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Last month this post about The Browser Company went mega viral…
Probably because it perfectly encapsulated the sentiment after their announcement to move on from Arc.
But it turns out that tweet was merely a chapter in the greatest comeback story I’ve ever seen in tech 👀
Because the new Dia browser has completely taken over the internet 😮
In retrospect we probably should’ve seen this coming 🤷♂️
The Browser Company is full of some of the most talented designers/engineers in all of tech. I mean just look at this onboarding flow lol.
Now that we’re finally seeing their vision for what an AI-native browser can be, it feels obvious that they’re creating the future.
So in this week’s episode, The Browser Company’s Head of Design (Dustin Senos) gives us a behind-the-scenes of designing Dia.
Some highlights:
How to build a product strategy around AI
How The Browser Co approaches prototyping
Dustin’s perspective on MCP and agentic design
How their definition of “good” evolved from Arc to Dia
Their process for exploring patterns for interacting with AI
The #1 piece of advice Dustin would give younger designers
+ a lot more
🤝 WITH GENWAY
I've been using AI agents to do research and something surprising is happening 👇
For context I use Genway in two ways:
contextual interviews → I prompt the AI with what I’m hoping to learn and it has a dynamic conversation with each person
usability testing → I uploaded early Inflight Figma prototypes and Genway’s AI agent helps me test them with real people
But here’s the surprising part… At the end of the interview most people say they're MORE comfortable opening up to an AI agent than a human 😮
If you want to try it out there’s a secret landing page just for Dive Club listeners which gets you 2 months free and 10 credits to recruit people 👇
🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS
My takeaways from designing Dia
1 — The future of “personalization”
The Browser Company has always emphasized personalization as a core value prop of their products.
With Arc, that manifested cosmetically (boosts, themes, even adding denim texture to your sidebar lol).
Their approach to personalization inside of Dia is a bit of a 180 though…
Because in an AI world, the name of the game is context.
In the interview, we talk a lot about “novelty budget” and how their design strategy evolved from Arc to Dia.
This time around they intentionally left things like bookmarks untouched so that they could allocate as much of that budget as possible toward AI.
Because in an AI world, personalization is the primary moat. Whoever owns the context has switching costs on their side.
2 — Portfolio of problem solving
I asked Dustin what he would look for in a new opportunity if he was forced to leave The Browser Company. Here’s what he said 👇
“I think if I were to go somewhere new, I would very intentionally interrogate the process to be like, are we actually getting to the crux of the problem we're trying to solve? Or are we just like building stuff?”
That answer would’ve been incredibly boring ~2 years ago 🥱
But in a world where AI makes it easy to spin up ideas and sprint in all directions at once, it’s never been more important to know exactly what you’re solving and how you’re measuring success. I’m feeling this big time with Inflight right now because LLMs offer so much functionality out of the box that you can tap into.
But it’s not just about product strategy…
Dustin thinks you can apply this to your personal portfolio as well!
Can you pattern match across human problems that people are having and choose the right tool and the right design to solve that problem?
Instead of orienting around big case studies or offering free client work, what if you solved smaller problems on your own?
Maybe it’s for a local business or even a family member? I’m currently making an internal tool to solve a scheduling headache my dad faces as an insurance adjuster. Dustin thinks that is just as compelling as anything else you could showcase on your website.
3 — The future of design is already here
Dustin urges people to not categorize products like Cursor as “coding” tools.
“the future of how to design products is already here. I think it's just not evenly distributed yet… don’t think of it as vibe coding—think of it as vibe designing”
He went on to talk about how rare it is for product designers at The Browser Company to work in static mocks...
The tool doesn’t matter (some people are in Origami, Swift, etc.). But the best ideas come alive when you can feel them.
“There's almost no excuse now as a designer to not code because the tools have made the code irrelevant.”
I spent much of yesterday prototyping in Lovable and the output was honestly incredible. Not only that but I’m about to drop it into Inflight and the feedback I receive will undoubtedly be better too.
“If you're showing wireframes nowadays, you're kind of working at the wrong fidelity because it's so much quicker to actually build a working prototype than show a wireframe and get feedback on it.”
How much did you enjoy this issue?Never hesitate to reply with feedback too :) |
Meet the Dive partners
I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹
The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇
Framer → How I build my websites
Genway → How I do research
Granola → How I take notes during CRIT
Jitter → How I animate my designs
Lovable → How I build my ideas in code
Mobbin → How I find design inspiration
Paper → How I design like a creative
Raycast → How I stay in flow while I work
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