I spent two weeks last winter rebuilding a checkout flow that nobody asked me to fix. The old one worked fine — 94% completion rate, perfectly functional. But every time I looked at it, I felt nothing. The buttons were rectangles. The inputs were rectangles. The confirmation screen was a rectangle with a checkmark inside another rectangle. Everything was correct and nothing was inviting. That project taught me something I keep coming back to: the way a thing feels under your fingertips changes whether you trust it, whether you enjoy it, whether you come back.
The Vocabulary of Touch
There is a reason children reach for clay before they reach for crayons. Clay responds. Press into it and it yields, then holds your mark. A button that looks like it might squish communicates something a flat rectangle never can: that there is a responsive system on the other side, one that acknowledges the weight of your attention.