Design – Marcel

June 26, 2023

Being a designer who doesn‘t code might make you a bad designer in 2024 and forward

It happened. The switch flipped and I‘m now one of those people who believe that it‘s far more productive to design in code than to move boxes and text in some design software.

I spent the last decade not wanting to believe the people who praised designers who code, but I‘m convinced now.

It‘s been about a year since I worked through 100 Days of SwiftUI. I built four iOS apps and about 4-5 web projects using React since then. I‘m obviously still a coding-baby but it‘s already very clear to me that being able to code made me a better designer.

AR interfaces are going to take this up a notch.

Three years ago, when I had an epiphany and realized that AR/VR interfaces are going to be the future of computing, I wondered how current design software would ever be able to allow me to do a good job designing AR interfaces.

I came to the conclusion that it wouldn‘t. It couldn’t.

June 17, 2023

Self-Efficacy in Spatial Computing

There’s this concept of self-efficacy in psychology that really resonates with me. I see a lot of life through this lens. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. […] A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid.

I believe that you can choose to be self-efficacious and things you do can make you feel self-efficacious. Most people fail to recognize when these moments occur, and even fewer make a conscious effort to intentionally create such moments for themselves.

Changing the physical world does this to humans. That’s one of the reasons so many people daydream about gardening and why pottery feels a bit like therapy. You create something that wasn’t there before. You moved something and it stayed in place. You’ve literally made a teeny-tiny dent in the universe.

You won’t be able to describe to a person who never experienced anything like it, how gardening makes you feel. Starting with nothing, spending hours of work, accepting failures and imperfections to then see a result of something you made, tickles the core of what we are. Sure, you can explain all the steps of the process and tell them you felt “good” doing so but there’s no way to describe the intensity of that feeling.

Turning a rotary dial to call someone, pressing buttons to control a SNES video game character and swiping and tapping on glass to send an email did this to us with ever increasing amounts of directness. Every evolution of digital technology helped us feel more self-efficacy.

For better or worse.

I think AR interfaces are the inevitable next step in computing because they make us feel more self-efficacious. You won’t be able to properly describe how moving digital windows in the physical space of real life made you feel. It’s counter-intuitive to even think that the way you interact with the window your bursting inbox makes a difference, yet it does.

Spatial computing can’t be described. It must be felt to be understood.

January 29, 2023

How to bypass email verification

This was read by an AI using a sample of my actual voice.

Turns out: When your sign up flow consists of users entering an email address and password you might want to verify that the person signing up actually owns that email address. Who would have guessed.

Since I’m using Firebase to build Goblin Mode I have a whole plethora of features and functions at my disposal that make this easily possible. In theory.

In practice I would have had to learn Firebase cloud functions to delete accounts without a verified address after a specific timeframe and that just wasn’t realistic. I’ll teach myself how cloud functions work when I start working on notifications.

Well, how to solve the issue of people being able to sign up with other people’s email addresses? You circumvent the whole thing by not offering email/password sign up at all.

Goblin Mode sign ups now use Sign in with Apple. Ethically it’s the only right choice if I want to even think about releasing the thing at some point. I’m not good enough at programming yet to say with conviction that I could build a confidence-inspiring login system any other way.

But that’s fine. This flow is surprisingly sleek and Apple even offers to hide people’s actual email addresses.

Oh and I used this opportunity to slightly tweak the whole onboarding experience. It’s not my greatest design work ever but it does the job.

November 25, 2022

There’s an unwritten rule that if you work long enough on complicated enough digital product design problems, somebody will come along and think that color coding would be a great solution. It basically never is. Color coding is a sign of design weakness.

November 22, 2022

Good Friction

This is a great thread on how Duolingo added a step to their onboarding experience that did nothing but put the user in the right mindset to learn. They let people pick a streak goal to challenge themselves. No matter if users picked 3 or 30 days, the app didn’t actually save the data nor did it do anything with the selection.

This is one of the 🤯🤯🤯 experiments we ran on the Duolingo Retention team : pic.twitter.com/Dv9Wp377vT
— Ali Abouelatta (@abouelatta_ali) November 21, 2022

Apparently this still resulted in a “huge” retention win. Stuff like this is my favourite kind of A/B testing. It’s not just a different shade of green that performs slightly better but a whole layer of human psychology that got revealed and used to create a win/win situation for user and company.

By the way: I did not expect much from it, but Atomic Habits is a good read. It’s not mindblowing in any way but also not as shallow as I expected.