🤿 more ideas plz

+ how Stripe crafts quality products 👀

I recently designed and built a website for one of my new favorite products (there’s even a custom landing page for Dive Club listeners 🤿).

So I wanted to give a little behind-the-scenes and unpack some of my strategy for the site.

Because I look at a lot of websites for design inspiration and there’s an opportunity that almost everyone misses 👇

PLUGINS TIME

Framer just had a banger of a release with their all-new plugin marketplace 💥

It’s a pretty big deal so here are a few of my favorites

Check it out here 👇

📺 THIS WEEK’S EPISODE

Challenging the status quo with design

Imagine your first traditional design role is designing the Snapchat messaging UX for millions of people across the globe… 🤯

Well that’s what Dan Moreno’s journey looked like as an engineer turned designer.

So this week’s episode is a deep dive into his 5+ years designing Snapchat as well as his new role at a rocket ship startup called Captions.

Some highlights:

  • Dan’s formula for presenting design ideas

  • How Dan grew his visual skills as an engineer

  • Inside look at the AR exploration team at Snapchat

  • How to get the CEO of Snap excited about your idea

  • How Dan rethought what Snapchat messaging could be

  • What it’s like being one of two designers at a high growth startup

  • a lot more

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

Key takeaways

1 — Dan’s formula for pitching his designs

Something that jumped out to me about Dan’s “formula” was how he often leads with personal experiences.

For example, when pitching a revamp to Snapchat voice notes, he began his presentation by talking about how often he exchanges voice memos with his mom on WhatsApp.

From there he’ll visually demonstrate the problem (ex: your thumb slipping off the button and sending a message before you’re done speaking).

Then he’ll map his experience to a broader user sentiment. Depending on the project this might be a collection of feedback quotes or maybe a data report.

Once the problem is felt on a personal and macro level, he’s ready to offer up solutions. Typically he’ll present up to three different directions for consideration.

How good a pitch you were able to make would determine whether your idea was prioritized next week or next year”

Dan Moreno

2 — Simplicity as a moat

Captions views simplicity as their greatest competitive advantage which places a lot of pressure on design…

Because when you’re creating a tool, users inevitably request power as they become more familiar with the current capabilities.

That’s why it’s so important to remember there’s a hidden cost for new users.

For example, I’ve learned each additional Notion feature incrementally over the last ~7 years… but someone signing up tomorrow is hit with them all at once.

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How to create a liquid scroll indicator in Figma

I’ve created and consumed a lot of Figma tutorials over the years. So when I say this is one of the coolest ones I’ve ever seen I mean it.

Musab truly cooked with this one…

So I encourage you to take 3 min and expand your box of what you’re capable of creating with Figma prototypes 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How Stripe crafts quality products

This article is an in-depth written interview with Katie Dill (Stripe’s Head of Design). Here are three of my favorite highlights 👇

  1. Designers at Stripe regularly create “friction logs” where they use the product as a customer and take screenshots/write notes of every tiny detail that feels off or should be improved.

  2. Stripe measures quality by looking at 4 metrics:

    • Essential journeys (employee perspective measured on a 5 point scale)

    • Customer sentiment (quantitative surveys)

    • Number of support tickets and bugs

    • Product efficacy (are we achieving the core goal of this part of the product)

  3. “Have the courage to stop the ship” → designers are empowered to say “it’s not good enough yet” and put another day into the project.

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 with AI

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

Episodes you might’ve missed...

Ideas you might’ve missed…

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See you next week ✌️ 
- Ridd

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