Tap Out of Polish, Tap Into Devotion

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I still remember the AOL disc. 100 free hours, a phone line tied to the house number, and the feeling that I was accessing an entire world from my childhood bedroom. This was freshman year of high school, right when the internet actually started showing up in every american home.

There was nothing to do online yet, and somehow it felt like I was accessing the entire world from my bedroom.

One of my clearest memories from that era has nothing to do with a website or an app. It was a game a group of us ran entirely through email. We each picked a wrestling character, mine was Ken Shamrock, and got added to a group email list. Every day a referee would assign matches, and your job was to write an email to the whole group describing your match, move by move. Your opponent would write back with a counter. Back and forth, until the ref stepped in and called a winner.

That's it. No app. No interface. No design system. Just a blank email body and your imagination.

I used to scribble notes in my notebook during class, planning out the move I wanted to describe that day. I looked forward to it the way you look forward to something that actually matters to you.

Twenty years into a career in brand and product design, that memory still teaches me more than most case studies I read. Because there was no polish anywhere in that experience, and it was one of the most exhilarating things I did that year. What made it work wasn't the interface, it was the structure underneath it. A daily cadence that built anticipation. A referee who gave it real stakes. A group of classmates who saw every match play out in public. And a blank page that forced you to bring your own imagination into the room instead of just consuming something someone else finished for you.

Most products chase polish because polish is easy to point to and easy to sell internally. But polish doesn't create devotion. Investment does. The products that actually get under people's skin are the ones that ask something of you, not the ones that hand you a finished experience and expect you to just show up.

I think about that email list game more than I think about most modern apps I've used. To this day I chase that high in experiences I craft in all of the projects.

That to me still holds the pinnacle definition of user experience.