Bitcoin is the future of money. But it needs more design. Bitcoin Design Week will bring together skilled Bay Area designers to jam on making future money more usable, beautiful, and human. I’ll be there. You should come too. Sep 15-19, 2025

1/ When I bought my Rivian R1S, I had one big hesitation. It wasn’t the range, performance, or reliability. It was the maps. Rivian had built its own maps + navigation system from scratch. And as a former Google Maps designer, I know how hard it is to make navigation great.

If all apps used LinkedIn's notification: “This person viewed your profile...” → Insta: Your high-school ex was snooping on your profile. → Zillow: 4 nosy people you sent holiday cards to, viewed your house. → X: Someone from the State Dept viewed your profile.

1/ In 2005, @avichal visited NYC and kept getting lost on the subway. Late to dinner and frustrated, he wondered: If Google Maps can route me anywhere by car, why can’t it get me on the right train? So on his flight home, he wrote the product spec for Google Transit. 🧵

1/ Waymo took out the driver, but it didn't design for the passenger. → 400 years ago: horse-drawn carriages. → 150 years ago: horse-less carriages. → Now: horse-less, driver-less carriages. There is so much opportunity to reimagine the basic carriage...

1/ We may be the last generation who needs to think like machines. For decades, we bent our thoughts into keystrokes + keywords and learned to navigate UIs. But now that computers are starting to interact like humans, the idea of human ⇄ computer interfaces has been upended.

1/ For years, I thought I was driving innovation — helping shape early versions of Google Maps, Search, and YouTube. Then an MIT professor asked me: “Can you name a time you designed a truly new behavior?” Not a better version. Something genuinely novel. I couldn’t. 🧵

I just learned there's an over-the-counter test to check for Covid, Flu A + Flu B. But the UI is 😵‍💫. The control line is labeled “C” (for Control), but “C” also stands for…Covid. So I thought my son had Flu B AND Covid. But nope, just a bad UI.

1/ “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation.” – Tobi Lütke. I’m a former Shopify designer and I’ve used AI daily for months. Tobi’s right: it’s not optional anymore. Here are 10 workflows that turned me into a 10x designer. 👇