Reflection // Product

What makes a product good rather than great?

I like to look at Craiglist’s for a great product because hasn’t changed it’s look since 2008 — simple, to the point, and an arguably brutalist for the better

What sets Craigslist apart from Nextdoor, ioby and Citizen is it’s brutalistic design — Craiglist’s brand looks almost like a high end wire frame. It’s typography are Arial and Times New Roman (aka the most default fonts today), icons look like they could have been pulled from any free icon library. The only place that CL has any sort of branding is in it’s colors — black, grey and #a32691, also known as warm purple. It’s found in it’s peace sign logo, and as a contrast point, but other than that, Craiglist simply functions as a bulletin board.

Craigslist created a product and kept it to it’s optimal performance — not trying to push new features, or paywall others, just followed its own mission statement and stuck with that. Risks are important to take, but taking them for the end user, not for the benefit of shareholders (Hello Instagram + Facebook and “curated feeds”)

What personally attracts you to product design?

Frustration with designs that intentionally set to distract or exploit user weaknesses. Thinking of social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, a lot of these apps prey on psychological weaknesses. As a product designer, you have a responsibility to the user to protect them from themselves, and as a user, you unknowingly trust a designer to do that.

No one wants to feel like their time is being gamified for someone else’s benefit. Touching back to Craiglist, the app is so simple, it’s meant for you to go in, find what you want and leave. Not to keep you sucked in for hours.

What is a digital product that you can’t live without? What problems does it solve for you?

Any apps that help me keep track of myself. Most people are not as in tune with themselves as they’d like, you can see that with the rise in meditation and wellness, and I’m no different. However, apps like Noom help me keep track of what I eat and Calm to help remind me to take a second to breath.

Apps I don’t need are entertainment apps, such as the ones named above. It’s similar to eating sugar — tastes great in the moment, but leave you feeling empty afterwards.

What is a digital product that you consider innovative, and why?

HipCamp! I love it.

What’s a product you feel “addicted to,” or otherwise feel negatively habituated?

Reddit. I love niche sub-Reddits, but mainstream Reddit is kind of awful. It helps reinforce some really bad habits, such as -

• Headline reading
• Not checking sources
• Hivemind / mob mentality

Reddit makes it easy to consume a lot of surface level content through a feed system, promoting images and headlines while making it less intuitive to find sources. Often times the most emotionally stirring content is promoted thanks to the double edged sword of the upvote system.

On top of that, comment sections usually don’t offer any sort of conversation — whatever the most popular takeaway is to a piece of content is what’s promoted at the top of the comment section. And it’s usually not helpful.

However, I think part of the problem is when a platform because popular, meta’s are found, patterns are set in stone, and what it was can be completely unrecognizable from what the platform has become.