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 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
Videos
- Sunrise Alarm product review rant
- A Good Microwave Needs a Good Knob
- What if reusable zip packaging were good tho? Give it wings.
- What if true wireless earbuds were good tho? spoiler: it’s mostly buttons
Twitter threads (mostly but not entirely by me)
- meta-thread: Things I Want To Exist
- “what would twitter be like if it were actually optimized for conversation?”
- “increase in podcast content but zero improvements in the tools we use to consume them and parse their content”
- “a better app for reading digital text”
- “An integrated multi-structure content editor”
- why are audio streaming services all boring and stuck in old metaphors of “playlists” and “radio”
- this site (which is not yet this good but at least exists)
- “What if search engines were good tho?”
- “brb just reinventing the entire concept of web browser”
- “Time to put on Hot Like Sauce and ideate for 7 minutes about an alternative Twitter DM system.”
- 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)
- What if Slack were good tho?
- What if email were good tho?
- What if teamwork apps were good tho?
- What if Twitter were good tho?
Other writings by Malcolm
- 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, not by Malcolm
- 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
- 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.