I got a little nostalgic after seeing the Coda and Grammarly news and decided to go back through some old notebooks. Nine years ago, we were just figuring out the shape Coda would take — the problems we'd try to solve, and the audience we'd try to delight. Looking back, it's fun to see the balance of totally existential strategic questions and fine-grained feature specifications. That's what those early 0 to 1 days tend to feel like. There's a lot of pedantic detail in some of these sketches, something Emery Wells and I would later spend a lot of time talking about at Frame.io. Building creative, collaborative tools for an audience that's bringing muscle memory and expectations from other products sets a high bar for getting the familiar details right. Observational skills are probably the most critical to develop for this type of work to be done well with a rapid cadence.
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Love that nitty gritty stuff about cursors, line behaviours and all that jazz. So important for real time collaboration UX and calling it out early was a statement of that importance that I’m sure stood you in good stead as the team grew, product evolved.
Did you ever figure out who Molly and Joe were?
Good stuff Trevor! Hope you are doing well
It's great to see how intentional your design is so early. It is cool to see this at a sketch stage rather than a drafting stage. Do you do rougher sketches elsewhere, or is this what you do as a first pass?
Love this. So cool to see the early thinking on the product.
VP Marketing at LinkedIn. Goldhouse A100. Forbes World's Most Influential CMO.
4dwhy is your handwriting so good 😆♥️💕