🤿 mushroom kingdom

I remember the exact moment when I first explored MercuryOS 🤯 

It was clear Jason Yuan was one of the most skilled design thinkers I'd ever encountered. No wonder he landed a role designing AI products at Apple shortly after.

But the main reason I wanted to interview him was to learn more about his new product called Dot. It's exceptionally designed and by far my favorite personal AI.

So this conversation is a behind-the-scenes of his journey since leaving Apple and a fun glimpse at what the future might hold for software products. We go deep into:

• What it looks like to design with soul

• What makes Jason’s design process unique

• How Dot is the spiritual successor to MercuryOS

• How more designers need to become AI engineers

• Why Jason thinks dynamic interfaces are over-hyped

• What Jason learned about storytelling from the theatre

• How to design a product based on one magical interaction

• a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

Look I tried… but I just couldn’t get excited about Midjourney 😬

But then Visual Electric launched and it totally changed the game for me. It’s image generation but on an infinite canvas.

I use it for everything now (including all of my article cover photos). Not only is the product intuitive but it’s clearly built specifically for designers.

I can’t recommend Visual Electric enough so I asked the founder to give you a discount and he agreed!

Use the code DIVECLUB and get your first month free 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

3 takeaways from Jason Yuan

1 — What we can learn from Super Mario Bros

Too often designers operate exclusively in problem-solving mode.

Sometimes it’s worth exploring an interaction or pattern for no other reason than it feels good. It reminded me of when Soleio said the best designers “self-plagiarize” later on… because that’s exactly what Jason did:

It all started with an interaction for pinching to zoom in and out of pages in Dot:

Many months later when they were exploring the right UX to represent Dot’s memory, recalling that little interaction unlocked the primary metaphor of Dot.

Instead of organizing memories in a folder-based system, they oriented the core mental model around zooming in and out of daily stories.

Jason suspects Shigeru Miyamoto followed a similar process when creating Super Mario Bros:

Sometimes if you figure out one magical interaction you can derive the whole system from it.

2 — Designing like an AI engineer

Dot straight up feels better than other AI products I’ve used. That’s good design… but so much of it exists outside of the pixels.

Instead of drawing rectangles, Jason spends a lot of time thinking through cognitive architecture.

They intentionally “designed” the model to focus more on its ability to extrapolate a sense of who you are vs. remembering every arbitrary fact about your life.

It’s this “theory of mind” layer that makes the product special. You feel it instantly.

This is what it looks like to design with AI as a new material 👀

3 — Jason’s design process

Craft is quickly becoming table stakes. There are plenty of designers who can create clean, polished UIs. My Twitter feed is full of them.

But it’s rare to find designers who are trying to say something with their work.

And the more I talked with Jason, the more impressed I was by his level of intentionality. He’s constantly working backward from the feeling he wants to evoke in the user.

From there, you simply need the right metaphor to guide the design direction.

To find this metaphor, Jason makes a point to source inspiration from anywhere other than existing interface design. And often the bulk of his design process happens in his head until the metaphor clicks and he can “see” the interface.

For example, Jason used the feeling you get when writing a letter to yourself to shape the Dot onboarding flow (it’s beautiful btw you should see for yourself).

This is what designing from first principles looks like.

I recently did an episode with Noam Segal who’s a long-time research leader at Airbnb, Wealthfront, Twitter, Upwork, etc.

Anyway… he kept raving about this new product called Genway. It uses AI-powered interviews to help you gather qualitative data at essentially infinite scale.

Noam got me hooked 😆 So now I’m using the product to gather feedback from you and others listening to Dive Club.

So if you have a few minutes you should try it out! It’s actually pretty fun and you can get a little taste of what the future of research looks like 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Design engineering 101

Last week’s episode with Mariana is on track to become the most popular episode ever. It’s not surprising given how much energy there is around design engineering.

So I wanted to provide a follow-up resource for people who are feeling inspired to start building more of their ideas.

It’s a guide by Baytaş who has quickly become my go-to source for design engineering content.

You’ll want to bookmark this one because there are a ton of resources included 👇

🤝 WITH FRAMER

Framer plugins are heeeeerrreeee

Framer released some killer features at their Fall event (relational CMS ftw 🙌)…

But by far the flagship of this release is their new plugin marketplace. The whole thing is worth scrolling through but here are a few of my favorites:

1. Figma to Framer style sync
   Yann-Edern from Linear’s plugin would’ve saved me a lot of time last week lol.

2. FramerAuth
   Historically designers have been limited to simple marketing sites. But it’s never been easier to create auth flows now! I think we’re going to see an explosion of lightweight web apps soon.

3. ASCII
   I’ll be honest I have no idea what this acronym means but the art style is sick. And now you can create it directly in Framer.

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👇

Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do pretty much everything on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

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