Amarpreet Dhillon

A design engineer based in Montreal, Canada. Currently helping users build their worlds and write their stories at . I love to shape how software works and feels.

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Velocity and craft

Velocity is amplified. Generative tools accelerate the work, and anyone who has used them for a week already knows it. A user flow may be designed within the day. A component library may be built within the week.

All of that is true, and it is the least interesting part. The amplification reaches production alone; perception still moves at the pace it always has. Between those two facts lies everything that still distinguishes one body of work from another, and a settlement between the velocity available and the judgment required is the objective.

Production was a genuine skill and it remained scarce for precisely as long as it remained difficult. It is no longer difficult, and it ceased being difficult for everyone at once.

Once a skill becomes universal it stops working as a differentiator, and distinction migrates to whatever remains scarce.

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Design engineering a collaborate popover

I’ve designed and built many UIs over the years, so intuition plays a big role in recognizing when an interface can be improved. When something feels off about an interaction, that feeling is compressing experience into a signal before you can put theory behind it. The design vocabulary helps you validate and communicate it, but the noticing comes first.

Still, validated intuition makes for stronger design decisions, and validation doesn’t require a formal study. Lightweight methods like heuristic evaluation and discount usability testing[^1] surface most issues.

Let’s look at the example above, a share and collaborate popover. My intuition says the interaction is overly complex and could be simplified. Let’s break it down.

The “Add people” input suggests that clicking on it should let us type and search for users to add. Instead, it navigates to a second screen. This closely resembles a standard input field prevalent across the web, so it should behave like one. This false affordance goes against Jakob’s Law[^2][^3] and introduces unnecessary cognitive load.

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