Nick Stamas

Ten hard truths product designers need to hear 👇

Vibe coding sounds great and all, but I’ll continue stress coding thank you very much

@Treggify @tihalstead proud of you

We’ve made the tough decision to wind down Divinate. The real MVPs for me are as follows... 1. My wife. Tyler's wife. Our young kids. They were our support systems, and sources of constant inspiration. 2. Tyler. We're a very very good team. The best. We work so well together. I'd rally and be high energy when he needed it, he'd be steady and consistent when I needed it. Friends for life. 3. My friend, mentor, and former boss @nickstamas. 4. Our customers, and founder friends. 5. Everyone who took meetings with me. From investors at giant venture firms (I got meetings I should not have lol), to tiny little angels. Most importantly the designers, researchers, and product managers who took time to give us feedback. Thank you. Onto the next chapter.

@benjaminprinter send

Launch an info product to help exhausted moms beat burnout, find joy, and reclaim balance I just wrote a 15-page document with the full strategy A mainstream offer that can make you $100K/month Who wants the doc ?

@ghoshal Snapchat is worth $15B and their homepage looks like this. I think you'll be ok.

Carrot's product has evolved faster than our website, and I don't have a designer on staff so our website is like 2-3 versions too old. But we're seeing record growth, so makes me question if it matters lol

@DanielPAnderson What?!

Found in the wild at Walmart. Is this fungible?

@mds It belongs in a museum

I still think about this from time to time. x.com/espiekermann/s…

@hvost I’m sorry Artiom. It’s horrific

A Hamas rocket hit a building just a block away from where I used to live.

@YatirKaaren I'm sorry Yatir

How do you go to sleep like this?

@JoshDoody @Shpigford @DetangleAI Im blocked 🤷‍♂️

@Shpigford @DetangleAI @nickstamas Thoughts?

Time for some design by committee... I'm reworking some things on @DetangleAI so that you can basically throw anything at the "Add items" flow and we'll handle it. I think the "add *files*" portion is good to go there. HOWEVER, what I'm not sold on is that text box at the bottom. You can input plain text, URLs to file and URLs to webpages. The box will expand as you type or add things. How can I make that text box clearer? Am I trying to do too much here?

what people miss about design

Side hustles were a zero interest rate phenomenon

It's weird that designing and building emails is still a hard problem in 2023. Excited to see progress in this space.

@binghott This is a real question, but it sounds snarky: if FB is so good at optimizing spend, why would you ever need to turn an ad off? Wouldn’t it just stop allocating spend automatically?

Shutting off your top spending FB ad is (99% of the time): 1. A bad idea 2. The wrong solution 3. Going to cause turbulence If you're going to turn off the top spending ad in an ad set or the account, don't expect overall performance and scale to remain the same. If you're turning it off due to "performance" please Google "FB ads breakdown effect" before you do.

@blankresident @Humane It didn’t work for Google Glass cbsnews.com/pictures/model…

@blankenship 👏

Probably the best thing I’ve drawn this year. Client-approved today. Get hyped for the rest.

@AdamWhitcroft bUT wHaT aBoUT aPpLe 🥴

If you design or build apps, spend time with people outside of tech; you'll be amazed at how little most of them care about the tiny details we endlessly sweat over. And don't think I'm saying they don't matter, they do. But also they don't...

@drewmck As a business, his efficiency is impressive and he's smart to use engagement-bait tweets like this as free marketing 😀 But all other things being equal, making something look good is an easier (i.e. less valuable) problem to solve than deeper design challenges.

@nickstamas While true, his business model earns him $1m/yr as a solopreneur. Which means the demand for design services may be in design-as-decoration vs. higher altitude services.

If you’re being hired to make something look nice, this is true. It either looks good or it doesn’t—no extra context needed. If you’re being hired to design (vs decorate) then the extra context is vital. Here’s how I write interesting case studies: Tell a good story in 3 parts. 1. Lead with the challenge/opportunity (ex: “we spent 6 months building a new feature but no one was using it”) 2. The meat is how you solved the problem. Was there a critical insight uncovered? Did you make some quick prototypes and user test them? Were there any constraints that added to the drama? 3. Results. What happened? What did you learn? (ex: “the new onboarding increased usage of the feature by 25%”) Getting good at talking about your work like this is a critical skill for senior design roles.

@menegazgio That would be a generous interpretation 😀

@justincarroll Yeah, the form is what draws us in and connects us emotionally. But in this case, it's a rejection that the function matters at all.

@nickstamas There's never been a design I've hated, but then loved after reading the case study. I've only ever thought... Wow, if they cared as much about form as they did about function they'd actually be good.

@antimoFM The term decoration comes from interior design. In that field, there's a more precise delineation of roles between interior decoration and design.

@nickstamas The distinction between design & decoration, it fills tweets and blog posts but 🤷🏻‍♂️