product design
sari and
product design
I recently met up with YouTube’s first UX designer, @cFormm.
He told me the story of his first day when Chad Hurley just told him:
"Make YouTube better."
Many designers might polish the visuals, propose a new feature, or do a full redesign.
But Form took a scrappier approach.
—
He found 10 YouTube users, rode his motorcycle to their houses an... See more
Nothing matters if you're not proud of it.
The Head of Design At Airbnb printed out 3 questions for designers at Airbnb to answer:
1) Does it work?
2) Does it scale?
3) Are you proud of it?
If the answer to #3 isn’t a resounding “yes” then they won’t ship (even if metrics suggest you should)
product development is not about "adding features"—but distilling a product to a simple marketable sentence. Adding features more often impairs growth.
Nikita Bier • Tweet
Some of the most rewarding features to add to products are ones that don’t increase surface area, but increase depth.
This is how you continue to make a product a whole lot better without it feeling like it got a whole lot bigger.
Basecamp’s new References feature is a great… Show more
Nice framing
Designing Friction
designingfriction.com
We like to see designing friction as a fundamental design principle when working with digital culture. Instead of following design ethics that strive to eliminate friction we suggest to not only allow, but embrace friction, facilitate it: design [products with] digital technology in a way that makes space for our humanness. Here friction is a core ingredient. Digital technology should create environments and situations in which we can truly connect with each other, as well as with the unknown, the uncontrolled, with all senses, all elements, all emotions. Create situations that are not calculated beforehand, predicted and measured; situations that result from and amount to the present moment.
the cost of risking a pixel, via Byrne Hobart
2024 Memo
Toolhouse's 2024 memo outlines their mission to develop a personal product generator that empowers users to create custom, personalized 3D objects through the integration of AI and agile production methods.
toolhouse.buildBeautiful memo bridging the physical and digital worlds in service of the future of product design, personalization, and people’s agency around their experiences. By Toolhouse (Joe, OEM care).
Highlights:
An engine to help you build first person products — products whose utility is specific to you, and shaped with an imprint of your expression.
The finest products are custom, and the ability to produce custom products should be made as accessible as possible. Custom and accessible don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
As the material world grows to reflect the agility of software, products will become much more malleable.
As the technology matures, the scale of applications will grow to encompass larger systems of interchangeable parts. With the ability to generate variations for any product.
The goal throughout is the same: leverage machine intelligence to lower the ceiling of production so users can easily produce exceptionally personal products.
Principles:
Physical imagination: materialize ideas to transcend the digital/virtual realm with real world feedback.
Creative practicality: balance expression with real-world utility. Make imagination useful.
Play and accessibility: give users agency to shape their world by making the production process easily understandable and fun to use.
Dynamic personalization: a product is a living entity, capable of continuous improvements and adaptations in response to the user's evolving needs. Make the system capable to respond uniquely to individual preferences and requirements. If you build what you use, you learn to build better.
Also reminded me of Scott Belsky’s post on personalization.