Our thoughts about designing digital products

This blog post stems from a thread I've shared on X before.

Seline's design got us over 500,000+ impressions on X and received an overwhelmingly positive response from people. That's considering I didn't know anyone and was posting about the tool from a fresh account.

People naturally like products made with care. That's why I've decided to share the core principles we followed while designing Seline.

ONE. Inspiration and where to find it

I rarely felt excitement about digital products and businesses, and the way people run them. Funny, considering I’ve been in web development for about ten years. But can you really get excited about using Jira? Or Slack? I surely can’t.

I’ll highlight two products that moved the needle for me:

amie.so. Back when the app was first announced, it struck me like a lightning—founder story was presented using film photos. It felt so personal and unique, a combination i’ve never seen before. Maybe it struck me because I love photography myself, but I even applied for a dev role and had an interview. I didn’t get the job—the interview was three months after I sent my application, and I was busy with my own projects by then and didn’t show much interest. I wouldn’t have hired myself either.

These stories are still up, I highly recommend taking a look.

getfernand.com. Less than a year ago, I stumbled upon a much different independent product named Fernand here on X, and it absolutely CLICKED. You can immediately feel it’s a product made with care, not just to make a quick buck. Their mascot feels just right, considering the service they provide, and it’s story is personal and touching.

The product is bootstrapped by people running it the way they want. That’s how I realized I wanted this too. I also knew I needed a mascot for whatever I’d be building.

p.s. We have a free Crisp chat but I plan to try moving to Fernand once we get Seline off the ground.

TWO. Design, graphics and personal touch

First off, my thoughts on the current design trends:

These days many products look the same. Mostly because UI/UX patterns have become well adopted and widely spread. Also there’s tons of premade stuff.
It’s hard to find a great designer who will live and breathe your product and keep iterating... and I think that’s where it’s at.. I almost think there’s no way to do it other than doing the design yourself. Unless you can somehow solve it with money, and that’s not for everyone. For example, amie's latest landing page was done by its founder.

Seline’s design is pretty basic too! Remove the images, and it’ll look almost like everything else. We use shadcn UI kit, which is awesome and also extremely popular. I’ve only changed some of the core components' looks, mostly based on things I’ve seen before and liked.

There are so many companies where people craft outstanding interfaces and experiences (family, vercel, linear, etc.), but that’s high-level play. I am mostly developing alone and didn’t have much time to implement my own components or play around with animations and flow, although I really wanted to implement something beautiful. I’m hoping to have some time for it in the future.

So, I chose to go with illustrations to stand out and to add that personal touch to Seline. I’ve seen a few websites (mostly non-tech) that rely heavily on their mascot/illustrations, and I decided it’s the way for us.

I started with a domain name. I wanted it to be a human name so it could be associated with a character. Then we ideated on a mascot, something people might remember. After that was done, we tried to feature Seline on every page of the website

We’ve drawn profile pictures for the three of us. I placed them in the header, so it highlights the people behind our product
I wrote and placed a personal “founder letter” on our homepage (inspired by @samdape's work)
I went for as few third-party tools as possible. For example, I developed our blog and docs myself using Next.js
- mdx, so they look unique compared to premade solutions
I’m lucky to have my girlfriend and her 15 years of drawing experience. The whole job cost me 1 pair of new loafers, 1 knitted sweater, and 30 kisses a day.

So I highly urge you to seek collaboration with artists. 2D and 3D. That’s the way to merge tech and arts. Don’t use AI for it, it’s crap. You’d be surprised how many talented people are out there.

Oh, and the font. We have basic Inter as our core font, and I also spent some time looking for a heading font that would bring some uniqueness, instead of just using Inter for everything.

THREE. Technology

I hope it’s not up for arguing that even a simple tool like Seline cannot be developed using jQuery and feel the same.

Or imagine our website, but every page load takes a couple more seconds, content shifts after every action, images jump up and down upon being loaded, buttons react within multiple seconds... I highly doubt that our illustrations would save the experience.

I think technology is as important as the design and plays a tremendous part of an overall product feel. It's how design comes to life. We went with Next.js + Vercel both on our marketing site and the app. I bet there are other ways to achieve similar result, but this one felt just right.

And there’s still lots of things we could and will improve on.

FOUR. Polishing, optimization, and taking your time

I am a huge opponent of “the quicker the better” mentality. Although it fruits results for many people, I just have different values. I’m building for the process of it, striving to create something that I will personally like myself, rather than doing it only for profit. Of course, I also want to succeed in the latter.

We:

Iterated on the final version of our mascot for tens of hours
Iterated on our landing page for months, going back and forth. I got rid of bento cards, redid our CTAs, our blog… everything
Optimized the marketing site so it hits 95+ on pagespeed
Tested our script and tracking on live websites with a bunch of traffic

The whole process from zero to the current release took 6 months, and that’s considering I’ve had lots and lots of help. Some people would say that a simple analytics tool like this should take less than a month to build. And maybe they are right, but that’s just not my approach.

I think that taking your time and developing a balanced product helps build people’s trust. They feel that it is something built to last, even if for some it happens subconsciously.

It also attracts people who have the same attitude towards their work. That I’m sure of.

FIVE. Team

There’s no way a product like Seline would be born out of my effort alone.

I’ve had people helping me who know their craft much better than me. My friend helped me with setting up the initial codebase and infrastructure, which is why the app feels this good. My girlfriend helped me with the drawings, which is why the app looks this good. I’m simply not as good at these things!

And that's it! Can't believe you read this far, but thank you and good luck!