1. Consumer-Facing Products: Speed and Emotion
Social apps, marketplaces, mobile products. These move fast and live or die on how they make people feel.
What design looks like here:
Everything is about speed. Ship, learn, iterate, repeat. You're constantly in motion.
Polish matters. Users notice when something feels cheap or clunky. Delight isn't a nice-to-have, it's the product.
Brand and product design sit close together. The experience and the identity need to feel like the same thing.
Research leans qualitative. You want to understand behavior and emotion, not just conversion numbers.
Design systems need to flex. You're running A/B tests and rolling out features constantly. Rigid systems slow you down.
The mindset: make people feel something, then make them come back.
2. Enterprise SaaS Products: Complexity and Usability
Enterprise tools are a different animal. You're designing for complicated workflows, multiple user types, and environments where mistakes cost money or time.
What design looks like here:
You need specialists. Information architects, accessibility experts, researchers who understand how people actually work inside organizations.
The focus is on clarity. Reduce cognitive load. Make complex things feel manageable. Help people do their jobs without fighting the interface.
You're working with legal, compliance, and security teams more than you'd expect. Their input shapes what you can and can't do.
Design cycles are longer. There's more validation, more stakeholders, more process. That's not bureaucracy for the sake of it. The stakes are just higher.
The mindset: make powerful things feel simple. Help people trust the tool enough to rely on it.
3. Fintech, Healthcare, and Regulated Industries: Trust and Compliance
When regulations are part of the product, design stops being just about experience. It becomes about risk, safety, and earning trust.
What design looks like here:
Legal and compliance aren't afterthoughts. They're in the room from the start. Design, risk, and legal need to work as partners.
Usability testing goes deeper. You're not just looking for friction. You're hunting for places where users might make dangerous mistakes.
Design systems bake in accessibility and compliance requirements. These aren't add-ons. They're foundational.
Documentation isn't optional. You need to be audit-ready. Everything needs a paper trail.
The mindset: innovation still matters, but it has to live inside boundaries. Trust is the product.