the most eye opening think I’ve ever experienced design-wise was adding a new note pop-up feature that always popped up at the top of your timeline when you were scrolling, that showed when new notes have arrived.

It did this on every new note in realtime. It would keep popping up over and over, this was so stressful and jarring that it made me realize I have a huge amount of power to cause stress just from small design decisions.

This made me think: there is a large landscape of possible design decisions that can greatly increase or decrease user stress.

One example in damus is that I just show a dot on the home button, but I don’t show the number of new notes. Some people will consider this less helpful, but it’s damus’ way of saying: just chill, there are new notes, don’t worry about how many.

Saving the scroll position is another subtle design choice: it enables a way for people to scroll up to see every note they missed since last session. Is this necessarily a good thing? To me this is stressful, it’s like obsessively making sure I don’t miss any note.

We will still likely add this feature, at least to notedeck/android, but it does have some stress-level difference in the way the app is used.

Something to think about. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.