Nicholas Jitkoff
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First of Kind · Mercurial Artifacts with Nicholas Jitkoff
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What Happens When an Assistant Uses Your Own Voice?
Nicholas Jitkoff tried using his own voice as an assistant and found the doppelganger unsettling. It also implied, to him, that the assistant had access to the same knowledge he does. No one else was using it. He was speaking, and hearing it speak back in his own voice.
Identity and trust are tangled, and people who help define an identity may trust it more. Hearing a voice you know leads you to expect that person, and then to judge the replies by how that person would feel about you. Using yourself is odder, because you are less likely to read extra meaning into what it does. He was testing what it would be like if he could pick any identity and chose his own. Some people have made mirrors
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How Did Quicksilver Send a Document to Someone?
Nicholas Jitkoff's favorite Quicksilver feature sent something to another person. Type the name of a document you know, type the name of the person it should go to, hit return, and it happened. That bypasses deciding on a medium and hunting down the object, which is the extra work that still sits in the way. He placed it next to launching apps, which happens hundreds of times a day, so people might actually try it.
Quicksilver could work that way because he was the one stakeholder and could iterate quickly with people who were trying it and giving constant feedback. Launching things already had obvious value, so other features could be tacked on. It became a platform for testing little feat
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What Is Pathfinding in Software Design?
Nicholas Jitkoff says pathfinding in software design is storytelling and vision setting: picturing things that could be built, in his case toward the near term, feasible and also inspiring. It sits somewhat off the critical path, and close enough to have a near-term impact. It does not always exist as its own team. Often any design team takes it on, fixing bugs and shipping the next release while also figuring out the next step.
It usually takes a company that is ready to change. Google, before Material, was not open to doing anything until Larry said they must make a change and that they had months to do it, with the willingness to commit resources. Sometimes design is the catalyst and has
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Why Is Old Software Hard to Experience Again?
Soleio says old software is surprisingly hard to experience again because there is so much of it and it keeps changing, so little context is left in which to run it. Digital work is easier to preserve in principle, and the original feel is still hard to recover. Videos can record a product, but they cannot capture the feel of walking around and using it. Things that felt familiar as recently as 10 years ago can still cause a visceral reaction. Old iPhones are a time capsule if Wi-Fi and cellular stay off so the phone can power up. Path, played on a phone recently, still felt nice. Foursquare, used while walking around, is not around anymore. An old browser can feel like driving a car from de
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What Does Act Without Doing Mean in Design?
Nicholas Jitkoff means act without doing as people having impact, often effortlessly, through the others around them, by supporting them and setting things up so the right things tend to happen. He splits a personal way of talking about design into two answers, the impact on the product versus the way the design is done, and says the two might be the same.
He hopes to see that approach while he expands a design team. The team should feel empowered, have the autonomy it needs, and be self-driven and enthusiastic, so the work feels effortless. He wants a delightful group to work in, and work that feels worth doing even independent of what is being made.
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What Is a Minimum Viable Universe?
Soleio describes a minimum viable universe as the smallest amount of information you can put into a system so it can grow, like flash fiction: how much fidelity a fable needs before it becomes a full world. He points to Itty Bitty, a way to encode a small web page, with small web page-like functionality, into a URL. He pictures it as a little portable self-blooming universe. The appeal is not only the clever, tidy implementation.
Nicholas Jitkoff designed Quicksilver as a platform for experimentation with UI paradigms, and it was well suited to that. Itty Bitty was mostly a way to build little things. Unreleased products around recipe sharing and coding environments are also built on top of
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What Is an Experience Designer?
Nicholas Jitkoff says an experience designer may be the most accurate name for this work, even though people say software and the title is a mouthful. The work is people's engagement with software, the hardware it runs on, and the environment around it. The most interesting problems span software, hardware, and environment together. Thinking only about software is limiting and not interesting.
Marketing, onboarding, the first experience of something, how people get into using a product, and the context of use all belong in the same picture. Design and programming cover part of it. What is interesting is how a product fits into the wider system. The role almost always means working with othe
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What Is the Most Malleable Design Medium?
Nicholas Jitkoff says software is the most malleable medium a designer can choose. Soleio had compared the field with law and said that about 15 years ago, people who would not have seen themselves as software designers could hit a stray bit of content, or a friend of a friend, and realize that how they think is design-adjacent. Work in Figma can look approachable enough to try, including for someone with taste who is already good at photography or visual communication.
Software design comes from graphic design, and many of the principles carried through because of structure, the constraints of the systems, and presentation. Training in architecture, performance, or photography gives other
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Why Are Side Projects a Better Hiring Signal?
Nicholas Jitkoff treats a side project someone is really excited about as a better indicator than past work of what that person will do well. Side projects show passion about something, and the side projects of potential co-founders were a reasonable litmus test for the same signal.
He had more side projects at Dropbox. Day work there focused on organization and on helping the company grow, retain people, and hire, which left less room for his own design work, so the side projects became an outlet on Caltrain. At Meta and Figma the work was more like pathfinding, so projects with the same feel happened inside the companies.
The shift from a side-project feel to the product a team is actual
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How Did Nicholas Jitkoff Choose His Co-founders?
Nicholas Jitkoff chose co-founders he had known for probably 15 years, and the choice was almost entirely about the people. He wanted to work with them, and they could figure out what to build.
He had worked with the group in different contexts. On one lower-risk 20% project at Google, he went to London to build the first iOS voice search app, almost in a hobbyist capacity, and he stayed in touch afterward. A few meetups tested the collaboration by talking through what they could build. The people wanted to build platforms and to think through the developer experience and the customer experience. He was doing company formation for the first time and had no set formula for the right approach
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Why Can the Arc Browser Try a Different Design?
Nicholas Jitkoff says the Arc browser can try a different design because it starts with a smaller user base and already has the learnings of earlier browsers built in.
A lot of the work becomes refinement once people expect the product to be a certain thing. A designer can argue that the job is to tear down the walls and make the hard choices of refactoring the experience. Hundreds of millions of people use the product every day, and they are not delighted when a gaping hole appears where they expected a key bit of functionality. They bump into muscle memory that had become invisible from using a browser day in and day out. The fight is almost like fighting the design of a car.
A smaller u
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How Does Joining Google Differ From Joining Meta as a Designer?
Nicholas Jitkoff says joining Google and joining Meta asked for different ways to practice design, even at companies of the same size. At Google he essentially grew up inside the company, moving from engineering into design and establishing hundreds of connections. At Meta he entered a company of the same size with no connections, so design leaders and executives had to create room for pathfinding.
The room replaced having to form relationships quickly in order to get work done. Over the 20 years he has been working, design has gained a seat at the table and no longer has to argue for one. People show almost overwhelming enthusiasm and ask design to figure everything out and to name the res