Kyle’s 2025 Rules for User Interaction

Limitation will be my liberation. Over the past few years, we’ve gotten so comfortable with responsive design, standard animations, and color-by-number user interactions that we sometimes forget to challenge ourselves. It’s 2025 now—I’m throwing down the gauntlet. These are my personal, non-negotiable rules for user interaction design/dev this year. If you’re cool with cookie-cutter, you’re reading the wrong article. If you’re ready to push boundaries, welcome aboard. Toot toot!

Rule 1: If it moves, it must move in 3s.

Motion on the web is nothing new. But we’ve all become way too complacent with our tried-and-true 1,2 combo:

1. Animate up 50px,
2. Fade in from 0% to 100%,
3. Done in 0.5s with whatever default easing we forgot to change.

No more. We worked too hard to kill parallax to accept a boring fade-in animation as the new standard. (But also… maybe we bring parallax back, just a smidge?)

In 2025, if it moves, it has to move three properties. That third subtle property is the secret ingredient—like smoked paprika in my potato salad (shhh, tell no one). Think of your element’s x/y positions plus a rotation or skew. Maybe you mess with the opacity and add a teensy scale and subtle text shift. Or maybe the third property isn’t even on the element itself—it could be on a child element or the parent container. Heck, the whole site could shift; I DO NOT CARE. The point is that the third property adds the extra “oh!” factor—that intangible flourish that makes the user pause and think, “Huh, that was cool. Tom, come look at this.” It doesn’t need to be a cartoonish bounce or a roller-coaster ride—just a gentle, nuanced shift that proves we’re paying attention to detail.

Rule 2: Constant motion for hover and focus states.

Traditional web hover states are becoming sad. A faint underline or a barely noticeable color shift doesn’t cut it in 2025. Meanwhile, the gaming industry has been nailing this for years: background gradients that breathe, icons that wiggle with updates, and buttons that pulse to grab your attention. These tiny flourishes let you know the UI is alive and guide your focus, whether on the mouse, keyboard, or controller.

With spatial computing and XR devices (goodbye, mouse pointer), our hover and focus states need constant, subtle animation—the cure for “meh” interactions. If my mouse, eye-tracker, or duct-taped joy-con is pointed at a button, I want it moving. Breathe, oscillate, glow, text that does the wave—I’m down for it all. The point is: you know what’s in focus–and you like it.

The moment a user puts focus on something, the interface should acknowledge them, actively confirming: “Hey, you’re here—welcome. What’s your name… Tom?”

Rule 3: If I’ve seen it before, I’m not doing it again.

We all love browsing Dribbble, Behance, deviantart, and curated design boards. They’re fun and inspiring, and they are the first place we go for new ideas or UI patterns. But in 2025, I’m placing a ban on clones. If a stakeholder sends me a link saying, “I want this,” my immediate response is: “Nope—get out of here, Tom.”

Why? Because we already have enough carbon copies of that same tired layout floating around the internet. Let’s treat existing designs as seeds for new ideas, not ready-made “mold-n-pour” solutions. Iterate, evolve, experiment. We’re here to push beyond the seen, not to remix ad infinitum.

Rule 4: If AI can do it, it’s not good enough.

Look, I love AI. It’s made its mark on my daily workflow—spitting out code snippets, replying to coworkers with a less passive-aggressive attitude, and maybe even ghostwriting parts of this blog post. But here’s the thing: if an AI can churn out your entire design with a single prompt, there’s nothing human about it. And in 2025, I’m championing the human factor in design.

AI is brilliant at rehashing good practices, referencing established patterns, and automating the mundane. But that’s also its downfall: AI is built on the past. It can’t produce a new, disruptive concept that has no precedent. That’s our territory. If we genuinely want to break new ground, we still need that messy, intuitive, all-too-human spark of creativity.

Rule 5: Bring back slicing and tables!!!

Wait, no. Don’t do that. We left them in the grave for a reason. But do bring back that sense of wonder when the web was still wide open, uncharted territory—when each new site felt like a wild experiment. hashtag_skeuomorphic_design

Final Thoughts

Those are my 2025 commandments for front-end user interactions. They might be simple, but limitations birth creativity. I want to see how far we can bend these constraints, what new dimension we can slip into a micro-animation, or how we can revolutionize the user’s “point and click” experience. Welcome to the Church of Kyle—free coffee on Wednesdays.

Is Tom still reading this? I owe that guy 20 bucks. You’re never getting that money back, Tom!!! Toot toot!