Despite hundreds of features, the navigation bar at the bottom of the WeChat screen is four icons: Chat, Contacts, Discover, Me. Zhang: “I told the team to establish a rule that WeChat shall always have a four-icon bar, and never add anything to it.”
If Apple was a democracy (aka customers don’t know what they want. or greatness requires a certain degree of dictatorship)
While AI can generate endless “perfect” outputs, the crucial design decisions are innately human: which questions to ask, guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and aligning execution against context and strategy. AI might generate hundreds of landing page variants, but it takes design sensibility to know which will genuinely... See more
love this distinction between levels of design. truly higher level designs are designing solutions instead of features, outcomes instead of products. there's no function more important than this.