Benoit

Users spend 2 to 4 hours straight talking to Sam. Sam is an AI companion we designed for Sunflower, an addiction recovery app. People who had never discussed their addiction openly suddenly had a space where they could say anything without judgment. Many of them quit and stayed sober because of Sam. But Sam wasn't in the first version or the second or the third. We went through four full iteration rounds before figuring out when to introduce the AI, how to build trust before asking personal questions, and how to make users feel invested before they even created an account. The next blog breaks down the 5-step process behind 10K paying users. Blog out now - Medium - pixel1.medium.com Substack - substack.com/@benpixel1

We banned Figma AutoLayout for junior designers at Pixel One AutoLayout is one of Figma's best features and it's a massive time saver. (You set spacing rules once and the layout automatically maintains them when you add or remove elements) But it's also making junior designers significantly worse at their craft. Junior designers start defaulting to AutoLayout for everything before they even think about what layout actually makes the most sense because it's convenient and fast. The problem is AutoLayout only lets you set certain types of rules and it's notoriously bad at handling exceptions (and good UI design is full of intentional exceptions) So junior designers end up designing within the constraints of what AutoLayout allows instead of exploring what the interface actually needs and that fundamentally makes you a worse designer because you're letting the tool dictate your options instead of your judgment. You stop exploring and you default to patterns the software has imposed on you. For a long time we had a rule, if you're junior you don't touch AutoLayout and you align everything manually. When you align everything by hand you pay way more attention to spacing and alignment details because you can't trust the machine to do it perfectly and you're constantly double-checking your work which trains your eye. AutoLayout removes that training and those observation skills are still critical even with all these automation tools (maybe especially with all these automation tools) The best junior designers we've hired are the ones who learned to see spacing and alignment problems before they learned to automate them away.