As a self-confessed techie, Apple’s annual WWDC has a permanent slot on my calendar. More out of curiosity than anything else, I like to see where Apple bets on positioning its products, design principles, and broader ecosystem strategy.
At this year’s WWDC 2025, Apple introduced its new Liquid Glass design system: a visual language built on transparency, depth, light interplay, and soft motion. It’s a clear step into a more emotionally expressive interface design, already making its way across iOS, VisionOS, and Apple’s platforms.
The response? Mixed.
Some have called it polished and refined representing the next evolution in modern interface design. Others have drawn comparisons to Windows Vista’s infamous semi-transparent windows, questioning whether we’re simply revisiting old ideas with better rendering engines.
But as I watched it unfold, it triggered a different set of questions:
What exactly are we designing for now? And is design thinking equipped to handle it?
In many ways, digital products today are objectively very good. Most major usability challenges have been solved. Authenication and sign in, payment flows and collaboration capabilities - these workflows largely work. And with AI rapidly driving feature parity across categories, competition is shifting. It’s no longer just about who has more features. Increasingly, it’s about something harder to quantify:
How does it feel to use?
We’ve reached a point where functional superiority is less decisive. What may increasingly set products apart is their emotional resonance - the sense of confidence, comfort, or even enjoyment a customer experiences while engaging with the product.
When you look at Liquid Glass, it’s not introducing new functional capabilities. The same tasks are still being completed. But there’s something else happening: a deliberate effort to influence mood and emotion within the interaction itself.
The softness, the sense of physical space created by depth and translucency, the way motion gently guides attention rather than distracting these aren’t just aesthetic choices, they’re subtle signals influencing how we feel as we navigate digital spaces, often subconsciously.
Which raises a bigger question:
If emotional experience is becoming part of product differentiation, do our current design processes even address it?
Traditional design thinking has served us well in framing functional problems: identifying pain points, clarifying user needs, improving flows. But as emotional design becomes more central, I wonder if we’re bumping into its limitations.
Design thinking doesn’t typically account for questions like:
These aren’t typical outputs of journey maps or empathy interviews. They require us to explore new kinds of user insights that go beyond functionality and into emotional context.
AI might be accelerating this shift even more.
As AI increasingly handles functional complexity - summarising, generating, predicting - we may be left with fewer opportunities to differentiate on what a product does. Instead, our competitive advantage may come from how it makes users feel while AI operates in the background.
In some ways, this could push design thinking to evolve from simply solving problems to orchestrating emotional states throughout the user journey. That’s not a radical break from its roots but it might require new tools, new types of research, and new ways to prototype experiences.
I don’t have clear answers, but I find myself returning to a few open questions:
Whether it’s Liquid Glass or something else entirely, the direction feels clear: as functionality becomes a commodity, the experience layer is where products will differentiate.
And as builders, we may need to expand our own frameworks, not abandoning design thinking, but evolving it to account for emotional resonance, trust signals, and sensory presence.
The core question might no longer be “Does the user complete the task?”
But instead:
“How does it feel while they do it?”
If you’re building something ambitious, I’d love to be part of it. Reach out to chat about your next product or growth challenge.
