The Night Shift · Department
Design
Design decisions in our products and the reasons for them.
5 essays filed here
- 01
A guess wearing a number
Orbit lets you keep a second profile — not for another account, but for someone you care about: a partner, a kid, an aging parent. You log an entry for them after dinner — low, 2 out of 5 — and it looks exactly like the one you logged for yourself an hour earlier. But you didn't feel theirs. You inferred it from a quiet table and a barely-touched plate. A self-report and an observation are two different kinds of fact, and a mark that renders them identically quietly lets a guess read as a measurement. The design work is keeping the two honest — so a chart of someone you love never hardens into a case file.
6 min read - 02
You won't remember why
Three weeks from now you tap an old entry — Thursday, low, 4 out of 5 — and it tells you nothing. The record is honest and useless, because when you logged it the reason was so obvious you didn't think to write it down, and now the reason is gone. The quiet design work in Orbit isn't the mood picker; it's the cheap context saved beside it — where you were, how long since you'd eaten, what the weather was doing — the handful of ordinary facts that turn a number you can't read into a moment you can. Not a diagnosis. A jog to memory, captured before it evaporates.
6 min read - 03
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 - 04
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 - 05
The ten minutes before the meeting
We designed ganttchart.ai for someone who needs a project timeline before a meeting starts. That time limit shaped the input, editing, and sharing.
2 min read