> One defining constraint must shape the product... Minecraft is built entirely from blocks. IKEA is flat-pack, self-assembly furniture.
I've been calling these things product primitives. I can't remember where I heard that term, but it refers to things like...
Blocks in Notion. Messages and conversations in Telegram. Frames and layers in Figma. Tweets in Twitter. Cells and sheets in Excel. Tools and layers in Photoshop. Commands in a CLI.
I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives. A bad product doesn't know what its primitives are. Or it has a very large number of primitives. It feels like everything in the product is some unique thing that works in its own unique way. So users have to learn a ton of different top-level primitives/concepts. It's confusing and intimidating and hard to teach. Ideally you just want one or two or three main primitives.
The complexity/power in an app comes from choosing powerful primitives that have depth, that are composable, etc. You can do a lot with Notion blocks. You can do a lot with Excel cells. You can do a lot with a CLI command. You can do a lot with a Minecraft block. There's depth there.
argee 21 minutes ago [-]
I think this philosophy might be oversimplified. Tana has basically two primitives (bullets and supertags) and manages to be devastatingly complex to use to the point you have to watch hours of tutorials to do very simple things. Conversely Google Maps has a lot of “primitives” but the UX is fairly tight for 90% of use cases.
CharlieDigital 36 minutes ago [-]
Constraints are underrated.
The most elegant solutions typically arise not out of unbounded degrees of freedom, but building specifically with a constraint in mind.
I think that this goes with point 1: composing the one pager helps define those constraints.
wanderingbit 1 hours ago [-]
We are trying to design our kitchen for a renovation and I can see how these 3 constraints would be useful for us to do for something more about design than software.
I’m gonna go do these…
ChrisMarshallNY 1 hours ago [-]
I like these. I have never thought about it that way, but I guess that I generally have the same constraints.
RITESH1985 1 hours ago [-]
I read the entire article. It gives realities that should be a part of building a product. The one page memory, the core tech and the constraint are identity of the product. Well written.
esafak 51 minutes ago [-]
> The core tech must be separable from the product
The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.
ChrisMarshallNY 43 minutes ago [-]
Agreed, but he is talking about limited-scope projects, that he probably does himself. That’s how I work, myself (these days).
In the past, I worked in teams, building much more ambitious projects, and these rules would likely not apply.
danielheath 42 minutes ago [-]
The product is automation; the tech is llms
Rendered at 02:33:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I've been calling these things product primitives. I can't remember where I heard that term, but it refers to things like...
Blocks in Notion. Messages and conversations in Telegram. Frames and layers in Figma. Tweets in Twitter. Cells and sheets in Excel. Tools and layers in Photoshop. Commands in a CLI.
I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives. A bad product doesn't know what its primitives are. Or it has a very large number of primitives. It feels like everything in the product is some unique thing that works in its own unique way. So users have to learn a ton of different top-level primitives/concepts. It's confusing and intimidating and hard to teach. Ideally you just want one or two or three main primitives.
The complexity/power in an app comes from choosing powerful primitives that have depth, that are composable, etc. You can do a lot with Notion blocks. You can do a lot with Excel cells. You can do a lot with a CLI command. You can do a lot with a Minecraft block. There's depth there.
The most elegant solutions typically arise not out of unbounded degrees of freedom, but building specifically with a constraint in mind.
I think that this goes with point 1: composing the one pager helps define those constraints.
I’m gonna go do these…
The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.
In the past, I worked in teams, building much more ambitious projects, and these rules would likely not apply.