Ben Syverson

There are a lot of tools out there focused on drafting or categorizing email, but not enough that have attempted full autonomy. I think whoever nails this will have a massive response.

You could try making a list of your favorite brands/stores that use Shopify, research the owners, and reach out directly! Probably 99/100 will turn you down, but it's totally possible to reach out to 100 (or 1000) shop owners. If you land a recognizable brand, it would definitely help get the next few, and then you can take it from there.

I'm curious what people are doing with the data that comes out of competitive analysis. Is it used to contextualize your own performance, or something else? How specifically is it changing your decision-making or behavior? Genuinely curious!

What use case are you thinking about within Design? I think of Perplexity as primarily a "question-answerer with references" but maybe that's just how I use it. Or are you thinking about a design tool that would produce design but also tell you *why* it did certain things, with references?

This is awesome! I'm curious what you think about Google's shift to more semantic and less keyword-based search results. Does this change the approach for researching keywords at all?

Haven't been in anything resembling this situation, but I would take the cash now and move on. Pretty good payday for 6 months work, and it would give you some cushion while you work on something even bigger. Better than running out of money and being forced to take a full time gig!

Curiosity

Hi everyone! Mattebox is a photo editing app focused on quality and simplicity, originally launched on the iPhone in 2011 to great reviews. I followed it up with a very ambitious 2.0 in 2013. Now, 10 (!) years after pulling 2.0 from the store, I'm back with 3.0. This is less of a new version, and more of a complete reboot of the franchise. I rewrote the app from scratch during COVID lockdown,...

This is fantastic! I'm looking forward to using this for prototypes. In my quick test, it finished the app within a minute or two, but installing the dependencies took a full five minutes. I wonder if there could be a Svelte option, or something where the base framework would install faster.

Steal the IDEO playbook! Start with a job/persona/customer you know something about, ideally in a large & growing industry. Interview 5-7 customers in this category 1:1, with a focus on their most expensive or time consuming pain points, workarounds and bottlenecks. This should give you a few ideas for solutions. Then design 3-5 rough UI mockups (think Sharpie on paper) or landing page...

For mobile apps, SwiftUI is actually a really amazing design & prototyping environment. Once you get comfortable with the components, you can literally stub out an app faster than you can mock it up in Figma!

If you're not feeling imposter syndrome, you're not growing! Just remember that everyone is figuring it out—and people who think they've got it all figured out are probably headed for a big surprise.

Daily workouts—no matter how small/short

I was in professional design consulting for 10 years (at IDEO), where I observed hundreds of user interviews and feedback sessions about our designs. I can't tell you how many times I had designed a "cool" UI that did something clever, only to have users hate it and prefer the simpler, more straightforward version. I worked on a physical therapy app about 5 years ago, and I prototyped a...

For some reason, I used to be so intimidated by type design. I thought there were tons of rules and guidelines you had to learn before you could really start. For example, the term "optical adjustment." How should I measure this? Where is the formula? It turns out, "optical adjustment" is industry jargon for "eyeballing it." When Glyphs 3.0 (1.0) came out, I took the plunge and started messing...

Mattebox is a photo editing app focused on quality and simplicity, and originally launched on the iPhone in 2011 to great reviews. I followed it up with a very ambitious 2.0. Now, 10 (!) years after pulling 2.0 from the store, I'm back with 3.0. This new Mattebox is completely rethought, and designed around HDR-capable formats like Raw, 4K HDR and Apple...