Didier Hilhorst

Life update: after 15 years in San Francisco 🇺🇸, we moved to Paris 🇫🇷! And… after 6 years, today is my last day @Uber — thank you for the ride 🚗. As for what’s next? Some time off first, and I’ll see next year what new adventures await! Here’s to a new chapter in life 🍾🥂.

@joshpuckett Amen!

I see a lot of discussion around taste and craft for designers, but surprisingly little about business models and how they impact your day to day work. This came up twice last week as I was talking to designers evaluating their next role, so I figured I’d write down some thoughts I often find myself sharing. ----- The business model of your company will, to a large degree, constrain and shape the work you do as a designer. It will set the metrics you optimize for, the efforts that get prioritized, and the instincts you’ll build over time. Many designers, especially those early in their careers, don’t think about this when choosing where to work. While ultimately your job is to design a great product that users love, there are many nuanced and predictable ways that you’ll be impacted by business models. Here are a few examples: Ad-supported products Your world will orbit around attention. Impressions, time on site, scroll depth, CTRs, ad managers. These are all the things that pay the bills, and that in one way or another you’ll be impacted by them. Ad placements and engagement loops are required, and will create somewhat constant tension between what’s good for the end user (who is not paying you) and what’s good for your business (and advertisers). SaaS Users often enter these products via trials or sales. But much of the work is everything after that. You’ll be concerned with things like activation, churn rates, seat or net revenue expansion, as well as onboarding flows, admin and enterprise management, and all sorts of compliance features like SOC2 and more. Marketplaces With these, you’ll be designing for two (or three!) very different audiences at once. Think buyers or sellers, riders and drivers, hosts, and guests. You’ll spend time working on trust and safety (reviews, verification, dispute resolution) and how to increase or solve for liquidity on your supply and demand sides. Tensions can often come from trying to improve one side’s experience in a way that doesn’t compromise the other side that most users will never see. Gaming Whether paid or free-to-play, much of the business of gaming is spending time on monetization and habit formation. You want to sell upgrades and digital goods and also get users to complete streaks and challenges and unlock rewards all in a way that doesn’t feel extractive or icky. E-Commerce Conversion is king. Everything revolves around optimizing funnels, reducing bounces and cart abandons, and obsessing about how you can take a user who is playing with options on a product detail page all the way through the checkout flow. ----- No matter the business model, your chief responsibility is simple: design a great product that your customers love. But a designer who spent five years in an ad-supported product has built a very different set of instincts and habits than one who spent five years reducing SaaS churn or balancing a marketplace. Neither is better or worse. They’re just different; and will emerge as slightly differently shaped the designer, whether they realized it or not. So when you're evaluating your next role, don't just ask "What’s the product and who is it for?” Ask yourself: "How does this company make money?" That answer might just tell you more about your day-to-day than any job description will.

@joshpuckett @asallen Pull-to-refresh (Loren Brichter)

@asallen Swipe to Close (Brandon Walkin) iOS6 Passbook Shred (Chan Karunamuni) MacOS Genie Effect (Bas Ording) Find my Friends Leather (Sebastiaan de With) iOS Camera Shutter (Johnnie Manzari) Mic Blow to Spin, Push Pop Press (Mike Matas)

I'm putting together a historical list of iconic interface details that shook the world of software design… (iOS slide to unlock, Path radial menu…) What would you nominate?

@rafahari @retrodotapp Dope! Congrats! Go @retrodotapp

First week with team @retrodotapp ❤️

Crazy diss from Anthropic aimed at OpenAI for introducing ads in ChatGPT Who is running the Ads department at Anthropic??

@raphaelschaad This is next level. Remember the Trolloverse at Flipboard?!

Browsing Moltbook and listening to the bots speak among themselves is hell of a trip

@ChrisTauziet @joshpuckett Also, we’re getting old, I do find myself referencing designs from the 2010s. Golden age for mobile, really ✨

@joshpuckett Carousel was fun

Remembered that I've been on the morphing interface train for decades now. Share Cart for Dropbox Carousel iOS prototype, Objective-C 2013

@ChrisTauziet @joshpuckett Classic!

@benblumenrose If you want more housing, don’t kill heritage, be smart. If anything replace this area (also not simple, but at least more reasonable…)

lol what is it with all these add density to SF but do it poorly posts?? You can have density and have incredible parks that inspire citizens. The Palace of Fine Arts is one of the most incredible spaces in the US. We need 100x more of that AND density where we have housing...

Winter arrived in Paris… and in crypto I guess? 😅🤷🏻‍♂️

@artman @praveenTweets Memories ❤️

This is @praveenTweets. His journey at Uber started with a “Strong no-hire” interview feedback. Today, he’s Uber’s CTO. Back in 2015, Praveen was interviewing for a manager role on Uber’s mobile platform team. He came from LinkedIn, where he’d led backend infrastructure teams. Since he’d be my manager if hired, I was added to the interview loop to assess his mobile technology skills. We had a great conversation - but he’d never worked on mobile before. So when it came time to give feedback, I did what I was asked to do: I marked him as a "Strong No-hire" for lacking mobile expertise. Thankfully, Uber’s hiring process wasn’t completely rigid. Normally, one strong “no” would end the process. But we all recognized that interviewing Praveen on mobile engineering wasn’t fair given his background. The team looked past that specific evaluation, and Praveen got the job. He started on the mobile platform team, then steadily grew through the ranks - Director, VP, SVP. I left Uber in 2019, but he stayed. Earlier this year, I was thrilled to hear he had reached the top: CTO of Uber. If you ask Praveen, he’ll tell you he just stuck around while others left. He’s humble like that. I don’t buy it - but he’s right about one thing: perseverance matters. Spend ten years deeply immersed in a problem space, and eventually, you’ll know it well enough to lead it.

@benblumenrose @EnriqueAllen 🙏❤️

Your legacy will live on in our work, in the companies we helped build, the designers and leaders we helped develop, and now in a new generation of students who will build on your story. Hope you’re looking down and smiling on us E…

@raphaelschaad Better to be West Coast?

I’ve just seen the future 🤯

@camworboys @hatchconference So great to share the stage with you, inspiring talk!

My talk from @hatchconference youtu.be/KyOMQJUxQ28?si…

What a day! Congrats to @zoink, @yuhkiyam and many others! What a journey 🙌. And yes, “Design is everyone’s business.”

@soleio Same, except it was called Mega Drive in Europe.

3 - Christmas 1993 I always thought growing up that rich families were the ones who had both 3 and 4

Sharing a proud moment 🥹: we’ve just evolved our brand @AskQonto! It’s such a pleasure to design and build on top of strong foundations with the team ⭐️. We aim to evolve at the same pace as our amazing customers — in business and beyond 😎.

After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't: Having a full-time designer in the room at all times I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll. This makes product development broken: 1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time 2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work 3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution. There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team. At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.

Universal truth: limitations (or restrictions) breed creativity. Simple.

I don’t really know how to express my sadness. But I’m thankful Enrique brightened my life for more than a decade. He will be dearly missed. His kind soul, his love for design, his laugh… 💔