Why Did Phones Break Desktop Design Tools?

Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk say Sofa joined Facebook while Chris Cox and others were still choosing companies to acquire so Facebook could lead on design. Desktop software had three interactions with a mouse: click, scroll, and maybe resize. Phones brought 50 overnight, including double tap, triple tap, swipe up, down, left, and right, and tossing the phone around. The team had no tooling for any of it.

The gap stayed part of the culture after the Sofa group left. Facebook's design team pioneered prototyping methods that later became standard at Twitter, Microsoft, and Amazon. The acquisitions were meant to make Facebook a pioneer on design, and playing with the new gestures on a real device was the missing piece.