Thread by @heyiboy

I've felt absurdly lucky the past two years working at Tinder and now it's my last week here. I'm heading over to Amsterdam soon to go work at @Framer ❤️

A couple of lessons that I learned from the Tinder interface as parting advice. None of this is gospel. [ Thread ]

You can distill super complicated ideas into a simple action—every hard problem has a solution and complexity is fine. This is the essence of great product and it's quite hard to get to but many give up. I promise you that it can be done. It's a skill you sharpen.

Everyone builds the same app because they're building memes—shadows of the same idea over and over. So how do you break out of this? You work on the idea. Good products are just neatly wrapped ideas/solutions.

One of the co-founders once gave me a fascinating piece of advice when I first started at Tinder. "What's on the screen is a real thing you can manipulate. Cards are real cards. They have dimension, shadows, gravity—they're alive." That blew my mind.

This idea of dimensionality and treating digital objects like real ones actually led me down a new path in my work. I started to build strict rules around my interface and I found that new UIs could arise, evolve, and have their own quirks.

Your job on product design is not to build UI but to build product. Important distinction. One takes requirements and executes what is asked of them because someone else already made all the design decisions. The other listens to problems and creates requirements to execute.

The biggest lie that you'll be given as a designer is your job is to create interfaces so that users continue to come back for more. Complete and utter bullshit. You'll go down a path of creating unethical and meme/shadow products.

Have the following in front of you at all times: ethics, enough constraints, enough data, the problem, the person that has the problem, and the materials. Those are the lights in your product maze.

It's over If you lose sight of the people you're designing things for. Just go home.

Fun is an environment where a person can reach accomplishment. It is the perfect combination of Rules, Goals, Play, Repetition, and Achievement.

Finally, start to build real things and NOT representations. This is tough to tease out so bear with me. What if every idea you had right now could just be magically built? You could save yourself MONTHS of work right?

Instead of creating cheap 2D representations like wire frames, drawings, storyboards—you code and animate from the beginning. Talk with prototypes! I'm not asking you to build production code nor create super cheap paper prototypes. Land somewhere in the middle.

You'll notice that you'll start to get more yes and noes for your work at a faster pace. The more real it is, the easier it is to talk about it and decide if it's a bad idea or a good one.

Build real things and not representations. Framer lets you work like this by default. It's weird at first but the gains are incredible.

There's more that I've learned but I think I'm finally going to start a blog soon. Too much hasn't been said about these topics I laid out. Also, reach out if you want to have coffee in Amsterdam soon✌️