When technology ships at lightning speed and startups rush to outrun the ticking clock of VC funding, there’s one constant that quietly shapes success: the user experience. Not just the UI or usability, but the entire product experience, from the first impression to long-term engagement.
Gone are the days when a solid feature set was enough. Users now come to your product with expectations, assumptions, and emotional benchmarks. Today, experience design is becoming the true differentiator.
Key Takeaways
- The full product experience is what sets successful products apart. It’s about designing for trust and emotional connection.
- To stay relevant, AI should be a core part of your product’s logic and experience.
- Users arrive with preconceived expectations shaped by past experiences and emotional benchmarks. These perceptions influence how they judge your product.
What Users Expect from Your Brand?
Expectations shape everything we do. Each morning, we wake up with an idea of what the day will look like — what we expect from our experiences, from the connections we make, and from the people around us. We carry expectations about ourselves, and about what others expect from us, whether it’s family, friends, or colleagues.
Our lives are built on these expectations. They influence the decisions we make and guide how we navigate each day. Understanding the role of expectations can help us become more aware of how they shape our mindset and actions.
We approach every product with pre-set expectations, shaped by what we’ve seen, heard, or used before. These expectations are deeply rooted in us, and they shape how we perceive value. It’s about what we believe we will gain or experience by using something.
We want to emphasize this clearly: users come to your products with preconceived perceptions and expectations. These shape their entire experience before they even start using your product.
How the Market Thinks Now
There was a time, let’s call it the OpenAI era, when launching a startup meant having a team of six developers, securing VC funding, and committing to six months or more of intense work. Going to market took months, sometimes even years.
You were constantly iterating, running in circles, and moving slowly. Meanwhile, big tech was sluggish, and startups played a simple game: build something and try to sell it to the old guard, those established companies that seemed stuck, just spending their salaries without much innovation.
The world has shifted. Before, users expected you to have one aha moment per product, meaning they came with a clear problem, used your product, thought, “Okay, this solves my issue,” and were ready to pay. That “aha” moment, when users recognize the value of your product, was the bare minimum everyone focused on. We define this “aha” moment as value divided by cost, because if the price is too high, it simply doesn’t make sense.
Today, things are different. Take vibe coding tools, for example, V0, where people with no experience can start building products quickly. You can create a front-end prototype in no time, and tools like Cursor can act like having 10 developers on your team. Product creation has become much easier and faster, allowing for quicker iterations and a faster time to market.
What’s the trade-off? It’s now harder for users to trust your product. Easier access means more noise in the market. As a result, users are more skeptical, and you need more than just functionality to earn their confidence.
Product Experience Design Is the Future
What does the future look like? We call it product experience design. This design approach consists of three key layers: the AI technology, the consumer’s pain points, and by the default settings. Let us explain what that means.
1. AI as the Core
Your team must deeply understand and integrate AI, not as an afterthought but as a foundation. AI needs to be embedded into the core of your decision-making, your product logic, and your experience delivery.
2. Mapping All Pain Points
Previously, we zoomed in on solving one core pain point. But that’s no longer enough. Today’s product experience must anticipate all the pain points a user may face throughout their journey, not just the one that brings them through the door.
3. By the Default Settings
In the near future, personalization won’t be a nice-to-have. It will be default. With access to massive amounts of user data, your product will be expected to:
- Adjust itself to the user in real time
- Communicate through intelligent AI agents
- Share data across apps to provide a seamless experience
Updated Product Framework: Data + Needs + UI
The future of products is a data layer that will be pre-customized for each user. We call these elements the “Data + Needs + UI.” Building great products isn’t just about the tech stack, the user interface, UX, or branding alone. It’s about the intersection of these elements — creating the new, future experience users are looking for. It’s the full journey the user goes through, from the first click to the last interaction. Powered by AI, informed by data, and shaped around real human behaviour.
We believe when product experience design is treated as essential, products stop blending in and start standing out. That’s the difference between noise and value, between being used once and being remembered.
Final Thoughts: Product Experience Is What Sets You Apart
As AI enters every space we work and live in, users expect more. With the marketplace becoming increasingly crowded, being generic is no longer enough. You need to stand out and be truly exceptional. That’s exactly what product experience is all about.
If you’re interested in building products your customers truly want to use and trust, we’d love to collaborate. We’ve been working with AI since 2017, long before it became a trend. Our in-house expertise with GPT-based models and AI integrations is a major competitive advantage. We use AI to power dashboards, create personalized experiences, automate functionality, and generate insights. Every product we design reflects data-driven thinking.
Contact us or explore our latest case studies to see how we turn bold ideas into powerful, user-centered experiences.
This article is a summary of Kyrylo Lazariev’s speech at the AI INFRA Summit. Check out the full video here.
