Reflecting on product design in a few words. From my perspective.

Feature requests are rarely about features. They’re a user’s guess at a fix. But they tell you about friction, and wherever it runs hot, your product is failing people.

At MOCO, we built a friction tracker: a heat map of unmet needs. It tells us where to look instead of what people wish for. From there, we can uncover the why behind the requests — and figure out the fix with the most impact for everyone.

Most homes are bad products. Built top-down — plot defines shape, shape dictates floor plan, floor plan decides the rooms — with a compromise baked into every step.

Good products start inside out: what do you actually want to do in this room? Sketch out how you live, draw rooms for it, stitch them together, put a building around them, then find a plot that fits.

This might be a naive perspective on the construction industry — but hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

One more chatbot with a generic LLM response you ‘smell five miles against the wind’ (as you say in German). Type what you want, hope for the best. Micromanage your new AI trainee.

The strange thing with AI is that, yes, it is a tool, not a feature. But screwed into a product, a tool alone isn’t enough — it needs a character, an identity that feels native to your product. Then it becomes something integral, something people can relate to and feel good about. Have fun with, even.

We’re not the first ones bolting AI onto a product.
But I intend to bolt it on right.

Only because it feels (!) like everybody is doing it doesn’t mean that it is the right thing to do.

Okay, this one is funny–and a bit sad.

I set up a shortcut for Siri to listen to my question, hand it off to ChatGPT, and read its answer out loud.

“Can we add a setting for that?” slowly kills the product. The default response to feature requests should be “no”.

What you don’t build is as important as what you ship. If an issue keeps coming back, ask “why”. And if that answer resonates, start digging.

Can we stop adding fancy light bulb switches to our apps and websites? It’s 2026. We have a system preference for that. Just use it already.

Building is easy. Letting people know is not.

If I ever get to teach UX, I’ll start with American kitchen layouts. Nothing says ‘user-centered design’ like upper cabinets at forehead height and a stove right next to the fridge.

Speaking of materialism – do you like good stuff, too?

Eighty percent is enough. Ego aside, no one cares about the last 20 percent. You can tweak it later. Now ship it already!

I said it once and I’ll say it again: autonomous vehicles won’t take off until the first manufacturer takes full responsibility for its robots.

Oops I did it again… updated my personal webpage. Credits to Onur Çoban for the inspiration.

„I left my settings app in the other room yesterday“ — Jason Snell, sixcolors.com

Who needs standing desks when you can put each app in a different room and run around the apartment all day?

Reading ‘Getting Real’ by Basecamp on how to build successful web apps. So many good quotes, it’s impossible to choose. This is the way. Or is it?

“Internet providers sell connections by capacity, but the difference between streaming a 4K movie 30 times faster than you can watch it versus five times faster than you can watch it isn’t particularly important.”

— Mitchell Clark, theverge.com

Starting a new job as a product designer. Will it be as fulfilling as I hope it to be? Who knows. For now, it feels like the perfect match.

And it will certainly open new doors in the future, in a field I feel so deeply connected to.

The new Live Sticker feature of iOS 17 is just incredible. Finally, having kids (or pets) makes sense again!

On this blog, my website and other personal documents, I’m currently using this color palette: a slightly-off white for background, a dark green-black for text and moss-grey for sub-text, and a bright orange for interaction.

I let the orange start with .5 opacity for dynamic/animation. The palette also works in dark mode by flipping ‘text’ and ‘background’ color.

Reviewed and redesigned my personal webpage to a much more minimalistic approach. Pure HTML and CSS.

Reducing clutter and removing features — it’s liberating.

I always try to imagine Adobe’s face realizing that Affinity by Serif is here to stay. Such a comprehensive product, facing one of the biggest digital players with nothing but confidence and quality.