Recently, I've been trying to level up my motion skills, so I did a little remix of this component from the Aave docs.

Personally, I love it. The movement is smooth, the orchestration is elegant, and it's a good example of introducing delight into what would otherwise be boring text documentation about middleware for processing database information.

But despite how much I already like it, I know for a fact that I could have easily spent hours more tweaking, adjusting, and micro-optimizing to get things just right. For most people, this visual pixel peeping and perfectionism is design.

Color, typography, animation, polish, visual craft. Hopefully from this site you can tell there's nothing I love more than a good, clean aesthetic. But, as Steve Jobs famously said:

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Workflow Based Design

So, if we're not just designing for looks, what are we designing? What does it mean to design how something works?

To me, it means focusing first on the workflow. When working on the flashy stuff, we ask questions like:

Does this color look right?

Is this animation smooth enough?

Does this design feel polished?

While these are all important questions, you'll notice that none of them are actually about the product itself. When we're thinking about how something works, these questions are at the completely wrong level. Instead, we should be asking:

Does this match the user's mental model?

What is the user trying to achieve here?

Does this step need to exist?

To be fixated on the first set of questions without having clear answers to the second is to miss the forest for the trees.

I haven't got a forest here for you, but I do have a beautiful little creek. It's a small stream of clean water that shines in the sunlight under an obviously blue sky, surrounded by a good mix of greenery and some vibrant plant life.

But, the real beauty of this scene isn't the creek itself, it's what surrounds it.

In product design, though you can't literally zoom out to look at the bigger picture like here, you can and should be trying to apply the same idea. It's clear here that the landscape as a whole is much more complex and beautiful than any single scene within it. And so, the point here is that the biggest gains are to be made on the landscape, not the scene.

This kind of non-visual and workflow-based design is what I imagine people mean when they talk about design thinking. We all recognize the importance of it, but at this point it's still a little abstract, so let me try to explain with some examples.

Dictionaries

For centuries, there were paper dictionaries. In its earliest days, the definitions weren't even organized alphabetically. And so, they were effectively just stacks of paper like this, ready for you to manually search through by flipping pages:

Over time, we continued to iterate and improve on the search process.

1. First, we organized them, making it quicker to accurately find the word you wanted in those stacks of paper.
2. Then, when computers came around, we digitized them, making it more accessible than a big, heavy book.
3. And when computers got fast enough, we landed on the search interaction we're familiar all with today.

Since then, search has continued to get better still with lower latency, spelling suggestions, autocomplete, voice, etc.

But, if we take a step back and think about the workflow, what if search isn't the right process at all?

Here's a video of the Force Touch feature on MacOS that circumvents the search process entirely. Instead of remembering the word you don't know, navigating to a new app or page, and typing it in, you simply just press on the word with a little extra pressure for a quick pop-up definition.

This is workflow based design. Instead of optimizing a single solution, they fundamentally changed the workflow.

Now, I doubt many of you have spent any time thinking about this dictionary stuff. But, you likely have encountered force touch somewhere across the rest of the Apple ecosystem (sorry Android users 😞).

Whether it's on the Mac to do a quick look up or on the iPhone to peek at a Messages conversation/notfication or in Instagram to preview a post on someone's profile, it's the kind of feature that doesn't just solve the problem at hand, but improves the entire landscape too.

AI and Beyond

For a timelier and more relevant example, we're starting to see the same thing happen with AI tools too.

When AI chatbots first started becoming popular, people started copying and pasting information from all over into the chat composer. And for most people, they still end up doing this many many times a day.

To help with the copying process, I've started to see more and more "Ask AI" buttons pop up. Instead of manually copying and pasting, this button now does it for you, putting in the relevant information automatically.

And while this is helpful, it's not an elegant solution to the problem. It's optimizing a process without thinking about the underlying workflow. The real solution is something that's not just AI friendly, but AI native.

Why copy paste when you can use Cursor or Claude Code? It's the reason why The Browser Company ditched Arc for Dia. It's the reason why Perplexity is now making their own browser Comet. It's the reason why Google has embedded Gemini overviews into their search results.

Conclusion

In the end, good design isn't just about adding polish, it's about removing friction. And often times, the most transformative products don't just make an existing step smoother, they question whether that step should exist at all. The pixel peeping side of design is well publicized, but again, design isn't just how it looks and feels. Design is also how it works.