Invest Like The Best - Designing The Future

“We really thought about our AI efforts as lowering the floor, but raising the ceiling. One example: how do we generate a first draft for you?”— Dylan Field

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Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · Creativity & Innovation

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AI lowers floor, raises ceiling via craft

“When I look back, I go, 'Man, I wish that we had gotten out earlier.' I tell everyone that it's like, what's the smallest increment of the idea that you could get out in an inspiring form. I definitely look back and wish that we had found that smaller bit sooner. It would have made everything easier. But the hard parts were motivating the team without traction.”— Dylan Field

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Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior

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Recorded user struggles to motivate team

“The first things I see people mess up are when to reuse versus when to be inventive. There are plenty of patterns that users already know, and sometimes it's very useful to be inventive and create new patterns. People fail to consider flows. They don't think about where a user's coming from, they think only about a certain state. That context, if they lack it, can hurt them. They often are too indirect.”— Dylan Field

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Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior

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Common design mistakes: reuse vs. invent, ignore flows, too indirect

“The founding vision was eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. We were looking at early machine learning approaches applied to creative tools, thinking about what's the potential for something like a BCI in terms of human-computer interaction. That was a vision statement that could last us a long time. The feedback we got was this is so abstract. What the heck are you guys talking about?”— Dylan Field

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Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Abstract vision confused; made concrete to clarify

“With WebGL, something like Figma became possible for the first time. In the past, you had to be desktop in order to do complex graphics. We were not sure where the limits of WebGL would be. Originally, Evan spent a lot of time building something that was more cross-platform and could target desktop as well as web. We had to rip it all out later because WebGL worked out.”— Dylan Field

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Technology & Engineering · Strategy & Decision Making

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Built cross-platform hedge, then bet fully on web

“Make the simple things simple, the complex things possible. It's easy to just endlessly do what users want, add more power to applications and then end up with something super complex that's not useful, not approachable. It's one of the biggest risks for Figma that we're always trying to counterbalance is how to make sure that we're not too power user despite people using us for powerful things.”— Dylan Field

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Strategy & Decision Making · Creativity & Innovation

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Simple things simple, complex possible

“In digital design, we ship AB tests all the time. We're constantly trying new things, seeing if they work. If they don't, you roll them back. No big deal. Completely different mindsets. For industrial design, it's all about you do all the iteration upfront and then you ship something, and this thing you ship is going to be around forever. You make your table, someone buys a table, you don't get to update the table.”— Dylan Field

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Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making

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Digital enables constant iteration; physical requires upfront perfection

“Design is incorporating so many different aspects of culture, of user behavior, of alignment, of craft, of just knowledge about where people are in different flows and more. It's so much about the debate of how it should work as well as the pixel perfection of what it looks like. It's something about creativity meeting problem solving in an interesting way. Even as design is made more accessible, it doesn't mean that craft is made more ubiquitous.”— Dylan Field

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Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

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Accessible tools don't create ubiquitous craft

“I think that it's both underhyped and overhyped at the same time. The reasoning capabilities in o1-Pro mode right now still seem underhyped. The level of analysis and thoughtfulness that is now included in answers, the level of intent that can be detected from your prompt. You don't have to be as mechanical about prompting things actually. At the same time, I feel like it's overhyped. There's still very much this outer loop that exists around AI.”— Dylan Field

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Technology & Engineering · Strategy & Decision Making

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AI reasoning both under and overhyped

“I think it's important to do things from a perspective of you want them to exist. But yeah, in any situation, if it's a game, then it's a game I want to win. I like to win board games too. I think it's fun to have that gamer mentality, especially when you're on a team. I was never a team sports guy because I'm not very good at sports, but I really like robotics club. We're all together trying to figure out in this sort of more intellectual activity, how do we win?”— Dylan Field

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Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Purpose primary, competition as game