šŸ¤æ more ideas plz

+ how Stripe crafts quality products šŸ‘€

I recently designed and built a website for one of my new favorite products (thereā€™s even a custom landing page for Dive Club listeners šŸ¤æ).

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 thereā€™s an opportunity that almost everyone misses šŸ‘‡

PLUGINS TIME

Framer just had a banger of a release with their all-new plugin marketplace šŸ’„

Itā€™s a pretty big deal so here are a few of my favorites

Check it out here šŸ‘‡

šŸ“ŗ THIS WEEKā€™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 globeā€¦ šŸ¤Æ

Well thatā€™s what Dan Morenoā€™s journey looked like as an engineer turned designer.

So this weekā€™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:

  • Danā€™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 itā€™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 šŸ‘‡

Key takeaways

1 ā€” Danā€™s formula for pitching his designs

Something that jumped out to me about Danā€™s ā€œformulaā€ 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 heā€™ll visually demonstrate the problem (ex: your thumb slipping off the button and sending a message before youā€™re done speaking).

Then heā€™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, heā€™s ready to offer up solutions. Typically heā€™ll present up to three different directions for consideration.

ā€œHow good a pitch you were able to make would determine whether your idea was prioritized next week or next yearā€

Dan Moreno

2 ā€” Simplicity as a moat

Captions views simplicity as their greatest competitive advantage which places a lot of pressure on designā€¦

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

Thatā€™s why itā€™s so important to remember thereā€™s a hidden cost for new users.

For example, Iā€™ve learned each additional Notion feature incrementally over the last ~7 yearsā€¦ but someone signing up tomorrow is hit with them all at once.

šŸ”— FEATURED RESOURCE

How to create a liquid scroll indicator in Figma

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

Musab truly cooked with this oneā€¦

So I encourage you to take 3 min and expand your box of what youā€™re capable of creating with Figma prototypes šŸ‘‡

šŸ”— FEATURED RESOURCE

How Stripe crafts quality products

This article is an in-depth written interview with Katie Dill (Stripeā€™s Head of Design). Here are three of my favorite highlights šŸ‘‡

  1. Designers at Stripe regularly create ā€œfriction logsā€ 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. ā€œHave the courage to stop the shipā€ ā†’ designers are empowered to say ā€œitā€™s not good enough yetā€ 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 šŸ„¹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them outšŸ‘‡

Dessn ā†’ How I ship like a design engineer

Framerā€‹ ā†’ How I build my websites

Genway ā†’ How I do research with AI

Jitterā€‹ ā†’ How I animate my designs

Play ā†’ How I design mobile apps

Raycast ā€‹ ā†’ How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric ā†’ How I generate imagery

Episodes you mightā€™ve missed...

Ideas you mightā€™ve missedā€¦

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See you next week āœŒļø 
- Ridd

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