I Never Exceed 100 Chars When Designing UIs

This essay is for builders, like me, who make things and need them to be used by as many people as possible. If you're a professional designer you already know this stuff. -- A good user interface is a good combination of two things: it's pleasant to the eye and it's easy to understand. It's not difficult to design a pleasant product, today. Good margins, a hierarchical font system, an accent colour, a few shades here and there. We're in the era of Design Systems: making beautiful UIs is now an engineering process. However, the boundaries set by a Design System have little to do with making a product understandable. This is not a big deal if the product fits a known archetype, like an e-commerce, a blog, or a social network. It doesn't really matter if you're a good or bad product designer: users will know the drill anyway. There's what I call a "product-pull". Now, what if the product is complex? Or implements something truly new, like temporary shared content à-la Snapchat, or swipe

This essay is for builders, like me, who make things and need them to be used by as many people as possible. If you're a professional designer you already know this stuff. -- A good user interface is a good combination of two things: it's pleasant to the eye and it's easy to understand. It's not difficult to design a pleasant product, today. Good margins, a hierarchical font system, an accent colour, a few shades here and there. We're in the era of Design Systems: making beautiful UIs is now an engineering process. However, the boundaries set by a Design System have little to do with making a