Product Design
Notes on designing products [good and bad]
Product Design
An essay: Why founders fail, despite being good at coding and high IQ.
Being mathematically smart hurts startup founders.
Math doesn’t account for emotions, and this is why devs easily build useful products but fail to get to Product Market Fit in 99% cases.
Imagine you’re building a building to sell. As a good builder, you put great effort into... See more
notes on the importance of conviction and clarity of purpose to doing great work
Consider this: if “talk to customers” is the biggest secret to product success, then why aren’t more products successful? Why are so many founders unsuccessful? What explains PMs who’ve been talking to customers 5 times a week for years, without ever making products that win?
Good discussion underneath
What Alan Kay has been emphasizing, and which is now at the heart of Bret Victor’s design philosophy, is that the computer is a “dynamic medium.” The essence of a computer is not the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen. It’s computational and responsive capabilities that don’t exist in a static medium like paper. We should use this dynamic medium t... See more
Alan Chan • My Vision: A Forgotten History
Great quote: “The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures”.
I would add: it’s not just data structures, but information representations that expose those data structures in an intuitive way.
Intuitive how?
In that the graphical representation and interactive controls provide a transparent interface to the un... See more
Quote reply to the previous tweet that captures most of my thoughts well with lots of examples.
Excerpts:
(On design): When designing productivity software, conceptualize it as a medium first and foremost, and a tool secondarily.
(On chatbots as UI): Its browsing, code interpreter, and Dall-E tools are testament to this upside-down design philosophy: the tools go to work first, only thereafter you see some output.
With the exception of code interpreter, interactions with ChatGPT are largely stateless and transactional. Manipulations are indirect.
@john_lam @simonw Reminds me of this Joel Spolsky anecdote "the gridlines are the most important feature of Excel" that I've never forgotten https://t.co/ygM8xxm8tw... See more
hate to admit it, but this tracks. ui design starts becoming more important the moment you have a sufficiently capable data structure/model in place
users will ask for features when what they actually want is a specific view
this probably explains notion » coda
notion has very good views and is adding automations after the fact
coda has very good automations and is adding views after the fact
my hunch is most people are visual learners. they prefer to have information laid out the right way and only then can they reason about it.
automations are reasoning before seeing
this is also why cli tools, chatbots, and other text based ui paradigms are niche or quickly fall out of favor. too much reasoning without the requisite framing.
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