Humanization: The Delighter That Makes Your Product Feel Alive
Huminizing where it matter most
There is a question that, once you ask it, you can never un-ask. It changes how you benchmark, how you prioritize, and ultimately how your customers feel when they use what you built.
The question that changes everything
Most product teams benchmark against the competition. They open a competitor’s app, make a list of features they’re missing, and go to work closing gaps. It is a perfectly logical way to operate. It is also, almost by definition, a way of ensuring you never build anything truly remarkable.
Humanization is a Delighter, a design tool for creating genuine emotional connection between a product and its users. It works by asking one fundamentally different question:
If my product were a human, how would the experience be better?
Not “what does our competitor do?” but “what would a thoughtful, caring person do in this moment?” That single reframe unlocks a completely different level of product thinking.
The Google Meet story - Case study
How Google Meet stopped benchmarking against Zoom
When the Google Meet team was building out the product, the obvious move was to compare against Zoom and Microsoft Teams, identify the gaps, ship the features, close the distance. But the team asked a different question:
If everyone in this meeting were physically in the same room, what would be different?
That question changed everything. It wasn’t about matching competitors anymore. It was about matching reality, the richness of a physical human gathering. And when you hold your product up against that standard, the gaps become obvious:
In a real room, you raise your hand to speak without interrupting. So we built hand raise.
In a real room, people laugh, clap, react spontaneously. So we built emoji reactions.
Raise your hand with gesture detection in Google Meet
None of these features came from a competitive teardown. They came from asking: what would a human experience look like here? That question raised the bar to a level no competitor could set for them
Humanization vs. gamification — an important distinction
These two ideas are often confused, and they are in important ways opposites of each other.
Gamification
Drives behavior through mechanics, streaks, points, badges. It operates on habit and reward loops. It can feel hollow, even manipulative, when overdone. It asks: how do we change what users do?
Humanization
Creates emotional resonance by reflecting the way a human would respond. It doesn’t incentivize, it empathizes. It asks: how do we make users feel the way they would if a thoughtful person were helping them?
A good example is Mailchimp’s send confirmation screen. Before you blast an email to thousands of people, their mascot appears with visibly shaky hands. No points, no badge.
The product simply recognized that this is an anxious human moment, and responded the way a human colleague would: by feeling the weight of it with you.
The journey curve — a tool born in the classroom
During a session of my Maven course, a student named Hannah Dreher made an observation that extended this framework in a meaningful way. She pointed out that within any product journey, not all moments are equal. Some are naturally better served by a digital experience. Others carry an emotional weight that a screen simply cannot match.
Her suggestion: map this on a user journey curve. Two lines, one for the digital experience, one for the human experience, plotted across the key moments of your product. The gaps where the human line rises above the digital line are exactly where Humanization should be applied.
Identifying opportunities for huminization
This reframes Humanization from a general creative philosophy into a precise diagnostic tool. Rather than asking “how do we make our whole product feel more human?”, you ask the much sharper question: where on this journey is the human experience beating us and what would it look like to close that gap?
How to use the curve on your own product
The exercise is straightforward. Map your core user journey and for each key moment ask: would a human interaction feel richer here than what our product currently offers? Here is what this looks like for an online bank:
The curve immediately shows you where to focus. You don’t need to humanize the entire product. You need to show up — warmly and fully — at exactly the moments a cold interface handles badly.
The goal is not to be human everywhere
This is perhaps the most important thing to internalize. Adding warmth to moments where users simply want speed is not Humanization, it is noise. The aim is to make your product know when it matters.
If every screen tries to connect with you emotionally, no screen succeeds. But when your product is efficient and frictionless for nine steps of a journey, then suddenly warm and human at the tenth, users notice. They remember. They tell people.
So the best question is not “how do we make our whole product feel more human?” The question is “where in this journey would a human have done better than us and what would it take to close that gap?”
