction without improving the product.
Finally, consider whether the experience remains coherent across devices. A native mobile application may offer capabilities unavailable to its web counterpart, but users should still recognize the same product principles.
The Next Competitive Advantage Might Be How Software Feels
For decades, software companies have competed through functionality, speed, reliability, and increasingly sophisticated interfaces.
Those qualities remain essential. But as digital products become more capable, another question deserves attention: what is it actually like to use them?
Does the application create confidence? Does it respond predictably? Does it communicate important information without unnecessary effort? Can users understand products they cannot physically inspect?
These questions connect engineering decisions with a deeper understanding of human experience.
Software cannot ordinarily reproduce the aroma of a coffee shop or the texture of a carefully crafted physical object. And in most cases, it shouldn't try to pretend otherwise.
What it can do is communicate relevant information, create recognizable interaction patterns, reduce uncertainty, and make everyday tasks feel intuitive.
The opportunity for software teams is not to turn every application into a sensory spectacle.
It is to design digital experiences that are so coherent, responsive, and useful that people remember how good they were to use.
And perhaps that is the most important lesson sensory branding offers the software industry.
For more on the relationship between sensory experiences, brand memory, and emotional attachment, read Why Can't Customers Forget Certain Brands? by Choong Whan Park USC.
Discussion: What's one application that feels exceptionally satisfying to use, even without elaborate animations or haptic feedback? What does it get right?
Top comments (0)