Domain 12 · 18 cases
Design & UX
Friction, restraint, defaults and trust, from the iPhone and Dieter Rams to Stripe, dark patterns and the curb-cut effect, and why design is strategy, not decoration.
- Cut the friction between intent and action
- Decide what to remove, not just what to add
- Tell when design is the strategy, not the decoration
The iPhone and Direct Manipulation
In January 2007, Steve Jobs held up a phone with no keyboard, no stylus, and almost no buttons, and told the audience it worked like magic. The industry…
Dieter Rams: Less, But Better
Dieter Rams spent decades at a German appliance company designing radios, shavers, and coffee makers that did one thing and looked exactly like what they…
Google's Homepage: Radical Simplicity
When Google launched in the late 1990s, the dominant sites, Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, were dense portals packed with news, weather, stock tickers,…
The Nest Thermostat
The thermostat had not been redesigned in decades. It was beige, plastic, and universally hated, and studies suggested most people never bothered to program…
Don Norman and The Design of Everyday Things
Every time you push a door that should be pulled, or spend thirty seconds fighting a hotel faucet, you are living inside a design failure. Don Norman, the…
Tesla's Touchscreen
When Tesla launched the Model S around 2012, the giant center touchscreen was one of the most talked-about features in the car. Climate, navigation, media,…
The TikTok Feed
TikTok became one of the fastest-growing apps in history without ever asking users to follow anyone, build a network, or make a single choice. The interface…
Stripe: Developer Experience as Design
Before Stripe, integrating payments into a web app meant a merchant account, a payment gateway, PCI compliance work, and weeks of grinding through…
Airbnb: Designing the Whole Experience
In 2009, Airbnb was dying. Revenue was flat, growth was slow, and the founders could not figure out why. Trained as designers, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and…
Duolingo and Habit Design
Duolingo's streak counter has driven people to log in from hospital beds, cut vacations short, and feel real grief over losing a 300-day run. When the…
Slack and the Power of Microcopy
Most enterprise software treats its users like IT tickets. When Slack launched publicly in 2013, its biggest differentiator was not features, HipChat already…
iOS 7 and the Design Pendulum
In 2013, Apple threw out seven years of accumulated visual language almost overnight. iOS 6 had been skeuomorphic: the Contacts app looked like a leather…
Amazon 1-Click
Amazon patented a button. The mechanic was simple: store a user's default payment and shipping details, then let them buy anything on the site with a single…
Dark Patterns and the Trust Tax
Booking.com once showed fake scarcity counters, "Only 2 rooms left!", on listings where dozens of rooms sat available. It worked, until regulators started…
Accessibility and the Curb-Cut Effect
Curb cuts, the little ramps at street corners, were mandated for wheelchair users. Then everyone started using them: parents with strollers, delivery…
Perceived Performance
An office building got complaints about slow elevators. The owners priced out expensive mechanical upgrades. Then someone installed mirrors in the lobbies…
Design Systems and Material Design
By 2013, Google's products looked like they were built by different companies. Gmail, Maps, Docs, YouTube, and Google+ each had their own button styles,…
Dyson: Industrial Design as a Moat
James Dyson spent roughly five years and more than 5,000 prototype iterations building a vacuum that would not lose suction as the bag filled. Established…
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