Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Great design has no training data
Products with no precedent
Take the iPhone: designing for multi-touch opened up a whole new interaction paradigm, and there was no training data for it. Instagram embraced the fact that everybody suddenly had a mobile phone. Snapchat had an interaction design that some people found strange, and it flipped the way people want to communicate with each other.
Each of those began with a problem people had or a need nobody had met, followed by a unique way of building for it.
AI repeats the pattern
AI puts designers in the same position again. Talking to something by voice, or using an agent to carry out tasks, has very little precedent. People are able to judge what good looks like in that territory, or at least try a bunch of things and learn along the way with real users.
Why was multi-touch such a leap?
The iPhone, introduced in January 2007, used a capacitive touchscreen that detects the electrical properties of a fingertip and can track several fingers at once. That made gestures like pinch-to-zoom possible, which a single-point stylus screen could not support. Researchers had built multi-touch systems since the early 1980s, including at the University of Toronto.
How did Snapchat change how people message?
Snapchat opens straight to the camera instead of an inbox, which set it apart from most messaging apps of its time. Its messages disappear after they are viewed, a feature central to its 2011 launch. Stories, a feed of snaps that last twenty-four hours, arrived in 2013, and Instagram added its own Stories in 2016.
How did Instagram ride the smartphone wave?
Instagram launched in October 2010 as an app for the iPhone, whose camera was good enough to make casual photo sharing worthwhile. The app paired filters with a simple feed, so a quick snapshot looked finished. Facebook announced its purchase of Instagram in April 2012 for about one billion dollars.
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