[0:00]When you are working on something, you have the vision. Like you know what you're trying to do. The goal is to communicate this idea as cleanly as you can to someone else. If I have this idea for a feature, don't just design the feature and share mockups. Don't just make a prototype and do a screen recording of you using the feature. Make an ad, right? Good. Sell this idea. Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Ridd, and this is where designers never stop learning. Today's episode is with Rafael Conde, who you might remember as Rafa from the layout podcast that I used to listen to all the time. Well, today he's working as a design engineer at Retro, which is one of my favorite consumer apps. So the focus of this conversation is all about how do you create software that makes people feel something? We're going to get into how he designed the new onboarding flow for Retro, how he uses video to share his ideas and a lot more, but let's start by going all the way back to the beginning of Rafa's journey. It was my first MacBook, and I I got it at a mall at a store and then I I went to the like the restaurant section above and I set it up on a table. And yeah, you open the laptop and you see that video with the stars and the words, it was like a whole experience. Still today, remember how I felt, which is like this is cool. I I thought computers were cool, but this is like cool, cool, even not just computer cool, this is amazing. This is like a movie, sci-fi, look, it's space. And then set the stage for everything else. Everything else I would see and experience like just trying this computer. It had that background, that context. This is amazing. This is cool. This is polished. Everything's shiny at the time. Thing was glossy. I think as a designer, I'm trying to chase that. Like that's what I want to do. I want to make people feel something like that. Did you experience that? For me the moment was kind of different actually, but it was, did you ever play the game Draw Something on iOS? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That changed the way that I thought about software forever playing that game. Because I I understood software. I liked apps. I was even kind of tinkering with Adobe Illustrator and just kind of making things and playing around, but then I saw Draw Something and it was so fun and it it just broke my box of what software could function as and where it could fit into my life. That was the moment for me and I'm like, I think I literally want to do this for the rest of my life is build stuff like this. There you go. Everyone has that, like the the origin story as a designer or someone in in tech, I think. There's always that, you can always trace it back to a moment where you're like, oh, even though I did go I did study computer science, like college. But it was not really because I wanted to be a programmer or anything. Like I I never had written any code or didn't even know how it worked, but it was mostly because like I liked technology. Just again, computers, video games. I I, you know, and it felt like, oh, the world is all going to be software, right? Like it's all computers. So I felt like I might just do computers, like to understand the world if that makes sense. I I'm making I'm sound I'm making it sound deeper than it actually was, but like yeah, computer share. But it was like, yeah, that first year that that's when I tried a Mac and that's where I saw like indie devs, the apps like from panic in full of little delight and Easter eggs and just humanity, like sprinkled into. Like I could see the people behind it and before, the only other place where I saw, you could really feel the people making the thing, like the people behind the thing was like video games. The game Metal Gear Solid, the first one for PlayStation, where famously, Hideo Kojima, he's the director behind that series. And he's very much like he puts himself into it. Like I think the first title card or something is like a game by Hideo Kojima. Like this is and even at the time, I was like, that would you you wouldn't see that in video games. Like you wouldn't get the credits or the actors behind like right that that was not a thing in video games. That's a that's a thing from movies. But no, Hideo Kojima's like, no, a game by Hideo Kojima. I'm going to put myself into this, this is my taste, this is my yeah, interpretation of how a video game should be or whatever. And so, and that game is full of those moments, like breaking the fourth wall, just making you think outside of the box. Like I'll give you two examples for people, you know, people listening to this. I think that game might be too old now for Let's not date ourselves too much here. Okay, PlayStation one.
[4:27]You know what? We didn't even call it a PlayStation one because there was only one, so it was the PlayStation, yeah. But that game, like at one point, you have to call this character called Meryl. And the game keeps telling you that you have to call her. Like, oh yeah, call Meryl, call Meryl. But you don't know her frequency. Like you don't know how to call her, like you don't know her number. The game will not tell you, and you're stuck, because you know what you have to do, but you don't know how to do it. So at some point, I'm sure you get so frustrated and so bored and so stuck that you start looking at the the game box and like the you see the back of the box. And in the backs, there's a bunch of screenshots of the game and explaining what the game is. And in one of the screenshots, you see like an image of a call between you, the the character and Meryl. And in that screenshot, you can see the frequency. And that's how you would know which number like to call her. This would not fly nowadays. Like, wait, you're purposefully getting gamers stuck and frustrated? You're purposefully getting people frustrated? Like that's usually something even as a as designers, we avoid at all costs, right? We don't want users to get frustrated. Fine, this is game, not a an app or whatever, a tool, but but like frustration ignited creativity, for for some. I'm sure some people dropped it. Like, all right, you know what? I'm done with this game. I can't do it. But that moment's like so because when when you get it, the what you feel when you're like, oh, I get it. You know, that feeling, man, is so memorable. It's forever. Here I am telling you this story. And like, there's this other character, second moment from the game, there's other character called Psychomantis. It's a boss. Really hard boss. And the whole thing about this character is like he's he's psychic and he can he can read your mind. So if you're trying to shoot it or something, it will always be one step ahead cuz it's reading your mind. And at some point, the character says, here's a magic trick, place your controller on a flat surface. And you're like, your controller. Wait, it's already breaking the fourth wall. Like, what do you mean your controller? Cuz now he's talking to the player, not the character. So you put it and then he uses the rumble feature, which was new and innovative at a time. So by by vibrating the controller, he would move. It was like, see magic trick, I'm making your controller move. That also blew my mind. And then the way you defeat this boss is you have to unplug the controller. There were wires back then for for people listening. Uh, you have to plug in with a wire that controller. Anyway. So you have to unplug the controller from controller one port and plug it into controller two port. And then all of a sudden, he couldn't read your mind anymore. No way. And that's how you would defeat it. Do you understand, Red? Do you understand what's going on here? The creativity, the genius, the fun, the frustration. There's so many feelings, there's so many emotions. This is I know video games, but like these things, these moments it imprinted on me and like this is what I would love to make other people, people feel using software that I designed or I made or whatever it is I make. Like I want to inject some of that humanity, inject some of yourself in it a little bit. Be creative when you can and just create those moments of surprise. I know, like surprise and delight, it's a very overused term nowadays, but I'm just going to use it again because I I don't know what else to call it, but like, yeah, a little surprise, little like, oh wow, or I didn't think that was possible or how did I do that? That's cool. That's why I do what I think, what I do. Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. When you're prototyping with AI, if you're spending time recreating styles, components and layouts from your actual product, I got news for you. You're probably wasting time and definitely not using the right tool either. That's why I love recommending Dessen to teams. In one click, you and everyone on your team can prototype directly in your codebase without ever opening an IDE. Dessen extracts your design language and gives you the perfect sandbox to explore without any of the technical hurdles. It's a pretty big deal and you can connect your codebase and start prototyping today, just head to dive.club/Dessen, that's D E S S N. It's surreal that I can just talk to my computer before bed and then agents explore 20 different concepts on paper's canvas that I can review the next morning to pick a direction. And using paper to scale my explorations with AI is totally reshaping the way that I think about my design process.
[8:46]And AI always comes up with something that I didn't consider. So I'll just grab my favorite parts from a handful of concepts, start moving things around, making little tweaks. And everything that the canvas is really good at. And then when I'm ready, I can just tell Claude or Codex to build the selected frame and there's nothing lost in translation because paper's canvas already uses HTML and CSS. And paper is truly taken my design process to the next level. I cannot recommend it enough. Just head to dive.club/paper to start designing today. Now, on to the episode. I want to tap into this concept of you chasing that through your career. That's obviously played a big role. Maybe before we go into that though, I'm curious if you've experienced that with any products recently. Maybe something that feels a little bit more like a traditional, you know, digital product just to help people wrap their head around what this actually could look like.
[9:44]And then maybe from there we can then talk about, okay, like how have you pursued that? But does anything come to mind where you've played it or used a product for the first time like, oh wow, this this did something for me? There's this new app. It's designed for you to track the the position of the sun and like where the light is coming from. Oh, interesting. Like say that if you want to do like if you're doing your like a shoot, like a movie or production, whatever, TV, and you need to know like at what time of day, where is the sun coming. And the way you like interact with this UI is there's a lot of like gyroscope motion stuff and it's a super cool UI that you wouldn't really expect and everything is really polished. So I'm going to put I'm going to send you the links. Two examples that come to mind. One is maybe a little bit easier because it is very, very, um, consumer, almost more game-like, but have you ever played with the Tolan app? Maybe a long shot. No. Okay, so Tolan, T O L A N is this AI companion, but it's it's cute. The branding's amazing and they turn it into this game where you're kind of building this world together. And I don't know, I saw it enough times. I was like, I'm just going to download this and play with it. And the initial experience of this app is unbelievable because they throw you so deep into this world and you're talking with this Oracle who's like understanding who you are as a person and then you meet this new friend and everything about it is sensational. I do think there is, you know, playing in that level of consumer is a little bit easy mode because you can take more risks. But another example that I think is interesting is we've continually had this raising of the bar for onboarding experiences for new browsers. So like Arc browsers onboarding experience was crazy. Like that was crazy. And then they, you know, had to one up themselves with Dia, but then Comet came out with perplexity and like you have the the space overlay on your map when you have all the sound effects and the planets and it's like, oh, okay, like that was a cool 20 seconds where they didn't need to do any of that, but I felt it for sure. Interesting that like browsers became the space to do that. Like the unboxing experience. The most commodified tool ever. Yeah. Cuz all you need to stand out, right? And then that that first impression. I'm surprised that we don't do more of this. I mean, I also know and learn the hard way of why we don't, but like even when I was at Sketch, I did prototypings and played it around with some ideas. But like you don't want to hijack their computer. You don't want to play sounds that can be very intrusive. You don't want to like, there's a lot of reasons why you shouldn't do it. But there's also some reasons why you should and like who's making that call, right? In the world where I feel like you design for everyone, right? You have to take into all kinds of users, which is great. Like I'm not saying we shouldn't. It's it's it's good. Accessibility wise and just like be aware of every type of user that might be interacting with this. But at the same time if you try to generalize so much, then it's harder to do those more like targeted experiences if you will. At Retro, I I worked on like the little, I don't know if you call it unboxing but we would play a little video with haptics and stuff the first time you would launch it. It was very much like targeted to a type of audience, a type of audience, is a type of audience. It's like a slideshow of pictures, like emotionally charged a little bit with like a message going through and then there's a haptic that you feel it with every new picture in a slideshow. And then like the whole thing is like, nowadays the world is full of ads and uh and slob and AI and reels and whatever and then we lose some of the like special moments with friends, family, things that matter. This is type of the message. And it starts like very fast. So and because of the haptics you can feel the fast pace of it. And then as it goes, it slows down to kind of communicate that thing like, hey, let's slow down in this world that's very noisy and very fast. Let's slow down and get back to like essentials or what matters or whatever. I think it was a neat idea. I think it's cool. I liked it. I think people that see this might be like, that's neat, great. But also you're introducing like a 10 second video before showing them the, you know, the sign up button.
[13:50]So and there's a lot of reasons why people just dropped and they did, by the way. Like just a little insight. Finally, this guy's saying something useful for people listening. Um, where are the lessons? Hi, I'm Rafa. I'm here in this podcast and this is a great honor. And uh Red has has had a bunch of brilliant, brilliant, smart guests. And now it's my turn. It's my turn to like ground a little bit this podcast and have the audience finally connect and like relate to, oh yeah. He's not that smart. That's nice. I can see myself in this podcast. Anyway. So we do this video and we test it and, um, I think we lost like 20% or 30% of signups for people, you know, who would see the video first. And it makes sense, but like, all right, but but what about at the end of the onboarding, meaning maybe a lot of people drop, but would those people drop anyways during the onboarding flow or no? And then the numbers get a little bit softer and it's not that big of an impact. Um, and then we didn't really do much in depth testing and whatever, like we don't know what kind of users would we get out of this thing. But suffice to say like, of course, you're going to play a video before, at that time was like, you have to tap and hold to skip, because I I didn't want to people like accidentally tapping and skipping, because I worked a lot on this video and I want people to see it. Of course, everyone wants to see this, right? Why would you want to skip it? It's beautiful. Stop. But yeah, no, so a lot of people dropped and like, all right, well, let's make it easy, easier to to skip, maybe. Then if you really don't want to watch this, you don't have to quit the app, you can just tap. And that helped. And then like, actually, we we were playing the sound, regardless of your like the mute switch, state or whatever in the phone. Cuz I'm like, we only have one opportunity to show this video and the soundtrack kind of plays a big role in how it makes you feel and all. So I I didn't want to risk people not listening, cuz I as a user, my phone is on silent, like all the time. Constantly, yeah. So if I'm designing for myself, like, oh, I, as a user, would be bummed if I didn't cause how would you even know there was sound? And then we like, we maybe softened that up and actually like, we would respect the mute switch. A great experience that I think for people who would appreciate this, it would make a big impact. But also has a big impact on everything else. And there's a reason why Apple doesn't do the video anymore when you open your Mac. Cuz like, hey, there's people who buy these computers for like massive organizations and companies and we have to set up 200 of these. And if I have to wait 10 minutes to watch a video every time I open one to set it up, like, come on, right? So if you're trying to design for everyone, then it's harder to make these things. It's harder to like Hideo Kojima when he was doing Metal Gear Solid. If if the goal was like, you have to do the mainstream game that everyone is going to love and everyone's going to beat it and it's going to be the greatest game ever for the masses, then he couldn't do those things. You can't purposefully get players stuck and frustrated, right? You know what I mean? So I feel like that's why nowadays, like before you would see more like big companies doing these risks. And now the big companies cannot afford to make these bigger risks. And that's why we see it in the in smaller indie shops, smaller devs that can make the risks. Like my own side projects are full of these little things that I don't really do on my day job, right? Or do it at a not as much or not as intensely, cuz the pressure is off. And then like, it's fine if if I lose 10% of my user base. I think there's a middle ground too that's kind of interesting. Like one of the lessons that I internalized from one of the co-founders at Maven years ago, where especially as a designer that skews slightly more technical, like I I see all the edge cases. I see all of the different personas. I see all of the ways that an experience could be sub-optimal for this specific type of person in this specific type of state. And it's really easy to let those not happy paths, like lower the ceiling of what the experience can be for the people that we really care about and the person that we're really optimizing for. And I think I've had to almost unlearn some of that a little bit where I'm like, no, no, no, I'm okay. Not ignoring that's a strong word, you know. But down playing the impact for this one% of state or this one% of users, if it means that I can create something that's really special for the people that I want to make sure are sticky and love the product and maybe that does mean adding a little bit more friction if I feel confident that I can create this feeling that is going to, you know, build affinity with whatever I'm making or something like that. There's a lot of lessons that I just internalized from my early days as a designer building software. Like, don't make users scroll or whatever. Don't like, labels everywhere. And all these things are great and good lessons, because you're making software more accessible. At the same time, people are they're more used to computers. Like new users as they were 20 years ago. Some of these things I I've been trying to like you said, like unlearn, cuz like, oh no, people who have to swipe horizontally. They don't know how. We have to put pagination or whatever. And then you test it if you want and then you realize, oh no, no, people are people who know how to scroll. Don't scroll. Like it's it's fine. Apple removed the home indicator, little grabber thing, right? From from from iOS 13 16. Can you imagine being like the designer and me like, oh no, but how will people know? It's such a good example. You're right. And they did that for billions of people. Yeah, at that scale, at that scale. And I'm sure people at Apple have the stats to back this up. I'm sure they've tested it because they're not a company that takes those big risks. No backlash. I haven't heard a single person, like a real person, like not designers on Twitter. I haven't heard a single person been like, oh no. I don't know now I don't know how to to go back, you know? I wonder if there was a drop off in the beginning though. You know, there had to be some moment of frustration. But they were like, you know what? We know this is going to be a learning curve, but people it's a bet on people's ability to figure it out and we know that this will be a better experience. We know that this is going to raise the ceiling, so we're going to do it anyway, even if there is like a lul or a period of frustration. I love that example. I haven't thought about that in a long time cuz that was a big decision. Yeah, and so some of those assumptions that I just grew up with, like I have to challenge myself a little bit and like trust the user a little bit more. And as I'm saying this, I'm just like, it hurts on the inside because it goes against everything I've ever like taught or like learned and, you know, like, no, make it more and more accessible all the time. And I still to a certain extent agree to that, but also, but trust him a little bit, because there's aren't all that dumb, right? And to go back to Hideo Kojima Metal Gear Solid. Trust that they'll look in the back of the case at some point, when the frustration is real. Can we get like really deep on the retro onboarding here for a second? Because I I think your haptic idea is kind of genius actually. And I think there's a lot of really good design, at least in my head, you know, when I'm like ideating, it's like, oh, this is going to look or feel beautiful. But I think what is inspiring to me listening to you talk is you were designing from this core or like root realization that you wanted people to have in that moment. Like the actual slowing down, like there was like a physical response almost that you were trying to create in the design, which I think is so interesting. Like how quickly did you arrive there? Like, can we just use that as a way to look at some of your creative process and how you're even thinking about going from, you know, the blank canvas of what do we want to do here to where you landed? Yeah, I'll prove that there's no genius here at all. Like I started with I'll do a slideshow because one, it's easy to do, like technically. The second, like I knew I wanted haptics. Just cuz it not because I wasn't at that point. I was not like, cuz I want to make people feel the thing. No, it's more like cuz it makes it more dynamic and haptics are fun. Like it makes it more interesting than just a video. So I started from there. Like I, okay, slideshow cuz it's easy and I can do it. And haptics cuz whatever. And then also, if I were to make a video and play a video file, then it would be so hard to like sync the haptics with the video. Maybe there's a I don't know how to do that. So it's just like I'll I'll do what I can what I know how to do.
[22:04]So that's why like I settled on slideshow. And then slideshow, I like looked at a bunch of slideshows and like ad campaigns and stuff from like that uses a slideshow format, cuz I was trying to like deconstruct it. My first take was like way too much motion and I had like a little Kenburn effect and all that stuff. And I realized like it's too much. And then I just analyzed, like studied a bunch of other slideshows and ad campaigns and I realized like, oh, actually no, there's no transition, there's no fades between the photos. No, it's just snap, snap, snap. Very easy. I do a slight Kenburns on the whole thing. So not per photo, but the whole animation has a slow like zoom. I started there and then I did the haptics and I realized with the haptics that I was actually feeling the pacing of the slideshow, of the video. And then like I was doing, you know, we have a daily call with everyone on the team and I was showing them and we had builds and people were playing and trying them. I'm pretty sure it was one of my coworkers. Sean or Cheryl, but someone was like, we realized that we were feeling the pacing and then we're like going over the story because at that point I only had the script. And I think one of them suggested like, hey, it would be nice if we start faster and then we go slower, slow down. Then it all just fell into place a little bit. So it was not I didn't have the whole idea and whole vision right at the start. It was like, I'll start doing the things I know how to do and slowly like, oh yeah, that would be cool and doable. Oh yeah, that would be nice. And everything was kind of like, everything's like a little accident of the process. Once we figured out the thing of like starting fast, ending slow, slowing down, then a lot of design decisions around it had that as like the goal. Then everything became easier. So, for example, when it was time for me to do the soundtrack, which is a very short little thing, but I started with like street noise. So at the top of the video, you hear the the the it's like a little piano thing, which is like in itself a calming sound, piece of music, but then I added a bunch of street noise. And like, I think it was like at a restaurant or something. It just went on like, I don't know, copyright. Like free sounds I could use. Like, yeah, and people talking and stuff. And then I would like slow that down a little bit. And then halfway through the video, you don't hear any any of that, which pairs really nicely with the slowing down as well, visually with the slideshow. The physical aspect of it with the haptics and now the sound, like sound is also kind of slowing down, focusing on the music and like removing noise. So once you got that motif, that like metaphor, everything else was just working around that and it fell into place. And the whole thing is quite short. It's like, I think, I don't think even like seven seconds or something. I forget. No genius is like, I'll just start with what I know how to do. Talk to people. Get other ideas. And then everything kind of falls in place. I like that it started with the haptics too. Like you didn't start from a problem solving or uh you know, how do I make this flow efficient? It's like, man, wouldn't it be cool if this thing buzzed and vibrated in my hand? How could I use that and then you got to that place. And and also like so often, I mean that's my experience too. It's like maybe I'll spend days in search of the motif and then you find the motif and then everything just unravels from there. There's so much momentum in every direction. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Can we go a little bit deeper into Retro for a second? I feel like we're we're winding, but I I love this product. Go deep, please. Thank you. Me too. Maybe a little bit. What what you joined and give us a big context for it, but I'm really interested in, you know, your role specifically because I know you kind of have this hybrid set of skills, so I'm interested to see what that looks like in a daily, weekly practice. I was looking around for a new job, a new thing to do. I was fortunate enough that like I was talking to some companies and products that I just use and adore and they're great. But usually all of them were like big company. I've never done the big company thing. And I was convinced that like, this is my time to do the big company thing a little bit. Based on the people I was talking to and based on also just like the state of the industry. It's not a good time to look for a job. It's tough out there. So it was not getting picky or anything. I was also considering very realistically just doing my own stuff and going indie, which is also very it's a big risk and it's very scary. And I I feel like I have been considering this for years and years. And I feel like with every new job search, I'm like, could it be now? And so, I was weighing these two, either I go big company or I go the other opposite and like, let me do indie stuff. And then the people at Retro approached me. And I have been a user. I've been using that app since they started like in test flight way back. I think three years ago, ish. Retro is like a what Instagram used to be. It's a it's a private social network for friends and family. There's no ads, there's no influencers, there's nothing. It's like a really small, closed social network for friends and family to share just your day-to-day. Again, what Instagram used to be. But now you open Instagram and you're like fall down the hole of reels and ads and, you know, you blink and an hour's passed like what did what happened? And also where are my friends? I haven't seen the same picture of friends. Anyway. So that's what Retro is. And I I've been such a big fan for so long when they reached out, I was so stoked to also learn more about the company, cuz I knew nothing. I don't think I knew anyone working there, you know, behind the company, behind the product. So, then I got to know them and it's a very small team. I think six or seven, I God knows. The complete opposite end of the spectrum from the big company that you were considering. And it was like one of the few like feel good apps that I still that I use genuinely on day-to-day. It was also like a similar reason why I joined Sketch. Like an app that I just absolutely adore and I use. So it was like the same, the same motivation, like this is an app that I like. It's a good product to exist in the world, makes the world a little bit better, I think. And then I also discovered that the team itself, they don't just do Retro. They're trying to build a little portfolio of apps. They're like an app studio if you will. And Retro is only one app, but they recently also shipped, um, they built this app called Splat. The team, they were trying to like play around with generative AI and like just learn a bit and and so Splat is, um, is an app for iPad and iPhone as well, but you you select a picture or like take a picture of your kids and stuff. And it with generative AI, creates like a coloring book, coloring thing for kids. And you can just like have the kids color in the app itself. Or how I use it, I just print it. So I just take a picture of my kids or like they pick a funny photo and we create a little like cartoon version of it that they can color. And again, genius. One of those apps that like feels good. This is nice. It's nice. And because it's designed a little bit for kids, no dark patterns, no weird, you know, upsells and ads and stuff. Feels very simple. Like very genuine. Without the pressure and burden of like design for scale and for business and for all that. So anyway, so here comes retro and and this team and they're like right in the middle. They're not a big company, but they're also not going indie, but it's doing the type of apps and the type of work that I think I would genuinely like want to do on my free time if I had the resources in time. So it felt really nice. And then after I got to meet everyone. Like everyone's just a great team. So it was a no-brainer for me to to join. And I've been there for January, February, so three months. We we're six or seven people. We don't really have titles, but I I think I'm a I'm a design engineer. That's my official, at least what's in the contract. That's the hot buzzword right now anyway. Yeah. They're like, all right, this guy knows how to code and it was funny cuz it changed even from the time I was talking to people, like getting to know the team and interviewing. And by the time I actually joined and started working, it already changed in the sense of like, we have this other product designer Sean, who at the time when I would talk to to them, they were like, yeah, I mean, we do primarily like, I figma stuff, but I've been more and more like with AI, like working building prototypes and stuff. And that's where he was at, at least that's that's the impression I got at the first time I spoke to him, like, oh, okay, he's a more of a traditional product designer who does mostly like figma stuff, but now with these AI tools, he's doing more and more prototypes and code. Cool. And I also spoke to Cheryl who's like, he's been doing a lot of the marketing stuff and also doing some of the product design. But first time I spoke with her, she was not doing really anything with code. At least that's the impression I got. And right now everyone's doing everything. Cuz I thought, oh, I'm going to be the guy, the designer who doesn't know how to code. And now it's like, no, everyone knows how to code, kinda. We're all using AI tools, we're all building prototypes and code. Sometimes I will build a prototype directly in the main app, like the codebase. Sometimes I create a little separate, like, you know, projects, Xcode projects for prototypes. But like Sean, who was like, yeah, I'm starting to do some prototypes with AI. Now like the the most recent feature, the the recap stickers. He built most of it. Like the actual code that that went into the production code. And now Cheryl is also doing a bunch of prototypes and building like opening PRs and stuff with some cool product features. It's it's it's fascinating to see. Also tricky to navigate, cuz like we see the risks. Sometimes we try to incorporate a whole prototype into production, like actually, Yeah, it's quite buggy and hard to navigate and it's a bit messy. So we're learning and like two steps forward, one step back, sometimes even myself. Like, what I do, when I have an idea and I have to think, am I going to do a Figma thing or am I going to do like a separate prototype in code? Or am I going to go try and build this in a separate branch directly in the app. It's more like, what's going to be faster? That's usually my go-to. Especially in early exploration phases, like where the goal is to communicate something. So sometimes the Figma thing is faster, but also not a lot of times. I think the the fastest I'm at least the most efficient that I'm at is like in a separate, isolated code project, you know, new Xcode projects for prototypes. That's my sweet spot. But sometimes I'm like, actually, I need like real data or I need other features of the app to work with this. And sometimes it is just faster to like create a new branch of the main app and just pull from there. Whatever I decide to go, whatever the flow, the process, it ends for me, it ends with usually a video. It's like a medium production, little video that I share on Slack. Cuz I feel like when you are working on something, you have the vision. Like you know what you're trying to do. I hope so. But you have the idea. The goal is to communicate this idea as cleanly as you can to someone else, cuz you think it's awesome. So if you just do a perfect transfer of idea without losing anything, the other person is going to think it's awesome as well. That's the ideal, uh, thing. And for me, I realize that the video is my most effective way of transferring an idea from one person to another. It's the the format that there's the least loss of information around it. Cuz if I just do a static mock up, here's a picture. There's a lot missing that might not make the transfer, right? You know what I mean? Uh, if it's like a little video, there's motion, there's a little prototype. All right. Now, you're communicating more, communicating out a flow, communicating animation if there's some, right? You're doing more. If you do a whole prototype and you send them a build and like try it. Okay, you're doing more, communicating more. But for me, the video is like, I can show you things. I can talk over it and just verbally tell you all the things that you should focus on and what's important. I can communicate excitement. And then you pair that with like a very light, upbeat soundtrack or cool, whatever it is. You add soundtrack to it. Oh, dude, yeah, I do like a little mini YouTube video. Oh, we got it. Okay. Go deeper here. What makes a good video? Talk about what is included in here cuz I've never added a soundtrack, but now I'm very into it. Oh. These are like the guidelines that I have to follow when I'm making one of these. It has to be like under 10 minutes, that's a rule. Cuz people are not going to sit down and like watch a 30 minute video on Slack. Under 10, ideally five. That's like the the best little nugget. I'll I'll sit through a five minute video. If it's a eight minute video, I'm like maybe I'll I'll watch it later when I have more time, you know. I'll turn it off to 1.5 on eight if it's eight minutes. Yeah, sure. So you do that, it's a short video. You do the soundtrack just because especially if there's a lot of talking. If it's just talking, it's more boring. Like there's there's no if you add a little soundtrack upbeat thing, it keeps it interesting. And also, if you're like, say that you're talking about one point and then you move to another point, you do a little soundtrack change. And now the person just feels like, okay, now it's a new thing. Like now it's a different thing. It feels different. And then you add some humor. You make some jokes. You make it funny to watch. And if it's funny, people will want to watch it, cuz it's entertaining. Ultimately, it's that. Make it entertaining. They're paying attention. Like they want to consume this, they want to see this. It's funny, it's cool. Make something that it's interesting, funny, and hopefully communicates the idea very well. Like if I have this idea for a feature, don't just design the feature and share mockups. Don't just make a prototype and do a screen recording of you using the feature. Make an ad, right?
