Some products are physical by nature. You're supposed to feel them before you buy them — the weight, the finish, the way they move. When the job is to create that desire digitally, before the product is available to experience in person, the experience design has to do something most digital work is never asked to do. It has to make something visceral feel real through a screen.
I've done that work. Using CG assets to place an unreleased product in the environments it was built for — not to demonstrate features, but to make someone feel what it would mean to own it. The challenge wasn't technical execution. It was emotional truth. And when there's no physical product to fall back on, the experience carries everything.
That's a specific kind of project. But the principle it exposes isn't.
The brands that get this right
Joby Aviation is building an electric air taxi. It isn't in service. Scout Motors is relaunching an American off-road icon as an electric vehicle. Production doesn't begin until 2027. Neither company has a physical product a customer can sit in or drive today.
And yet both have built genuine brand loyalty, real audience investment, and commercial momentum — entirely through the designed digital experience. The motion, the pacing, the scroll, the personality of those sites isn't decoration placed on top of a value proposition. It is the value proposition, delivered in full, before a single unit ships.
There was no choice for either brand but to treat experience design as the product itself. The website wasn't marketing collateral. It was the only thing a customer could actually experience. Both brands arrive at launch with audiences who are already invested, already converted, already waiting.
The category error
Pre-launch brands make this obvious. But the principle extends further. Any organization whose product can't be picked up, test-driven, or physically evaluated before purchase is already selling the experience before it's selling anything else. The digital presence isn't the wrapper. It is the product, or the closest thing to it most customers will ever encounter.
The category error is briefing experience design as a communication layer — commissioning it to explain the product rather than to deliver it. And the most reliable signal that an organization has made this error isn't the brief itself. It's the budget behind it.
I've watched this play out more than once. The ambition is real. The vision is strong. And then the scoping conversation happens, and the budget reflects what the organization thinks communications costs — not what experience design at that level of ambition actually requires. The experience gets built down to fit the number rather than built up to carry the vision. It ships. It describes. It does a fraction of the work it could have done.
“The conversation that doesn't work is the one about craft, about motion, about how the experience feels.”
What converts the room
The stakeholders who are hardest to move on this aren't the ones who don't care. They're the ones who haven't yet connected experience quality to a commercial outcome they're already accountable for.
The conversation that doesn't work is the one about craft, about motion, about how the experience feels. Executives aren't hiring for feel. What works is connecting the quality of the experience directly to a number they own — conversion, retention, pre-launch demand, brand equity that compounds before a product ships. When that connection is made clearly, the conversation changes. It stops being a design argument and becomes a business one. Those are the conversations that get the investment the work actually needs.
What this means for how organizations scope design
The brief is a bet. Every decision made in it — scope, budget, timeline, what the experience is being asked to do — is a decision about what kind of return is possible. Organizations that treat experience design as a finishing layer, brought in after the real decisions are made and tasked with communicating rather than delivering, are placing a smaller bet than they realize.
The ones treating it as the thing that does the real work — scoped early, invested in seriously, held to commercial outcomes rather than just creative ones — are building something that compounds. Every customer touchpoint does more work. The brand arrives ahead of the product.
Joby and Scout built their experiences knowing there was nothing else to carry the brand. Most organizations have a product to fall back on — and that safety net is exactly what makes it easy to underinvest in the experience. Until it isn't.
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