Case Study Club

Zombie UI

Katie Dill has a name for interfaces that all look the same: zombie UI. Her example is a Korean barbecue restaurant with a website that looks like it sells software.

Dill, head of design at Stripe, said it in her talk at the Lenny & Friends Summit. The name comes from the buildings that went up after World War II, when builders copied modernism at speed and left the thinking behind.

Her fix is a point of view. "If you don't, AI will give it for you." AI is good at the most probable answer, which means whatever was popular before. Last week I wrote about Rick Rubin saying much the same thing.

AI also makes things look finished too early. Type one sentence and you get an interface with nice corners and drop shadows. It looks done before anyone has asked if it solves the problem.

Teams used to filter before they built anything. A team could have twenty ideas and only enough people to build one. Now a team can build all twenty in a week, so the filter comes after the build, "when it is a lot harder to say no." Dill says we have to "unlearn that built means done and that done means good."

She calls that the job of an editor. I see it as the job of a design director, who sets the point of view before anything is built and says no to the work that doesn't fit it.

I learned this with Comms. I shipped it here in August, and it got more than 200 downloads and 29 weekly users in its first month. It was built and done, and it turned out to be the prototype for Orbal. Every section of the Orbal page has been through tens of iterations, from the intro to each slide after it.

Her last point is that when everybody can build, it gets harder and more important to differentiate. Someone has to direct the work.

Jan

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Arc's four tiers of tabs

Chris Coyier calls Arc "the greatest web browser ever." The Browser Company, now part of Atlassian, has moved on to Dia, and Coyier is trying to move with it. Before he does, he has written down what Arc got right about tabs. He counts four tiers.

The first is pinned tabs, small icons that stay the same in every space. The second is top tabs, which belong to one space and work like bookmarks. Close one and it resets to its main URL. The third is regular tabs, which Arc can archive on its own after a set time. The fourth is Little Arc, a bare window for links opened from other apps, with one button to turn it into a tab.

Squints

Squints by Andreas Katzmann puts Figma's measuring tools on any live web page. Inspect an element to see its box and the gap to the next one. Drag out rulers and guides that snap, lay a column grid over the page, and draw notes on top. It identifies the font that actually rendered, shows the token behind a colour, and slows every animation to a tenth of its speed. It is a free Chrome extension.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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