The Internet Is Gray — Here’s How We Make It Feel Alive
Why expressive product design beats forgettable UX.
WRITTEN BY Matt Katz, Exec. Strategy Director, & Steve Mahn, Group Exec Creative Director
You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it. Maybe you’ve even built it: the generic internet. The same seven templates doing laps around your screen. Helvetica, hover states, hero banners, calls-to-action. The web today is efficient. It’s also... gray.
A lot of this gets chalked up to “best practices,” but let’s be honest: we’ve optimized the soul out of digital experiences. Everything’s frictionless, but also forgettable. At some point, “good UX” started meaning “don’t make anyone feel anything.”
We think that’s a problem.
At Instrument, we design digital products. And what we’ve been craving lately isn’t more polish. It’s feeling. Energy. Ideas that don’t look like everything else on the homepage of a UX award site.
We want the work to mean something. To reflect the people who made it — and the people it’s for.
So, here are a few loosely held beliefs. A gentle manifesto. A dispatch from inside the system, nudging the industry toward weirder, better, more alive.
Outcomes over process (aka more doing)
There’s a whole economy built on process. Agencies love process. Process is tidy. Billable. Scalable. It’s also a great way to avoid making a real decision.
But the world is changing. AI’s making everything faster. Clients are (rightly) less patient. So we’ve started doing something radical: focusing on the actual outcome.
When we worked with ARTPOWER to help build tortoise — a financial platform for artists — our team had to drop the usual rituals. What mattered wasn’t what we “normally do.” What mattered was a question: how do we empower artists? That shaped every design decision, every feature, every choice. No sacred cows, no templated processes. Just a mission, and a product that had to work.
The tyranny of KPIs
Look — we love the Baymard Institute. But when you tell every e-comm site to do the exact same thing, what you get is... the exact same thing.
Metrics aren’t the enemy. But when they become the only thing, you end up designing for a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet doesn’t care about your brand, your story, or your users. It just wants to see a bigger number.
We prefer being data-inspired. Which is why, when we redesigned Oura’s website, we didn’t lead with everything. We teased. We invited curiosity. We treated it like storytelling — not shelf-stocking. Same with our ongoing work with Nike. It’s not about showing all the shoes. It’s about showing the right story.
Ironically, these “risky” decisions often perform better. But that’s not the point. The point is: you felt something.
Experiment often. Fail occasionally. Ship something new.
A lot of clients want innovation. Fewer are willing to pay for trial and error. That’s the catch: new things aren’t efficient. But they are essential.
Our creative technologists live here — in the experiment zone. They’re not just plugging in new APIs; they’re making weird little prototypes, throwing stuff at walls, seeing what sticks.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it really doesn’t. We’ve pitched ideas that looked amazing in our heads and flopped in front of a client. But even the flops teach us something. And sometimes, they spark the thing that works.
We’d rather show a prototype that doesn’t quite land than another Figma flow that looks like every other app. Because sameness is safe — and also deeply boring.
Good work should feel hard
You know that thing where you scroll for two hours and retain nothing? Yeah. That’s not what we want to make.
We want to build experiences that hold attention. That reward depth. That make you forget you had other tabs open.
But that kind of work is hard. It’s iteration, feedback, more iteration. It’s ideas that don’t make sense until they suddenly do. It’s awkward reviews and big rewrites. It’s vulnerability — from both the team and the client.
It’s also worth it.
Because when a digital product feels like something — when it carries meaning, or joy, or a little bit of weird — people remember it. They come back. They care.
And that’s what we’re here for.
