What if it were good tho?

Have you considered… what if it were good tho?

A remarkable amount of products are released without anyone ever considering this question, in regard to most aspects of the product. See this rant about how almost nothing is actually designed.

I, Malcolm Ocean, have taken the time to consider, for several things, “what if it were good tho?”

This site is an ongoing index of what I imagine things would be like if they were good.

Actual products

  1. What if to-do list apps were good tho?

Videos

  1. Sunrise Alarm product review rant
  2. A Good Microwave Needs a Good Knob
  3. What if reusable zip packaging were good tho? Give it wings.
  4. What if true wireless earbuds were good tho? spoiler: it’s mostly buttons

Twitter threads (mostly but not entirely by me)

  1. meta-thread: Things I Want To Exist
  2. “what would twitter be like if it were actually optimized for conversation?”
  3. “increase in podcast content but zero improvements in the tools we use to consume them and parse their content”
  4. “a better app for reading digital text”
  5. “An integrated multi-structure content editor”
  6. why are audio streaming services all boring and stuck in old metaphors of “playlists” and “radio”
  7. this site (which is not yet this good but at least exists)
  8. “What if search engines were good tho?”
  9. “brb just reinventing the entire concept of web browser”
  10. “Time to put on Hot Like Sauce and ideate for 7 minutes about an alternative Twitter DM system.”
  11. 100 tweets on “what if it were good tho?” (for @threadapalooza 2021 —100 different things, mostly suggested by friends, not all of which are products)

Design docs on my roamblog (all drafts, some more complete than others)

  1. What if Slack were good tho?
  2. What if email were good tho?
  3. What if teamwork apps were good tho?
  4. What if Twitter were good tho?

Other writings by me

  1. What if GitHub Forks View were good tho? (I’ve had this rant in me for awhile, and GH recently asked for feedback, so I gave it!)

Other epic reimaginings by other people

  1. Max Krieger: What if chat were good though? “can we augment our online chats with new affordances? what does a conversational medium that supports thinking look like? Is there a pathway from the linear, one-dimensional, immutable logs we call “online conversation”?” I made a comic
  2. Bret Victor: What if coding were good though? “creators need to be able to see what they’re doing”. here’s a video, though he has many other resources.
  3. propose others here!