Instead of rushing into clarity, learn to move through the unknown. Use your instincts, gut feeling, and sense for what sparks joy as the guide.

Resist early validation

In our dAtA-dRivEn world, validation feels like progress. But new ideas rarely fit old metrics. Don’t force product-market fit before your idea has grown its own wings. The greatest products in history would’ve been killed by early feedback. Trust your instincts first.

Dodge external pressure

Mid-journey, it’s easy to let external forces nudge you into producing, compromising, and proving things too soon.

Distractions, à la the ‘next shiny object’ kind, can pull your focus before things even take root, dragging you toward immediate answers when you should be diving deeper into the unknown.

Creating is iterating

Uncertainty isn't just a phase in the beginning—it's a constant loop. Iteration compounds; simple moves start to {conn|inters}ect in ways you couldn’t predict.

Every step forward is progress. Every dead-end, a teacher. Embrace the unknown. Breakthroughs always arrive unannounced <3

What will feel so clear, obvious, and natural in the end to everyone else started off as a fuzzy mess only you could see.

I love this, but I’ve noticed it comes at (least for now) a cost. When every app is built on the same foundations and models, the result is a smörgåsbord of experiences that lack personality, originality, and edge. Modern apps, websites, and brands are starting to look like digital doppelgängers.

In this brief post, I’ll drop some of my ideas and attempt to outline some high-level principles to help your products stand out, based on industry best practices used in applications with millions of users. Let’s dig into it.

Reinvent and reuse

The best products strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty, offering users a sense of both home and innovation at the same time. New and old reliable, hand in hand.

Ideally, your app’s new features and interaction patterns should blend harmoniously with familiar components that users instantly recognize from other products they love and use daily.

Zomming outMost interactions and flows in your product should be generic, established, and feel familiar. This way you leave cognitive and visual space for the novel flagship features you want to highlight and use to differentiate your app—without it being overwhelming.

So to be clear, public design systems are great and prevents product teams from reinventing the wheel. But a risk when using these off-the-shelf component libraries is that the user experience can become too generic, dull, and speechless. It can make your product lack the edge™ that makes it interesting, rememberable, and fun to use.

Crafting experiences that feel unique and “resonate with your users” is easier said than done and more of a (tbh, kind of vague) end result rather than a process that’ll get you there.

So, let’s look into how global brands are achieving this á la show, don’t tell.

Breathe your brand

One important key to differentiate your experience is to spark joy between the lines of your UI, and make your app’s key flows into brand moments. Make the core interactions feel unique and on brand while using underlying patterns users know and feel at home with via thousands of apps before. The focus here is to create something that feels special to both you and the user without overdoing it (more on this later).

To get started, experiment with tailor-made animations, copy, and illustrations designed to frame each part of the experience. Elements that embody entities, steps, or features in your app.

Identify in-between steps of your flows; empty states, loading, success screens, and confirmations, etc., and use these moments to highlight your brand alongside the messaging without slowing the user down.

Consistency is key. Ensure that your brand is introduced seamlessly throughout the flows. Every detail matters. Embedding your brand beyond marketing channels and into the end-user experience is easier said than done, but it is essential for building a cohesive and memorable product across all clients / surfaces / touchpoints.

Below, I’ve included some examples of how brands like Figma, MetaMask, and Notion do this. With more examples by the bottom of this post.

Streamline your UI

Many apps often present all available features at once, on the top level. Everything is right there, all the time, whether the user needs it or not. This makes sense for some apps, but generally leads to a cluttered and overwhelming user experience.

The overarching goal should be to make your product accessible to newcomers without sacrificing depth or power for experienced users. This is particularly crucial for flows like onboarding, which can have many potential paths and edge cases. It’s important to avoid turning critical flows into daunting tasks that overwhelm the user. Enough is enough.

Aim to keep only the fundamental features at the user’s fingertips, and introduce additional functionalities as they become relevant in the flow. This approach ensures that users are not bombarded with options and can focus on the task at hand.

Most product teams are caught up with adding more features, capabilities, and functionality, but very rarely spend time thinking about what can be removed. So every once in a while — instead of adding stuff — consider what can be removed to streamline the experience. Zoom out and re-focus on the main tasks your app is designed for, and make it super delightful before adding customizability and subtasks.

Think of experiences people love, like Apple Pay or AirDrop, which each do one thing exceptionally smoothly without almost any configuration, customizability, or cognitive overload. They just focus on delivering one seamless and intuitive experience that does one thing really well.

Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could detract (you!!) from it.

Analog patterns in digital shapes

Great interactions are often modeled after properties from the real world. This approach was particularly prominent during the skeuomorphism-era that characterized early versions of iOS, but it remains a valuable tool for infusing digital experiences with a sense of clarity, delight, and familiarity.

Analog patterns can be used to simplify, overview, and intuitively describe complex interactions. Examples include the use of sliders, toggles, and controls to adjust volume, brightness, or other arbitrary metadata. Another example is how most calendar apps mimic the look and feel of a traditional desk calendar. By drawing inspiration from real-world objects and interactions, you can create interfaces that are immediately understandable and engaging for users.

UI parallels to the real world can transform mundane tasks and boring UIs into experiences that spark joy. Give yourself some time here and let your imagination go free here. Think of products, patterns, and interactions that you love irl, and see if any of these could be used as proxies to simplify or symbolize what you’re trying to achieve via software.

Speech is silver, and action is gold

While education, descriptions, and explicit context can be needed, the real magic happens when users can seamlessly interact with your product without needing instructions. By holding the users’ hands and displaying just what they need at any given stage, you can create a product that feels almost effortless to use without having to clutter the UI with tooltips and long intros.

Instead of relying solely on text to guide users, use visual cues and interactive elements to lead them through the experience.

Exceptional software goes beyond function; it creates a connection between people and technology. In a world overfilled with apps, adding polish & joy to the core flows of your product is what transforms ordinary products into extraordinary ones.

Until next time 👋

Thank you and stay blessed. Included some inspo below, let me know what you think, if you have interesting ideas or UI to share, and feel free to follow me on Twitter.

Inspo

No giga-brain insights, but rather some guiding principles for designing in web3. Hopefully someone out there will enjoy it.

Time to hit that publish button.

Draft faster, improve faster

Designing products in web3 means designing products that haven't been done before. We're collectively trying things out, exploring patterns, and finding out what sticks. To keep the momentum up during these explorative stages of the space, learning how to draft and iterate on ideas faster will be key.

For most people, the design process is split into two phases: drafting and editing. In the drafting phase, the goal is generally to get out of your way to get something onto the screen (or whatever medium you prefer). However that looks for you, this phase is crucial to seizing your most important ideas and preserving them for future rearrangement.

When you can draft quickly—you can start editing sooner. When you can start editing sooner, you can share more designs with people. And the more designs you can share, the more feedback you can receive, the better your ideas (and final products) will become.

And the best part? Designing quickly is, i.e., a compounding skill. Faster iteration cycles means more opportunities to learn, improve, and ship.

Skill-up for collaboration

As web3 intersects finance, distributed infrastructure, and socio-technical systems in ways we haven’t seen before, teams should seek to build a team of overlapping multidisciplinary members.

In my experience, I've been able to run the furthest, the fastest, and had the most fun, when collaborating with people in complementary roles. Where we each took the time and effort to speak each other's language and build a shared sense of what we're working towards.

So should designers code? Write copy? Understand the sales pipeline? Interview users? Read the data? Yes.

It's just that it's not practical to try to be the one person who does all of these things day-to-day in any meaningful capacity. But if you can be the bridge between these teams, and not feel alienated by their different lingoes, you’ll gain a lot.

Don’t try to solve everything

It's easy to add more features: slap a button here, throw in a disclaimer there, and pin an explainer tooltip on everything. It's not so easy to take those things away.

Educating people about new features or changes is tough. And it's even harder to dismiss a loudly-requested feature for reasons that users might not easily understand.

Designing quality UI is knowing when to add features. Knowing when something works well and when to take things away, especially if a feature is no longer in service of a broader vision.

This past week I’ve seen too many can-do-it-all products showcased; DeFi products with more features than the G Suite, NFT projects with twelve different utility verticals, and alternative layer ones claiming to be better at pretty much everything. I.e. products trying to do everything—but end up doing nothing.

One thing I’ve learned from participating in, and sometimes winning, hackathons is to always scope down your products. Start by identifying one tiny problem, friction, or annoyance you’ve thought about, and begin with solving just that super smooth.

Quality software is fast. Data is cached. The first paint feels instant. Interactions respond in milliseconds. Simplicity and narrowing things down to the core is everything.

Track the space

Designers who became experts at mobile screen design in 2008 and 2009 are likely at the top of their game today. They are designing solutions for a massive number of people, and their skills are easily transferrable between industries, companies, and products.

Today, we can observe similar opportunities in web3. And as the space expands, the foundational tools we have access to will flourish. From new standards, to protocols, to frontend libraries—we continue to invent new and exciting primitives that unlock the ability to solve new kinds of problems.

Those who make it a habit to examine the latest trends, details, and product decisions will more likely be able to push the limits of their own products further.

Prioritize attending conferences, hackathons, and talks within your interest. Wherever you are in life right now, occasionally throwing yourself into 48h sprints with like-minded frens, new tools, and red bulls is an efficient method for staying up-to-date.

Until next time 👋

Thank you and stay blessed. Let me know what you think and feel free follow me on Twitter.