sunset enjoyer • founding design eng @hey_aristotle • waterloo se
sf ོ
Joined December 2024
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sophie retweeted
the wider your display setup, the more you're training your brain to think like prey. real alphas use a MacBook neo
sophie retweeted
I've lost count of how many times I've reread Designing the Star User Interface (1982) from Xerox PARC. Every time, I'm struck by how sincere and thoughtful the writing is. Really want to share this with anyone thinking about the next generation of UIs.
A few things that particularly resonate with me (there's so much more in the article):
1. A consistent conceptual model matters. I believe the next generation of UIs should be generative and adaptive, but still follow a coherent, learnable set of 'physics'. Malleability shouldn't come at the cost of predictability.
2. Simplicity should be a first-order design principle (something LLMs are bad at). Fewer buttons, clicks, or keystrokes don't necessarily make an interface simpler. Nor does adding more. "simple things should be simple; complex things should be possible"
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. Many prototypes are meant to challenge assumptions - they should be designed to be thrown away, rather than promising to deliver the throwaway to users.
** What stays with me most is just how much nuanced, deliberate thinking went into the WIMP interfaces we've inherited, and are now eager to reinvent.
We need at least the same depth of thought and care. Still have a long way to go.
sophie retweeted
“designing much faster than the others” — this so daft and makes it clear they don’t understand design at all. “Designing fast” (or slow) is just not a thing. If you conflate “producing ui by piecing together stuff” and “design” then the former (which is a form of assembly-line practice) can surely be fast or slow.
What makes the practice of design challenging is not how to put a ui or poster together, it’s what the pieces are, what the message is, what is being communicated, how it all works together.
So many of today’s “design” AI tools focus almost exclusively on the production part, on putting stuff together. I’d love to see an AI design tool that forms a deep understanding of a problem over the course of days or months and works like a creative partner. Call me on my bullshit, thinks about the whole, isn’t concerned really about the final arrangement of elements as much as it would understand the story and the message.
Revolut's designers are moving off Figma.
Storonsky spotted one team designing much faster than the others. What they did:
1. Gave an LLM Revolut's design system at the code level
2. Prompted it to build new flows on top of that system
3. Got a live interface they can click through on a laptop or phone, instead of static frames
Result: 3-4x faster. Now he's pushing it to every designer at Revolut.
His job, as he describes it: find what works in one team and spread it across the company.
Full breakdown here:
productmarketfit.tech/p/revo…
the insidious thing about claudish becoming less obvious is that the output is still hard to parse but the garbage is much harder to filter out
you might love plaintext but plaintext is not a Place. all you can do is create a note among notes. you cannot create a cherished little nook that you always know will hold things just the way you like. this is the siren call of personal software...