Thinking About Products

And in almost any given field, you can go in there and find a particular form of representation which transformed or ignited the field.

The periodic table, for example, Mendeleev's periodic table was basically the beginning of a theory of chemistry. That's where it all started. [more]

Bohr's model of the atom, which of course was originally inspired... See more

Leibniz's notation for the calculus. Leibniz was the UI designer of the 17th century. He was obsessed with notation, always trying out different notations, always talking with his friends about notation. Because he realized that a lot of the power in an idea lies in the form in which it's expressed, because that's what allows people to think it.

Place-value Arabic numerals were the first user interface for numbers that allowed calculation to be done on paper

New representations of thought — written language, numerals, mathematical notation, data graphics — have been responsible for some of the most significant leaps in the progress of civilization, by expanding humanity’s collectively-thinkable territory

In the mobile era, we claim to want chronological feeds with controls and knobs, but metrics and studies repeatedly show that once algorithmic feeds just worked, we universally prefer them to any manual controls.

And in the AI era, today we look for citations and reasoning traces because models mostly work but still need oversight. As reliability... See more

For years, pressing Save every few minutes felt like a small act of control. When autosave appeared, it took a bit of time for me to trust it but once it proved reliable, my reflex to manually keep hitting the save button simply went away.

Every WTH moment undoes the trust built up by several wows. And its impact depended on context. If a less relevant news article bout Taylor Swift ranked above a better one, it was a mild annoyance to all but the most die hard swifties. But if the search engine navigated you to a Home Depot that had closed years ago, it was a bigger WTH moment!