Pretend Product: Improvements of Interfaces I’ve Encountered This Week

Pretend Product is a series of musings on a product that should exist in the world or improvements I’d offer to an already existing product

Disney+

• Press spacebar to play / pause what’s on like Netflix does.
• Hover a tile to add to list instead of having to click the tile and get sent to a new page just for a single action.

Imagine a plus button and other actions here instead of just the movie thumbnail

Medium

• Only count towards my limit if I actually read the piece instead of counting it against me the second I click into the article.

I actually didn’t read all of my free stories this month. You miscounted because you incremented the number of stories that I clicked into, not the ones I actually read.

Fetch

• This sign up screen that says sign in instead should update the copy to accurately represent the actions that can be taken.

I almost thought sign in and sign up were in the same list until I saw the link to sign in instead. Confusing.

Airbnb

• Require hosts who claim to have WiFi to verify their upload and download speeds on their properties.

LinkedIn

• Cue emoji reactions to messages by relevancy. I never use 80% of these.

Rotate with my most recently used reactions instead of these 5. It’s unclear to me why they were chosen as the top reactions for LinkedIn DMs to begin with.

One of my peers advised me to improve my product sense by moving through my day thinking about a product that could help my life or seeing how the current products that I use could be improved. Pretend Product is me putting that into practice.

I encourage you to move through your day being aware of the things you use from a product lens and see how that helps drive your creativity and innovation.