I used to have a colleague who said that the right reaction from a user to great design is smugness.

Not satisfaction. Not delight. Smugness. As in, “of course it works that way. This is how I would have made it too.”

She used the word deliberately, because it’s evocative in a way that “satisfaction” or “delight” aren’t. There’s something a little uncomfortable about it, which is exactly the point. Smugness implies that the user is taking partial credit for something they didn’t do, and the really interesting thing about great design is that this is kind of…correct? When something fits you so well that you feel like you might have willed it into existence, that’s not delusion. That’s the design doing its job.

Don Norman gets at this from a slightly different angle in The Design of Everyday Things: “Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.” He’s not wrong, and it’s a useful thing to tell a stakeholder who wants to make the interface more “exciting,” but I’ve always felt like “invisible” undersells it a little. Invisibility implies the design just…disappears, when in reality great design isn’t so much invisible as it is like slipping into your favorite pair of jeans, the ones that have conformed to your body over years of wear, without any of the suffering that usually requires. It’s like a memory. You don’t notice it because it already feels like part of you.

Jonathan Ive puts the designer’s experience of this more precisely: “So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think ‘of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?’ It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.” This is the part that gets lost when we talk about invisible design as though it were a natural state, something you arrive at by doing less. Inevitability is not the absence of design. It’s design at full intensity, working so hard and so well that it looks like it wasn’t working at all.

Which is why I find the smugness framing so useful in practice, because it reframes the goal in a way that’s actually actionable. “Design for invisibility” is a little like being told to “be natural,” it describes the desired outcome without telling you how to get there, and if you think about it too hard you start doing the opposite. But “design for smugness” gives you something to test against. Does the user feel like this was made for them? Do they feel like their judgment is being confirmed rather than overridden? Do they feel, just a little, like they could have designed this themselves?

That last question is the one I come back to most often, because I think it exposes a real limitation in how we tend to talk about the peak of the UX design experience. Stephen Anderson once said that “delight is the high-fructose corn syrup of user experience,” which is funny because it’s true, and because it says out loud something the UX industry has been carefully avoiding: that a lot of what gets called “delightful design” is empty calories dressed up as nutrition. Aaron Walter’s UX hierarchy of needs tops out at “pleasurable,” which is fine as far as it goes, but pleasure is exactly what Anderson is warning us about. It’s the thing we reach for when we want to feel like we’ve hit the peak without actually climbing it.

The smugness my colleague was describing isn’t pleasure. It’s closer to Maslow’s actual peak: self-actualization. The feeling that, in using this thing, you have bent reality to your will. That the world has arranged itself according to your preferences. That you are, for a moment, exactly the kind of person who would have designed it this way yourself.

Smug isn’t typically a word we use positively, which is part of what made it so arresting when she said it. But once I got past the initial confusion, it felt like someone had just handed me fruit…and a name for the color between red and yellow. I saw what they were talking about. I’d even felt it myself. I just didn’t know what to call it.

That’s how I use most of these quotes, honestly. Not because I couldn’t think the thought, but because someone else found the words first, and once you have the right words, you can finally do something with the idea. As Paul Rand said, “Don’t worry about being original. Worry about being good.” Someone already found the word for orange. Use it.