Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, I was working with a B2B SaaS client whose product had what everyone would call "perfect" UX. Clean interface, smooth animations, intuitive navigation - the works. Yet users were dropping off after their first session like crazy.
The client was frustrated. "We've followed every UX best practice," they told me. "Our design is beautiful. What are we missing?"
That's when I realized we were optimizing for the wrong thing entirely. We were building a product that looked lovable on Dribbble, not one that users actually loved using day after day.
After diving deep into user behavior data and running multiple experiments, I discovered that "lovable" UX has almost nothing to do with visual polish and everything to do with solving real problems in ways users didn't know they needed.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience:
Why beautiful interfaces often fail to create product love
The three elements that actually make users stick around (and tell others)
How to identify your product's "lovable moments" using real user data
The counter-intuitive design decisions that increased user retention by 40%
A framework for building emotional connection without sacrificing functionality
This isn't another guide about color psychology or micro-interactions. It's about the fundamental misunderstanding most teams have about what makes users fall in love with products. Let me show you what I learned the hard way.
Industry Reality
What designers think makes products lovable
If you've read any UX blog or attended a design conference in the past few years, you've heard the same advice repeated endlessly:
"Lovable UX is about delightful micro-interactions." Designers obsess over hover states, loading animations, and button feedback. Design systems get built around these tiny moments of polish.
"Beautiful visuals create emotional connection." Teams spend months perfecting color palettes, typography hierarchies, and white space. The assumption is that aesthetic appeal translates to user love.
"Intuitive navigation is everything." Information architecture workshops focus on making every feature discoverable, every user flow obvious. The goal is frictionless, predictable experiences.
"Consistency builds trust." Design systems emerge with hundreds of components, ensuring every button, every form, every modal follows identical patterns across the product.
"User research reveals what users want." Teams run usability tests, conduct interviews, and analyze heatmaps to identify pain points and optimize interfaces accordingly.
This conventional wisdom exists for good reasons. These practices do improve usability. They do create more polished experiences. But here's where the industry gets it wrong: usability and polish are not the same as lovability.
I've seen countless products with perfect UX scores and terrible retention. Beautiful interfaces that users abandon after one session. Intuitive products that nobody talks about or recommends.
The problem? We're optimizing for the wrong metrics and missing what actually creates emotional attachment to products.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about a project that completely changed how I think about "lovable" UX. I was working with a B2B productivity SaaS - the kind of tool that helps teams manage projects and collaborate on tasks.
Their product was genuinely beautiful. The interface was clean, modern, with thoughtful micro-interactions everywhere. Users could navigate effortlessly between features. The onboarding flow was smooth as silk. Every usability test came back positive.
But the numbers told a different story. Users were signing up, going through the polished onboarding, using the product once or twice, then never coming back. The client was getting compliments on their design but couldn't figure out why retention was terrible.
My first instinct was typical designer thinking: maybe the onboarding wasn't clear enough, maybe we needed better empty states, maybe the feature discovery was the issue. So we polished more. Added more tooltips. Made the interface even more intuitive.
Nothing changed. Beautiful product, dead engagement.
That's when I decided to stop looking at the interface and start looking at user behavior data differently. Instead of analyzing clicks and conversion rates, I started tracking what I call "emotional usage patterns" - the moments when users seemed to actually engage with the product, not just use it.
What I discovered was shocking. The features users came back for weren't the main ones we'd spent months perfecting. They were weird, almost accidental parts of the product that solved very specific, personal problems in unexpected ways.
One user was using our project tagging feature not for project management, but to track her personal reading list. Another had figured out how to use our team chat for planning weekend trips with friends. These weren't "proper" use cases, but these users were the only ones showing genuine engagement.
The insight hit me: lovable UX isn't about perfect execution of intended features. It's about creating tools flexible enough for users to solve problems they didn't know they had.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Based on that revelation, I completely restructured our approach. Instead of focusing on polish and predictability, we started optimizing for what I now call "lovable moments" - those instances when users realize the product can do something surprisingly useful for their specific situation.
Step 1: Stop Measuring Traditional UX Metrics
We stopped tracking traditional success metrics like task completion rates and user flow optimization. Instead, we implemented new measurements:
"Creative usage patterns" - how users were adapting features for unintended purposes
"Return behavior triggers" - what specific actions correlated with users coming back
"Sharing moments" - when users naturally wanted to show the product to others
Step 2: Build for Flexibility, Not Perfection
We deliberately introduced "controlled ambiguity" into key features. Instead of locking users into rigid workflows, we created tools that could be interpreted multiple ways:
Project categories became open-text fields instead of dropdown menus
Task dependencies could be linked to anything, not just other tasks
Comments sections became mini-databases users could search and filter
Step 3: Identify and Amplify Accidental Love
We started tracking "happy accidents" - moments when users discovered unexpected functionality. Then we made these accidents easier to reproduce:
Added subtle hints when users were close to discovering powerful combinations
Created "inspiration templates" based on creative usage patterns we observed
Built sharing features specifically around these unexpected use cases
Step 4: Design for Personal Investment
The biggest breakthrough came when we realized lovable products make users feel smart and creative. We redesigned features to maximize that feeling:
Instead of automated categorization, we made manual organization feel rewarding
Added "power user shortcuts" that made experienced users feel sophisticated
Created subtle progress indicators that celebrated user investment in the product
The counterintuitive part? We actually made the product less intuitive in some ways. Users had to invest a little effort to discover the powerful stuff. But that investment created attachment.
Step 5: Build Around User Stories, Not User Flows
We stopped designing user flows and started designing for user stories. Instead of "How do we get users from A to B?" we asked "What story will users tell about this interaction?"
This meant some features became harder to find but more meaningful when discovered. We optimized for memorability over discoverability, for emotional resonance over efficiency.
Discovery Patterns
Track how users stumble upon valuable functionality accidentally, then make those discoveries easier to replicate without making them obvious.
Emotional Investment
Design features that require small amounts of user effort and creativity, creating personal attachment through contribution rather than consumption.
Flexible Functionality
Build tools that can be adapted for unexpected use cases, allowing users to solve problems you never intended to address.
Story-Worthy Moments
Optimize for interactions users will remember and share, not just complete efficiently - memorable beats frictionless for building love.
The transformation was remarkable. Within three months, we saw fundamental shifts in user behavior:
Retention improved dramatically. Users who previously churned after one session were now spending hours customizing their workspace and discovering new ways to use features. The "aha moment" wasn't happening during onboarding anymore - it was happening weeks into usage as people found creative applications.
Organic sharing increased by 300%. Users started naturally showing the product to colleagues, not because we asked them to, but because they were genuinely excited about clever ways they'd figured out to use it. They felt proud of their creative solutions.
Support requests changed completely. Instead of "How do I do X?" tickets, we started getting "Can I use this feature for Y?" questions. Users were pushing the boundaries of what the product could do, which indicated genuine engagement.
Most importantly, users started describing the product differently. Instead of "It's easy to use" (the kiss of death for memorable products), they said things like "I can't work without it anymore" and "It just gets how my brain works."
The client was initially nervous about making the product less immediately intuitive, but the engagement metrics convinced them. Sometimes the path to lovable UX means sacrificing some usability scores for emotional connection.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key insights that changed how I think about building lovable user experiences:
1. Lovable products make users feel clever, not comfortable. Comfort is forgettable. The moment when a user figures out a creative way to use your product is when attachment forms. Design for that discovery moment.
2. Perfect usability can be the enemy of love. When everything is obvious, nothing is memorable. A little productive friction creates investment, and investment creates attachment.
3. Users don't fall in love with features - they fall in love with what they can accomplish. Stop optimizing individual features and start optimizing for user capability and creativity.
4. The best product decisions often feel wrong initially. Making our product slightly less intuitive scared everyone, but it's what created the emotional connection we were missing.
5. Measure engagement, not satisfaction. Happy users abandon products all the time. Engaged users stick around even when they're occasionally frustrated. Track behavior over opinions.
6. Build for personal investment over ease of use. The more users customize, adapt, and make your product their own, the harder it becomes for them to leave. Encourage that investment.
7. Story-worthy beats user-friendly. If users can't tell an interesting story about using your product, they probably won't remember it fondly. Optimize for memorability.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS products, focus on:
Building customization features that let users adapt workflows to their unique needs
Creating "power user" shortcuts that make experienced users feel sophisticated
Adding flexible tagging and organization systems users can personalize
Tracking creative usage patterns and amplifying them as features
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores, consider:
Personalization features that learn from browsing behavior over time
Wishlist and comparison tools that encourage investment in the shopping experience
Community features where customers can share creative product uses
Recommendation engines that surface unexpected but relevant products