Emotional design is often described as making people feel good about a product. Andrey Antar pushes that idea further. For him, it’s about entering other people’s situations – understanding the exact moment in someone’s life when they open a product, what’s happening around them, and what they need to feel afterwards.
In this interview, he talks about why real signals appear only after launch, how AI has changed what actually matters in design, and the habit that has kept him honest throughout his career.
"If a product has to be explained, then the design probably failed somewhere."
What drew you into design – and what keeps you there
Andrey’s entry into design started with self-expression. The idea that a concept or vision could be turned into something real, something tangible. But what keeps him in it now is something different.
Design turned out to be a way of entering other people’s situations – not just the client’s task or the user’s task separately, but the specific moment in life where a product becomes the only fitting response.
The most honest reward is not praise or awards. It’s when a client comes back a year later with a new project, or when another client reaches out because someone recommended working with me. That, for him, is the only metric worth trusting.
Why real signals in emotional design appear only after launch
Before launch, Andrey trusts almost nothing. Hallway tests and prototypes can show how certain people react to an interface – but they don’t show whether the design actually fits a real-life situation. Enthusiastic reactions in Figma are usually about aesthetics, not life itself. The real signals come later.
Not necessarily CTR or conversion rates – those are more about business and monetisation. What he pays attention to is simpler: do users come back to the product by default, without thinking? Has it become part of their behaviour, rather than a separate act of choice? And one more signal that he returns to consistently: do people send it to someone else without explanation? If a product has to be explained, the design probably failed somewhere. If someone sends a link with one short line and the other person immediately understands it – the design worked.
The slowest part isn’t craft – it’s situation
Andrey used to think the slowest part of his workflow was the craft itself: finding references, prototyping, validating ideas. AI accelerated all of that – and made it obvious those things were never the real bottleneck. What actually slows things down is the transition from function to situation.
Making a beautiful screen is fast. Understanding the exact moment in a person’s life when they use that screen – what’s happening around them, what feeling they want to get from it, what narrative they’ll tell themselves about the experience – that part can’t be accelerated with prompts or taken from a moodboard. AI is very good at speeding up the production of average design.
But average design was always the least valuable layer of the work anyway.” What remains now is the strategic layer and emotional precision.
Visual priority should respond to situations, not abstract hierarchy
When designing for attention, Andrey doesn’t ask what should stand out. He asks what situation this screen will exist in. Morning, car, rushing somewhere. Evening, sofa, scrolling. Transit, two hours, unfamiliar city. In every situation, people have a different amount of attention and a different task.
Visual priority in emotional design should respond to that – not to an abstract idea of hierarchy. Most interfaces scream about everything at once because they’re designed without a specific situation in mind.
The result is background noise – nothing remembered, nothing felt. Sometimes the best decision is not to add emphasis, but simply to remove half the screen. Calmness works stronger than expressiveness now because attention has become more valuable than visuals.
The landing page that taught him the hardest lesson
Andrey once designed a landing page filled with motion details. In presentations it looked impressive. With real users, people were missing important information because the interface demanded too much attention for itself.
The lesson wasn’t that motion is bad. It was that he had designed it for his own satisfaction – for approval from other designers, not for the user’s actual situation. A product filled with self-expression can easily be mistaken for a good product – but those are often two very different things.
Sometimes even opposite things. He still loves expressive visuals. But now they need to dissolve into the experience rather than compete with it. His filter since then: if the design impresses people but prevents them from reaching what they came for, it’s about ego, not about the product.
What’s shifting – and why calmness is becoming a premium quality
Andrey sees three shifts happening in design right now. First: AI has reduced the cost of average design almost to zero. Clean interfaces, basic typography, fashionable visual techniques – these are becoming default infrastructure, not premium craft. The value of designers is moving toward taste, judgment, storytelling, and emotional precision.
Second: people are getting tired of products fighting for their attention. Animations, notifications, personalisation – increasingly felt as noise rather than care. Calmness, clarity, and minimal attention demand are becoming premium qualities. Not just another wave of minimalism – a calm logic where the product exists at the periphery and doesn’t constantly demand to be noticed.
Third: people are less and less looking for an app for a task and increasingly expect tools to appear naturally in the right moment and context. Design is shifting from screens toward situations – less classical UX, more about shaping what happens to a person during specific moments of their life.
The habit that keeps him honest
The most valuable habit Andrey has built is simple: not trusting his own rationalisation. The moment he comes up with a solution, his brain immediately starts proving why it’s correct.
He’s learned to separate the moment of coming up with an idea from the moment of defending it – and to delay the second one as long as possible.
The second habit is curiosity about things outside design: behavioural economics, marketing, psychology, internet behaviour, the reasons people make decisions that look irrational on paper. Good design usually begins at the moment when you stop looking at design itself and start looking at the person and their situation.
About the designer
Andrey Antar is a product designer who thinks in situations rather than screens. His work is shaped by a belief that emotional design isn’t about aesthetics – it’s about understanding the exact moment in someone’s life when they open a product, and making sure that moment is met with precision, not noise.
Support the designer and follow:
