To best communicate a feature's vision, go beyond mockups or screen recordings. Frame your presentation as a compelling 'ad' that sells the idea's value and excitement to stakeholders, ensuring the core concept is transferred effectively and persuasively.
It's easy to let edge cases and non-ideal user paths lower the ceiling of an experience. It's often better to downplay the impact on a small percentage of users if it means creating a truly special and optimized experience for your core target persona.
Many delightful features in the Hand Mirror app, like a toggle that refuses to be turned off, originated from the prompt: 'Wouldn't it be funny if...?' This question is a powerful creative tool for discovering and implementing moments of humor and personality, especially in side projects with less pressure.
To make internal video presentations more compelling, treat them like short, entertaining content. Add a light soundtrack to maintain energy, inject humor to keep the audience engaged, and use sound shifts to signal transitions. This ensures your ideas are not just seen, but felt.
The design for Retro's onboarding wasn't pre-conceived. It started with simple elements (a slideshow with haptics), which led to the motif of 'slowing down.' Once this central idea was established, it streamlined all other creative choices, from soundtrack to visual pacing.
Counter-intuitively, creating moments of user frustration can ignite creativity and lead to a powerful, memorable 'aha!' moment. This challenges the design convention of always minimizing friction, showing that intentional struggle can deepen engagement and create lasting memories.
To create more emotional designs, don't try to force creativity. Instead, actively collect small interactions from other products that made you feel something ('cool,' 'classy,' 'cute'). This builds an intuitive library of emotional patterns to draw upon in your own work.
A standard screen recording can feel sterile. To create a more emotionally resonant demo, shoot 'B-roll' of a person physically holding a phone and interacting with the app. Seeing the product in a real-world context makes the experience feel more tangible and impactful.
The creator of Hand Mirror reveals his single-purpose utility app was initially rejected by the App Store for being 'too simple.' This highlights a platform-level pressure against minimalist design, forcing developers to add superfluous features simply to pass the review process.
Apple removed its iconic Mac startup video likely because it's inefficient for mass enterprise rollouts. This illustrates a key trade-off: designing for a universal audience often means sacrificing memorable, niche experiences that don't scale, creating an opportunity for smaller players.
Retro's emotional onboarding video caused a 20-30% signup drop-off. While seemingly a failure, this friction can act as a valuable filter, weeding out low-intent users and attracting those who resonate deeply with the product's core mission from the very beginning.