What makes a product truly indispensable

How emotional design drives user retention

Have you ever wondered why some products keep us coming back while others —even if they’re useful— quietly disappear from our lives? The difference lies in an emotion that’s rarely mentioned in product design: the sense of achievement.

In a world saturated with apps and tools, there’s a truth we often overlook: people return to a product when it helps them feel better about themselves. Not faster. Not more efficient. Better. But what does “better” really mean? Among the emotions tied to product use, feeling better usually means feeling your own progress —that sense of having advanced, learned, created, or solved something that once felt difficult.

And here’s the key: our deepest motivation doesn’t come from finishing things, but from becoming someone who can do them better.

In the tech world, companies often compete on speed, features, or precision. But the real competition happens somewhere else: in how the user feels after using your product. On this, Apple has always been a step ahead —whether you like it or not— and it’s hard to deny.

If you work in technology, your challenge is not to build products that do more things, but products that make people feel they can do more things. That difference —small but fundamental— is what separates a useful product from an indispensable one.