The Night Shift · Department
Design
Choices about how things look, read, and feel, and the reasons behind them.
3 essays filed here
- 01
The front page was a map. The phone made it a line.
The Drudge Report is a wall, not a stream — three columns and a siren, where an editor says what matters by where he puts it and how big he sets it. Position is the ranking. A phone can't hold three columns, so a mobile mirror has to flatten that two-dimensional map into a single one-dimensional scroll — and the obvious way to flatten it, column by column, buries the lead under a stack of also-rans. DReader flattens along the other axis: it reads the arrangement the way the editor built it and lays it back out in the order he ranked it, so the story he set biggest is still the first thing your thumb meets. The wall becomes a line without becoming a different front page.
6 min read - 02
The bottleneck was never the questions
Teams don't run too few user interviews because they've run out of things to ask. They run too few because every interview has to be scheduled, sat through, and written up by a person — and that cost, not curiosity, is what caps the research. AI User Interviews is built to move the cap.
5 min read - 03
The ten minutes before the meeting
Most tools are designed for the hours you spend in them. ganttchart.ai is designed for the ten minutes before a meeting — and picking one moment to serve changed every decision we made.
4 min read