2 ways to make your design ideas compelling💡

You can have the greatest design concepts in the world, but none of that matters if they don't make it into production. So this episode is all about how to create an aura of inevitability around your ideas. And one of my favorite examples is from Vincent at Figma and the story of how AI search got prioritized and launched at config 2024.

I actually really wanted to build text search instead of this more complex autocompletes. And I'd written this text document, this PRD where I basically outlined the case for text search where it's like, hey, we should build text search for these reasons and given this machine learning model and a fine tune like this, we can probably pull it off. And that PRD just completely went nowhere. People were excited about it, but everyone was like, I'm not sure if I believe what's written here. Do you have any proof that we can indeed pull off text search? That's like, what you're writing about these machine learning models is actually true.

I've had pretty much this exact same experience before, and it's really a case study in the value of prototyping. So here's what Vincent did next.

So I made an end to end prototype just to show that from a technical perspective this is possible. And it was this prototype that kind of showed, okay, you can do selection search, you can do image search, you can do text search.

It's so much more difficult to ignore something that feels real. It reminds me of Saleo's story of Project Motion and how they got buy in from Zuckerberg to add video to the Facebook platform.

Code Wins Arguments was a poster that we had at Facebook, but I understood and internalized that less than years prior to that poster being created, just through the experience of building the project and kind of creating this aura of inevitability around it. Because it was functional, it was working, people inside the company could use it, and we were running out of obstacles to keeping us from shipping it more broadly.

The cool thing is that you as a designer now have the power of code prototypes in your toolkit, even if you have no idea how to write any syntax. Like, I've been using lovable and cloud artifacts a lot recently to explore ideas, even just to get a sense of what's possible. Like, I'm working on a new canvas experience for Inflight and I thought it'd be pretty neat to dynamically theme the canvas to match the UI that you upload. Now, this is the exact type of project that normally gets deprioritized but using Claude, I was able to figure out exactly how it could work and realized that actually it's pretty straightforward. In this case, sending someone a working prototype is 10 times more compelling than presenting the idea as a slack message. But code isn't the only thing at your disposal. The defining moment in Vincent's journey for getting buy in came when he filmed a video to walk through the prototype and get people excited about the idea.

I figured that the prototype by itself wouldn't be enough. What are you going to do? Are you going to send people a link? So you have to trust that people like, understand the prototype about your narration. So one thing I did in addition to the prototype was create this video around it where I'm basically going through the prototype and I'm basically pitching the idea of hey, we should focus on search instead. And here are all the three ways that would truly enrich like, you know, Figma's product.

I'll say it again, design is sales. And it's a big reason why video has quickly become the go to way that I share my work internally. When people can hear you talk about the problem and why you have so much conviction in a specific, specific idea, it's so much more compelling. And apparently it's not just me. I shared a poll recently because I was curious how often are people using video when sharing their work? And it beat sharing a figma link. Almost 2 to 1. It reminds me of when Kevin had a product at webflow, talked about how they use Loom.

Internally, you'll see designers constantly building prototypes, walking through the experience, recorded over a.

Loom, doing the voiceover, and then you'll see just a flood of feedback coming.

In, real quick message and then we can jump back into it. You know what I can't stop thinking about cursor but for designers. And that's why I'm all in on desen. It's not another zero to one tool for prototypes or side projects. It's a visual interface that gives you access to your company's existing code base so you can make updates to things like components, typography, properties and push your designs to production without having to go through an engineer. That's what the future of product design will feel like. And you can start experiencing it today. Just head to Dive Club Desen to get started. That's D E S S N. Look, I don't know about you, but I've never been happy with the way that I get Async feedback on my designs. Whether it's Figma comments Loom videos, slack threads. It's a mess. So behind the scenes I'm working on the product that I've always wanted to exist and it's called In Flight and I'd love to show it to you before it goes live. So head to Dive Club Startup to get a little sneak peek of what's coming next. Okay, now onto the episode. Now, just because you hit record on a video doesn't mean that it's going to be effective. You still have to be compelling. So let's return to our Vincent story. I want you to pay attention to the first couple of sentences in the video that he shared internally in figma.

It's almost 5pm and you're on the design deadline and you're scrambling to make it, but you just can't find your freaking design slots you're looking for. He asked your co workers on Flack where the design files are, but they don't know. And now you just measured that line. Your entire career is gone.

That, my friends, is a hook. And it's a big reason why the video went viral internally at Figma. It reminds me of when Gabe Valdivia said the best designers act like content creators within their org.

I do believe today that designers are content creators. And as content creators, one of your main tasks is to tell a story in a format that is compelling to an audience.

And the more that I put my ideas out into the wild, the more convinced I am that video is the most compelling way to do it.

And I think if you look at the broader media landscape, there's a reason why video is so engaging and so powerful. More importantly, short form video is so powerful. I don't think, you know, sharing ideas within a team is any different. You can like. I think the best designers are probably like TikTok creators within their own company who can create some ad idea that's sticky and really engaging in a way that's really powerful. Someone who's probably the best that I've seen do this is Alex Cornell.

Conveniently, I interviewed Alex Cornell too, and he shared the exact same sentiment. You don't get a free pass just because it's the workplace.

I think there's like a mistaken assumption that people will read everything you write and watch everything you you post, and that's absolutely not the case. All the same rules around like posting to YouTube and making it engaging and like thinking about how you're going to hold people's attention apply in corporate communications as well.

I have a bunch more thoughts on how you can effectively use video and get better feedback from your team, but I'm going to save those for an upcoming episode. So that's all for now. I will see you next week.