从 Snap 工程师到创始设计师：Nate Parrott 谈 Arc 浏览器的设计

Shopify、Mercury 和 GrubHub 有什么共同点？猜不到吧？它们都不断回来找我，让更多设计师加入 Figma Academy，因为这个课程不止讲基础，还会教你高级技巧，让你对团队更有价值。我们有每周直播课，深入讲解系统策略、加速工作流、高级原型设计等细节，我还会在整个课程中对你的所有作品给出个性化反馈。所以如果你想把自己的技艺提升到新高度，我为这个节目的听众准备了一个特别优惠，我想你会喜欢的。去 dive.club/figma 抢占你的名额吧。好，现在进入正题。

What do Shopify, Mercury, and GrubHub all have in common? Give up? Well, they keep coming back to me to enroll more of their designers in Figma Academy, because it goes beyond the basics and teaches you advanced tactics that you can use to become more valuable to your team. We have weekly live sessions where we really get into the details of things like system strategies, workflows for speed, advanced prototyping, and I even give personalized feedback on all of your work throughout the program. So if you want to take your craft to the next level, I have a special offer for the listeners of this show, and I think you're going to like it. So head to dive.club/figma to claim your spot. Okay, now on to the episode.

我觉得很多设计团队的最佳实践是：团队应该像一个整体，要有非常统一的设计系统，每个人产出的作品都要高度一致，看起来一样、感觉一样、声音也一样。我不知道这是对是错，但我知道我很享受在一个反其道而行的团队里。我们最终形成了这样一种状态：不，每个人都有自己的印记。我可以看着团队里任何人做的作品，不用别人告诉我就知道是谁做的。我就是能看出来。

I think a lot of the best practice for a design team is like the team should behave as one, there should be this very cohesive design system, everyone should be producing work that is extremely consistent, that looks the same, that feels the same, that has the same voice. And I don't know whether that's right or wrong, but I know I've really enjoyed being at a team that kind of bucks that trend. We've kind of wound up in this place where it's like no, everyone does have a fingerprint. I can look at something that anyone in the team has created and kind of know who made it without even being told. Like I can just tell.

欢迎收听 Dive Club，我是 Rid，这里是设计师永不停歇学习的地方。过去五年我最喜欢的产品之一就是 The Browser Company 的 Arc，今天我们请到了他们的创始设计师 Nate Parrott。这期节目将深入探讨 The Browser Company 的设计为何如此特别，我们会聊到他们的原型文化，以及他们如何探索新想法。但首先，我们得先稍微了解一下 Nate，因为在加入 The Browser Company 之前，他从未担任过设计师的职位。所以这个故事实际上是从 Snap 开始的。

Welcome to Dive Club, my name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. One of my favorite products that has launched in the last 5 years is Arc from the Browser Company, and today we get to hear from their founding designer, Nate Parrott. So this episode is a deep dive into what makes design at the Browser Company so special. We get into their culture of prototyping, how they explore new ideas. But first, we got to get to know Nate just a little bit, because prior to joining the Browser Company, he had never held the role of designer before. So this story actually starts at Snap.

那段时间真的很有趣，我非常享受，离开时也很纠结。我毕业后直接以 iOS 工程师的身份加入，在 Snap Map 团队，那是一个在纽约的独立团队，负责的是——如果你没用过的话——一个有点像表情符号风格的地图，显示你的朋友在哪里，还有很多好玩的功能，比如如果你的朋友在机场，他们的头像会拿着行李；如果他们在船上，头像就会在船上。我加入后真的很喜欢捣鼓这些东西。我做过正式的生产项目，但我最喜欢的是一些小东西，比如他们让我上线了一个功能：你点击某个人的表情符号，如果他们在下雨的地方，屏幕上就会下起雨来，有粒子效果，或者会下雪。我特别喜欢在产品里加入这些随机、异想天开的小东西。过了一段时间，我意识到这其实才是我真正想做的事。于是我从生产工程师的角色转型为更偏向原型设计师，开始和 Snap 的设计团队紧密合作。基本上就是做超高保真度的原型。设计师们会有设计稿，或者只有想法，然后我会拿实际的 iOS 代码库，把它 fork 出来，再把那些功能硬塞进构建版本里，然后他们会给产品团队和设计师发一个特殊的构建版本，里面都是大家正在做的各种想法的粗糙版本。因为像 Snap 这样的产品，你面对的是人际沟通，所以很难用静态设计稿来模拟。比如很难从设计稿中判断：周五晚上出去喝酒时，你给朋友发 Snap 的时候，真的会去用这个功能吗？所以很多这类东西，唯一能判断的方法就是真正把它做出来，让人们实际使用，让他们能和公司里的朋友真实交流，真正去感受它。

It was really fun, I really enjoyed it, and was really torn about leaving. I joined as an iOS engineer right out of school, and I was on the Snap Map team, which is this kind of separate team out in New York that works on, you know, if you haven't used it, it's like a bit emoji-style map that shows you where your friends are and does a bunch of fun things like, you know, if your friends are at the airport, their avatar will be holding luggage, and if they're in a boat, their avatar will be in a boat. So I joined there and really just enjoyed kind of messing around with stuff. Like I worked on real production projects, but some of the favorite things I did are like they let me ship this thing where you tap on somebody's emoji and they're in a place where it's raining, it'll like rain down on the screen, there's little particle effect, or it'll snow. And so I had a ton of fun just building these random whimsical little things into the product. And after a while, I was like, this is actually what I want to do. And so I transitioned away from this role as a production engineer to more of a prototyper, and I started working really closely with the design team at Snap. It was basically super high-fidelity prototyping. So designers would have mocks or they would just have ideas, and you would start by taking the actual iOS codebase and we would fork it, and then we would just hack those features into the build, and they would put out a special build for the product team and the designers that just had really hacky versions of all of these ideas that people were working on. Because with something like Snap, you're dealing with interpersonal communication, and so it's really hard to mock up. Like it's really hard to tell in a design, are you actually going to reach for this feature when you're sending somebody a snap when you're out for drinks on a Friday night? And so really the only way to tell with a lot of these things is to build it for real and have people actually use them and be able to actually communicate with their friends who work at the company and really feel it out.

这很有意思，因为我刚和 Gavin Nelson 聊过，他现在在做 Linear 的移动应用，他解释说在他做的东西里，设计很大一部分就是交互。当设计本身就是交互时，你在 Figma 里能推进的程度是有限的。你得进入 SwiftUI 或者别的什么，做出一个东西，然后能发布预览版。所以我在这些公司里确实发现了一个共同主题。

It's interesting because I was just talking with Gavin Nelson, he's now working on the Linear mobile app, and he was explaining how so much of the design is the interaction in what he's working on. And like when a design is the interaction, it's only so far you can push it in Figma. Like you got to just get into SwiftUI or whatever and make a thing and be able to ship like send out a preview build. So there's definitely a theme that I'm catching on to here at these companies.

是的，我们在 Arc 有句话：你不能光靠苦思冥想就设计出一个浏览器，因为网络太混乱了，人们使用网络的方式也太混乱了，你在 Figma 里再怎么努力模拟，也永远无法真正知道结果，除非把它做出来，然后每天实际使用。

Yeah, I mean, we have a saying at Arc, like you can't just think really hard and design a browser, because the web is so messy and the way people use the web is so messy that you can try as hard as you want to mock something up in Figma, but you're never going to know until it's built and you can actually use it day to day.

好，那我们就跳一下。你是怎么从 Snap 的工程师，从未有过传统设计职位，变成 The Browser Company 的创始设计师的？

Okay, so then let's make the jump. So how did you go from engineer at Snap, never having had a traditional design role, to becoming the founding designer at the Browser Company?

说实话，我真不知道 Josh 和 Her 为什么愿意在我身上冒险。也许是因为我的网站，因为那个网站挺有趣的。我不知道。但故事是这样的：其实从大学开始，我就对浏览器非常感兴趣。我看到有人做精美的邮件应用、精美的笔记应用，我总是在想，为什么没有人做一个精美的浏览器？这是我比任何其他工具都用得多的工具。为什么没有人做浏览器界的 Mailbox？所以我在业余时间，其实自己就在做浏览器的原型，用的是 SwiftUI，大概在 2019 年，那时候 SwiftUI 刚出来，体验很糟糕，非常粗糙。但我做了一个非常基础的侧边栏，能加载页面，完全不可用。但我对这个想法很兴奋。我有一些朋友知道我对浏览器感兴趣，偶尔会有人跟我说，有个风投 guy 要创办浏览器公司，你应该和他聊聊。后来我真的去聊了。Josh 邀请我吃早餐，我们聊了聊，他看起来不错。但真正让我想在那里工作的，是我们聊到我做的浏览器，他也在聊他们正在做的浏览器，他说：哦，你有侧边栏，那你的侧边栏在哪边？我说：在左边啊，这还用问，侧边栏当然在左边。Josh 说：其实我们的在右边，因为我们深入思考过这个问题，网页应用都把侧边栏放在左边，所以你要平衡一下，把侧边栏放在右边。说实话，他错了，但我想：哇，你可以一整天都在思考这个问题。这真的是一个很深的问题，而我只是在业余时间做这个，我没有达到这种思考深度，但我可以。所以我就想，我想在这里工作。

I mean, I have no idea why Josh and Her took a chance on me, honestly. Maybe it was my website, because it's kind of fun. I don't know. But the story is, I'd actually been really interested in browsers for a really long time, ever since college. I saw people make fancy email apps and fancy notes apps, and I was always like, why is nobody making a fancy browser? Like this is a tool that I use way more than any of those other tools. Like why is nobody making the Mailbox of web browsers? And so in my spare time, I was actually prototyping a web browser on my own, and I was doing it in SwiftUI in like 2019, when SwiftUI had just come out and it was terrible and really rough. But I had like a really basic sidebar and you could load pages, and it was totally unusable. But I was excited about the idea. And I had friends who knew I was into web browsers, and occasionally I would hear from them, oh, there's this VC guy who's starting a browser company, you should talk to him. And eventually I did. Josh invited me to get breakfast, and we chatted, and he seemed cool. But what really sold me on wanting to actually work there was, we were talking about the browser that I had made, and he was talking about the browser that they were working on, and he's like, oh, you have a sidebar, and well, what side is your sidebar on? And I was like, well, it's on the left, duh, like that's where sidebars go. And Josh was like, well, actually ours is on the right, because we've thought about this a ton, and web apps put their sidebars on the left, and so you want to balance it, and you want to put your sidebar on the right. And he was wrong, honestly, but I was like, oh wow, like you could think about this all day. Like this is a really deep problem, and I'm doing this in my spare time, I'm not engaging at this level, but I could. And so I was like, I want to work here.

就像那一刻，我心想，不，这真的是一件值得深入探究的有趣事情。我喜欢这样，因为现在它确实在左边，所以某个时候你肯定赢得了那场争论。

Like that was the moment where I was like no this would be a really interesting thing to dig into. I love that, like knowing where you actually are now because it is in fact on the left, so at some point you definitely won that argument.

嗯，我是说，我没有参与那次讨论，但我们试过，其实真的很有意思。当你把侧边栏放在右边时，你会注意到的一件事是，你会花很多时间把鼠标拖过屏幕中间，然后你会注意到这一点。你会想，我花了好多时间把鼠标拖过太多像素。就像，你与某个东西互动的那些细枝末节，在浏览器这种你一直在用的工具上会非常明显地显现出来。但这就是我们最终的结果。不过，为了继续讲我是怎么到那里的，我和 Josh 见了面。我对这个项目很兴奋。他们让我做了几次很简短的面试，然后他们基本上就说，你被录用了。我不确定我是否要接受，然后我和 Josh 见了面。我想，我不认识这些人中的任何一个。我不认识 Josh，我不认识 Hirs，我也不认识另一位创始工程师 Samir。但我逐渐了解了他们，我意识到，是的，他们是好人。我应该和这些人一起工作。Josh 跟我讲了他在白宫的经历，以及他对自己运营一个婴儿尿布分发项目感到多么自豪，我就想，这家伙看起来是个好人。我觉得现在是我人生中该去冒险尝试一个雄心勃勃的初创公司的时候了，所以我这么做了。在 Co 之前大约两个月，我加入了，当时是纽约浏览器公司，我们打算完全面对面，每天在办公室工作，但这并没有真正实现，但你知道，公司其他人基本上也接受了。

Well, I mean, I don't have this talk, but we've tried it and it's actually really interesting. The thing you notice when you put the sidebar on the right is that you just spend a lot of time moving your mouse across the middle of the screen and you like notice it. You're like, I am spending a lot of time dragging my mouse across too many pixels. Like it just, the little nitty-gritty details of how you interact with something really show up with a tool like the browser that you're using all the time. But that's kind of where we ended up. But to continue the story of how I got there, I met with Josh. I was excited about the project. They had me do a couple really short interviews and then they were basically like, you're hired. And I wasn't sure if I was going to take it, and I met with Josh. And I think, I was like, I don't know any of these people. I didn't know Josh, I didn't know Hirs, I didn't know Samir who was the other founding engineer. But I just got to know them and I sort of realized, yeah, they're good people. I should work with these people. Josh told me about his time at the White House and how proud he was about running a baby diaper distribution program, and I was like, this seems like a good guy. And I feel like now is the time in my life to take a chance on an ambitious startup, and so I did. Like two months before Co, I joined and it was the Browser Company of New York, and we were going to be totally in person and work in the office every day, and that didn't really work out, but you know, the rest of the company sort of said all right.

那么我们来谈谈早期阶段吧，因为我觉得作为设计师，这是你能继承的最独特的环境之一，你知道你并不是在回应一套清晰的问题陈述，你只是相信浏览体验可以变得更好。不仅如此，浏览器是一个庞大的软件，所以你无法构建一个 MVP。浏览器的 MVP 是什么，你知道吗？所以，面对这样的起点，作为第一位设计师，最初几个月是什么样子的？

So then let's talk about the early days, because I think it's like one of the more unique environments to inherit as a designer, where you know you're not really responding to this clear set of problem statements, you just have this belief that browsing can be better. And not only that, the browser is a massive piece of software, so you can't build like an MVP. What's an MVP of the browser, you know? So given that starting line, what do those first few months look like as the first designer?

我的意思是，那主要是我们在做原型，我们试图构建 MVP，我们知道我们无法为世界构建 MVP，但我们可以为自己构建 MVP，我们可以加入我们日常使用浏览器所需的所有功能，尽管我们知道它会很糟糕，会缺少很多东西。所以我们开始时，当我加入时，他们的工作方式是每周或每两周做一个不同的原型，他们会给它们命名，他们会迭代。所以有一周我们会做一个侧边栏在左边或右边的原型。我参与的第一个是一个层级标签系统，当你打开一个标签时，它会嵌套在它的父标签下面，这挺酷的，但最终不是很有用。我们做了很多这样的尝试，比如我们有可以切换空间的版本，还有标签在顶部但只有五个的版本，我们真的很快地迭代，试图看看，好吧，你知道吗，我们并不缺想法，我们只是需要一个非常快速的流程来尝试它们。所以 Heran 和 Sam 构建了一个浏览器的基础，他们可以在 Electron 上迭代。它慢得可怕，也不是很可靠，但你能感觉到，你可以把标签放在任何你想要的地方，你可以把命令栏放在任何你想要的地方，你可以很容易地添加各种不同的屏幕，所以你真的能感觉到什么有用，什么没用。所以我们花了大约六个月的时间尝试各种东西，其中绝大多数完全没有成功，但我们觉得，酷，我们仍然有很多想法和很多兴奋感，而且你知道，那是 Co，所以我们没有别的事可做。最终我们有了几个我们喜欢的想法，所以我们把这些想法整合成了第一个版本。

I mean, it was a lot of just, we were prototyping, we were trying to build MVPs, and we knew we couldn't build an MVP for the world, but we could build an MVP for ourselves, and we could put in all the features that we needed to use a browser day-to-day, even though we knew it was going to be bad and it was going to be missing a ton of things. And so we started off, when I joined, the way they had been working was they were going to do a different prototype each week or each two weeks or something like that, and they would just name them, they would iterate. And so one week we'd be doing a prototype where there was a sidebar on the left or a sidebar on the right. The first one I worked on was this hierarchical tab system where you had, when you opened one tab it would be nested underneath its parent tab, which was kind of cool but not that useful ultimately. And we just did a ton of these, like we had versions where you could switch spaces and versions where you could have tabs at the top but there were only five of them, and we just really rapidly iterated and tried to see like, okay, you know what, we kind of had no shortage of ideas, we just needed a really fast process to try them. And so Heran and Sam built this foundation of a browser they could iterate on in Electron. It was horrendously slow, it was not very reliable, but you could get a sense of like, you could put tabs wherever you wanted them, you could put the command bar wherever you wanted it, you could add various different screens really easily, and so you could really get a sense of what was useful and what wasn't. And so we spent like six months trying stuff, and the vast majority of it did not work out at all, but we were like, cool, we still had like a ton of ideas and a ton of excitement, and you know, it was Co, so we had nothing else to do. And eventually we had a couple ideas that we kind of liked, and so we took those and formed that into the first version.

Marc，你能谈谈外部用户反馈在早期阶段的作用吗？比如，这在多大程度上算是一回事？因为你知道，我不知道，我从来没见过有人真的抱怨他们的浏览器。从历史上看，我们并没有那么在意浏览器。所以，跟我谈谈在早期阶段，反馈与单纯探索和相信直觉之间的平衡。

Marc, can you talk a little bit about the role of external user feedback in the early stages? Like how much even was that a thing? Because you know, I don't know, I've never seen someone like complain about their browser really. Like historically we haven't cared that much about the browser. And so talk to me a little bit about this balance between feedback and then just exploring and trusting your gut in the early stages.

我们很幸运，因为我们是在为自己构建，你知道，那些花很多时间在浏览器上的人，相当懂技术，但不是每个人都是工程师。所以我们很幸运，如果我们构建了什么东西，我们自己很容易就能判断它是否有用。你知道，你可以尝试在浏览器中构建一个功能并每天使用它，但你知道，你必须用这个工具来工作，所以你不能真的自欺欺人地认为什么有效什么无效。所以我们实际上，我认为我们在最初六个月左右的超能力是，我们就是受众，我们就是日常用户，我们使用这个工具，并且在很大程度上完全依赖它，以至于我们真的不需要做用户研究或焦点小组或类似的事情。我们会从自己和团队成员那里听到反馈，后来，你知道，我们当然扩展了，我们在做 UX 研究、扩展和获取团队以外的人的观点方面做得更好了。但在最初的日子里，很大程度上就是我们就是客户。

We were kind of lucky in that we were building for ourselves, you know, people who spent a lot of time in the browser, reasonably tech-savvy, but not everyone engineers. And so we were kind of lucky in that if we built something, it was pretty obvious to ourselves whether it was useful or not. You know, you can try to build a feature into the browser and use it day-to-day, but you know, you have to use this tool for work, and so you can't really kid yourself about what works and what doesn't. And so we actually had, I think our superpower in the first six months or so was that we were the audience and we were the daily users, and we were using the tool and we were fully dependent on it for so much that we didn't really need to do user research or focus grouping or anything like that. We would hear from ourselves and from folks on the team, and later, you know, of course we branched out, we've gotten a lot better at doing UX research and expanding and getting the perspectives of people outside our team. But in the very early days, it was very much just like we are the customer.

你知道，Arc 另一个独特之处，而且从测试版开始就一直如此，就是，你知道，你显然很注重细节，但不仅如此。就像产品中你能感受到一种灵魂和个性，你知道，很多其他产品团队可能会认为不必要的元素，比如你做的那些引导卡片。你知道，所以你能跟我们谈谈 Arc 的视觉语言是如何形成的吗？

You know, something else that's unique about Arc and really has been since even like the beta is, you know, you obviously sweat the details, but it's more than that. Like there's a soul and a personality that you can feel in the product, and you know, elements that maybe a lot of other product teams would view as unnecessary, something like the onboarding cards that you had. You know, so can you talk to us a little bit about how the visual language for Arc came to be?

是的，我是说，你提到引导屏幕很有意思，因为那是我们团队有了其他几位设计师后的第一批项目之一。Carla Cole 和 Christina Barov 加入了，还有 Omar Alphan，他们构建了这个令人难以置信的引导屏幕。这是第一个我基本上没有参与的大项目。有趣的是，我觉得 Josh 雇用我是因为我在 Snap 工作过，他说，哦，你会为浏览器制作所有这些很酷的、异想天开的东西。而我进来的时候想，这是我的第一份设计工作，这是一个严肃的软件，所以我必须让它非常高效和易用。

Yeah, I mean, it's funny you mentioned the onboarding screen, because that was one of the first projects once we had a couple other designers on the team. Carla Cole and Christina Barov, they joined, and Omar Alphan, and they built this incredible onboarding screen. And this is the first big project that I was kind of not involved in. And it's funny, I think that Josh hired me because I was at Snap, and he's like, oh, you're going to make all these cool whimsical things for the browser. And I was coming in and I was like, this is my first design job and this is a serious piece of software, so I have to make this really efficient and usable.

我在那儿的头一年左右，其实没怎么考虑“感受”这回事。我记得 Josh 有次说，我们要把这个项目交给其他真正能做这事的人。后来我慢慢想通了，意识到其实不只是实用性。我们是亲眼看到的——我们做了一个引导流程，说到底就是一系列表单，结果人们在 Twitter 上赞不绝口。大家打开它、开始走引导流程，会发出“哇”的惊叹，这种反应你在人们盯着电脑屏幕时很少听到。所以对我来说，教训非常明确：你必须让人们有所感受，你必须让他们兴奋，而且这么做几乎不会错。实际的身份认同是什么反而不那么重要。我觉得作为团队，我们已经围绕“我们的氛围是什么、想唤起什么样的感受”达成了共识。但我觉得真正重要的是那些做这个项目的人，他们心里有想建的东西，然后把它变成了现实，唤起了某种感受。这几乎就像艺术——没有标准答案，就是要让人有所感受。

I kind of just didn't think about the feeling very much for the first year or so of my time there. I think Josh at a certain point said we're going to give this project to other people who can actually do this stuff. And eventually I sort of came around and was like, actually, you know, it's not all about the utility. But we were shown this firsthand. We built this onboarding flow, which is just a series of forms at the end of the day, and we got people raving about it on Twitter. People would open it up and start the onboarding process and go 'whoa' in a way that you very rarely hear people go 'whoa' when they look at something on their computer screen. So to me, the lesson was very much like you have to make people feel something, you have to make people excited, and there's not really a lot of places where it's wrong to do that. It doesn't even so much matter what the actual identity is. I think as a team we've kind of coalesced around what is our vibe, what are the feelings we want to evoke. But I think really it comes from the people who worked on that project who just had this idea of what they wanted to build, and they brought it to life and it evoked a feeling. It's almost like art where there's no right answer for what it should be. Make people feel something.

这让我想起你跟我说的另一件事：Arc 的人会在他们发布的东西上留下自己的指纹。那我们能不能聚焦到那段时期——你开始意识到“我想注入更多感受，超越实用性”的时候。有没有一个例子，你设计了一个东西，然后你会说“对，我能在这个功能或交互上看到我的指纹”？

It reminds me of something else you said to me, which is people at Arc leave their fingerprints on the things that they ship. So maybe we could zoom in on that period of time where you're kind of coming to this idea where it's like, okay, I want to actually inject more feeling and go beyond utility. What is an example of something where you designed it and you're like, yeah, I can see my fingerprints on this feature or this interaction?

嗯，我觉得一个好的例子是我们移动应用的第一版。我们做过两个移动应用：Arc Search 是最新的，是个完整的浏览器；在那之前，我们有个配套应用，只是显示侧边栏里的标签页，你可以往里面加东西，基本上就是个权宜之计，在我们做出真正的移动浏览器之前先用着。但它的酷之处在于，因为它基本上就是个列表加一个分享扩展，所以有巨大的空间去添加大量细节和乐趣。我花了很多时间深入思考：如果不用系统 UI 套件、也不借鉴任何人，我会把移动应用做成什么样。最后我搞出了一个非常有趣的拟物设计，带一堆渐变、亮色和柔和的文字标签。我花了三四天时间做一个按钮组件——就是你想往侧边栏加东西或者登录时用的那个按钮——它是个大的 3D 物体，你按下去它会向下动画，还有两次触觉反馈，一次按下、一次抬起，还有一堆阴影之类的疯狂细节。我全用 SwiftUI 写的。对我来说，这很大程度上就是自我放纵，玩得很开心。但我觉得这正是让这样的团队做出最好作品的方式：人们去做自己受启发想做的事，留下自己的指纹。如果你赋予人们这种权力，又别让他们跑偏太远，最终就会得到充满热爱的作品。我在那个应用里倾注了很多心血，希望它体现出来了。

Yeah, I think a good one is the first version of our mobile app. So we've had two mobile apps. Arc Search is the most recent one, it's like a full-fledged browser. And before that we had this companion app which just showed you your tabs from your sidebar, you could add things to it, and it was very much just like a stopgap solution before we could build out a real mobile browser. But what's cool about it is because it was basically just like a list to you and a share extension, there was so much room to really add a bunch of detail and a bunch of joy to it. And so I spent a lot of time going really deep on what I would make a mobile app look like if I wasn't using the system UI kit or really borrowing from anyone, and landed on this really fun skeuomorphic design with a bunch of gradients and bright colors and soft text labels. And I spent like three or four days on this one button component that you'd use when you wanted to add something to your sidebar or also to sign in, where it was like this big 3D thing, you push down on it, it would animate down, and there'd be two haptics, one for when you push down and one for when you push up, a bunch of shadows and all this crazy stuff. And I built it all in SwiftUI. And it was very much for me just kind of self-indulgent, like a good time. But I think that's kind of how you get the best work out of a team like this: people go off and they do what they're inspired to do, and they leave their own fingerprints on it. And if you empower people to do that and you don't let them get too far afield, I think you wind up with just like labors of love. I put a lot of labors of love into that app, and hopefully it's shown through.

听你说“充满热爱的作品”很酷，因为作为一个只在 Twitter 上旁观的人，Arc 让我印象很深的一点，就是你们庆祝这种作品的方式：每次发布都会点名具体的设计师和工程师。你能看到这个“灵魂飞轮”是怎么一直转的——你很有动力做出很棒的东西，因为你知道你的名字会被写上去。如今在大公司，有多少设计师能在一个发布的功能上留下自己的名字？

It's cool to hear you say labor of love, because as someone who's just observing from Twitter, something that really stands out to me about Arc and the way you celebrate labors of love is every single release cites the specific designers and engineers that worked on that thing. And you can see how this flywheel of soul just keeps spinning, where you're really incentivized to make something awesome because you know your name's going to be put on it. And how many designers get their name put on a feature that's released at a big company today?

对，非常少。我觉得这很有趣，因为很多设计团队的最佳实践是：团队应该像一个整体，要有高度统一的设计系统，每个人都应该产出极其一致的作品——看起来一样、感觉一样、声音一样。我不知道这是对是错，但我知道我很享受待在一个反其道而行的团队里，不管好坏。我觉得这不是刻意为之。不知道你认不认识我们的设计负责人 Dustin，他可能会说他试图营造这种环境，但我觉得通过有意和无意的行为，我们最终走到了这个状态：不，每个人确实都有自己的指纹，确实有一种编辑式的声音。我对电影制作了解不多，但 Browser Co 的每个人都喜欢聊 A24。我听说 A24 非常特别的一点是，他们给电影人极大的创作自由。他们不像其他制片厂，一群人坐在房间里说“我们怎么才能拍出一部有市场卖点的电影”。他们给那些声音很强的电影人很多自由，让他们放手去做自己想做的。这就是他们能产出那些作品的原因。Browser Company 在某种程度上很像这样：是的，你有一家公司，你确实有一个我们共享的品牌和声音，但每个手艺人都有自己的声音，而且被允许闪耀出来。

Yeah, very few. I think it's funny because I think a lot of the best practice for a design team is like the team should behave as one, there should be this very cohesive design system, everyone should be producing work that is extremely consistent, that looks the same, feels the same, has the same voice. And I don't know whether that's right or wrong, but I know I've really enjoyed being in a team that kind of bucks that trend, for better or worse. I don't think this is a deliberate thing. I don't know if you know Dustin, our design lead, would say he's tried to foster this environment, but I think through deliberate actions and non-deliberate actions, we've kind of wound up in this place where it's like, no, everyone does have a fingerprint, there is kind of an editorial voice. I don't know much about filmmaking, but like everyone at Browser Co likes to talk about A24. And one of the things that I've been told is very special about A24 is that they let the filmmakers—they give them an enormous amount of creative freedom. They're not like other studios where there's a bunch of people in a room being like, here's how we can make a marketable film. They give filmmakers with a very strong voice a lot of freedom, just go out and do what they want. And that's how they wind up with the kind of stuff they put out. And Browser Company in a way feels a lot like that, where it's like, yeah, you have a company and you do have a brand and a voice that we all share, but there's individual craftspeople with individual voices who are being allowed to shine through.

我们能再多聊聊你的个人流程吗？比如当你盯上某个机会时，你会做什么来推动它、弄清楚它能变成什么？然后你的工程背景又是怎么融入其中的？

Can we talk a little bit more about your personal process? Like once you have your eyes set on some kind of an opportunity, what are you doing to push that forward and figure out what something can become? And then how does your engineering background play into that too?

嗯，这真的取决于项目是什么，但很多时候我做的第一件事就是打开 Xcode 试试。尤其是最近我们在做的一些 AI 相关的东西，很多东西的感受取决于你从语言模型那里得到的反馈，或者从网上拿到的数据。所以我的很多流程其实是从非常功能性的原型开始的。这些原型通常很粗糙，没有你期望的那种感觉或氛围，也没有可用性。但我会尽快开始做一个我能“活在上面”的产品。所以我最近很多工作就是在延续我在 Snap 的做法——我们有一个单独的应用构建版本，人们每天都在上面生活，设计师很容易在上面迭代。

Yeah, I mean, it really depends on what the project is, but a lot of the time the first thing I do is just open up Xcode and try something out. Particularly with some of the recent AI stuff we've been doing, where so much of the feeling of something depends on the feeling you're going to get back from a language model or something like that, or the kind of data you'll get back from the web. And so a lot of my process really is starting with prototypes at a very functional level. And often they'll be really rough and they won't have the feelings or the vibe that you would expect, or the usability. But I'll start just trying to get a product I can live on as quickly as possible. And so a lot of my work recently has been in just kind of continuing what I did at Snap, where we had a separate build of the app that people were just living on day to day, and it was very easy for designers to iterate on.

所以现在我们有了这个，我们有一个 Arc 的版本，还有很多直接通过功能开关（feature flags）塞进 Arc 的原型。然后团队里其他人还做了各种其他原型浏览器，就是基础浏览器的复刻版，可以在里面体验各种不同的功能、不同的界面或改动。所以很多工作都是基于这样一个理念：你不能想得太深，不能在 Figma 里花太多时间，就是先把能用的东西摆到面前。

So now we have this we have a version of Arc and we have a lot of prototypes that are like hacked directly into Arc behind feature flags and then we have various other prototype browsers that other folks on the team have built that are just recreations of a basic browser where you can feel out various different features or various different UIs or changes. And so a lot of it is just like based around this idea that you can't think really hard, you can't spend too much time in Figma, just get something functional in front of you.

我看到 Twitter 上有些问题，Coinbase 的 view 有一个让我很有共鸣，它触及了很多设计师都会有的那种感受：在利用熟悉的东西和创造前所未见的新事物之间，存在一种张力。我相信你推出的很多模式都相当创新，而且你设计的这个界面几十年来都没怎么变过。那么作为设计师，你如何超越仅仅做出能用的东西，真正找到方法去提升某个功能或交互的上限呢？

I saw some questions from Twitter and view from Coinbase had one that really resonated with me, which kind of gets at this feeling that I think a lot of designers have, where there's this tension between capitalizing on what is familiar versus, you know, we all have this desire to create something that is novel and the world hasn't seen before. And a lot of the patterns that you're shipping, I do believe, are quite innovative, and also you're designing for a surface that really hasn't changed in decades. So how do you as a designer go past just building something that is like functional and really identify ways to raise the ceiling for what a given feature or interaction can be?

是的，我认为第一件事是你必须决定是否应该这样做。我觉得产品里有很多地方你应该这样做，完全可以说“我就在这里做用户期望的事”。我们经常讨论这个，比如产品里的“新颖度预算”（novelty budget），我们愿意让用户遇到多少新东西，以及我们是否在为正确的事情这样做。举个例子，在 Arc 搜索里我们有隐身模式，它不像普通的隐身模式那样，你进入标签切换器然后把整个浏览器切换到隐身。我们在搜索框里放了一个小按钮，可以切换隐身模式的开关，因为我们的想法是，你意识到自己想隐身的那一刻，通常是在搜索的时候，你会想“嘿，我脚上长的这个东西是什么？”就在那一刻你会想“哦，我需要隐身”。所以我们当然要把入口放在搜索框里。但说实话，事后我不确定这是否是正确的决定。有很多人说“我找不到隐身模式”或者“我不知道这个奇怪的图标是什么”。我们花了很长时间想找一个图标，既能表示“不是隐身”，又不会让人感觉诡异。所以你真的需要非常谨慎地决定什么时候要改变一些东西，以及是否有充分的理由。然后一旦你决定改变，实际上就是要有创造力，把最疯狂的想法拿出来认真对待。在 Browser Co，我们从来没有遇到过缺乏想法的问题。我觉得我们团队里有很多人有很多想法，而且我们也倾听 Twitter 和其他地方的人给我们提的想法，人们经常提出相当好的建议。所以我们在这方面从来没有问题。当你每天使用一个工具并生活在其中时，痛点在哪里、哪些地方可以改进就变得很明显了。所以我觉得对我们来说，这真的只是一个优先级的问题，就是我们应该在哪些方面做出不同的改变。

Yeah, I think the first thing is you have to decide whether you should do that. I think there's a lot of places in a product where you should, where it's perfectly reasonable to say I am going to do exactly what the user expects here. We talk about this a lot, like what's our novelty budget in a product, how much are we willing to make people encounter something new, and are we doing that for the right things? So an example of that would be, you know, in Arc search we have like an incognito mode, and it doesn't work like normal incognito modes where you kind of go into the tab switcher and switch your whole browser to incognito. We put a little button in the search box where you can toggle on or off incognito, because the idea is the moment you realize you want to be incognito is when you're doing a search and you want to be like, hey, what's this thing on my foot growing? And it's like at that moment you're like, oh, I need to be incognito. And so of course we're going to put the entry point in the search box. And I'm actually not sure if that was the right decision in retrospect. There's a lot of people who are like, I couldn't figure out incognito or I don't know what this weird icon is. And we spent a long time trying to find an icon that means not incognito but in a not creepy way. And so it's like you really have to be very deliberate about when you actually want to change something and whether you have a good reason for it. And then once you do it, I mean really it just comes down to being generative and taking the wildest ideas and giving them the time of day. We've never really had a problem with having ideas at Browser Co. I think we have a lot of folks in the team who have a lot of ideas, and you know, we listen to people on Twitter and various other places who tell us their ideas, and people often suggest quite good ideas. And so we haven't really ever had a problem with that. When you're using a tool every day and living in it, it becomes obvious what the pain points are and when things could be better. So I think it really is just for us a prioritization thing of like what should we actually do differently.

我的意思是，作为旁观者，很明显你确实有很多想法，因为我在外面看到很多原型流传，比如 Twitter 或 Reddit 之类的。我想象，由于这些想法，你肯定有一个相当庞大的原型“墓地”。那么，团队要怎么做才能看到一个原型，然后达到“对，这个必须进产品”的程度呢？

I mean, it's definitely clear as an outsider that you do have a lot of ideas, because I see a lot of prototypes floating out in the wild, and you know, maybe Twitter or Reddit or wherever. I would imagine that you have a pretty extensive graveyard of prototypes as a result of all of these ideas. So what has to happen for the team to look at a prototype and get to the point where they're just like, yeah, this has to get into the product?

即使是像我们这样非常热衷于尝试自己东西的团队，你知道，因为它是一个浏览器，当你把某个东西放进产品里，如果它没有用，其实很明显，那也没关系，我们不需要发布它。所以我们有时会做的一件事是，在内部浏览器里通过功能开关（feature flag）放一个东西，然后对人们关闭它，看看有没有人注意到。如果没人注意到，那我们就觉得，太好了，这说明这不是体验中重要的部分，不值得发布。我们在发布之前，对于“我们想让自己惊艳到什么程度”的标准，在不同时期有高有低。

Even with a team like ours that is very motivated to try our own stuff, you know, because it is a browser, it can be pretty clear when you put something in the product and it's not useful that it's fine and we don't need to ship it. So one thing we'll do sometimes is we'll have something in the internal browser behind a feature flag, and we'll just kind of turn it off for people and see if anyone notices. And if nobody notices, then we're like, great, that means that this was not an important part of the experience, and it's not worth shipping. Our bar has raised and lowered at various points for how much we want to really blow ourselves away before we ship something.

有没有一个例子，当时标准真的很高，你确实想在向公众发布之前让自己惊艳一下？

Is there an example where the bar was really high, where you just kind of did want to blow yourself away before releasing something to the public?

一个是之前我们做的 AI 产品。我们在内部做了大概 20 到 30 个原型，我们对想解决的问题有一个完整的想法，因为我们当时只是在玩这个“橡皮泥”（Play-Doh），我们说，嘿，我们要进入这个项目。我们知道我们有这项新技术可用，让我们构建一些新东西，然后出去寻找要解决的问题。在大多数情况下，我认为这样做是相当糟糕的，但当你有一项能解决很多问题的全新科技，并且你对此有信心时，我不认为到处看看“我有这把锤子，让我去找些钉子”是个坏主意。所以我们有一个我们非常非常想实现的想法，那就是帮助用户发现更多网站。你在一个网站上，让我们给你展示一些相关的、非常有趣且吸引人的东西，几乎就像 TikTok，就像你在 TikTok 上往下滑，每次都能发现新鲜刺激的内容。我们在这一点上推进了很长时间。我们尝试了大约 20 到 30 个想法，最终，我们有点觉得，是的，你知道，我们把一些想法放进了构建里，偶尔也会编辑它们，我们使用它们时也有点兴奋，但最终我们觉得，嘿，你知道，我们真的很喜欢这个想法和方向，但就是不能发布这样的东西。感觉它并没有极大地满足我们作为人的需求，感觉它没有真正存在的理由。所以我们实际上完全回到了画板前，说，好吧，我们还能用这项技术做什么？然后我们找到了完全不同的东西，就是产品中微小部分的非常小的交互，比如你固定一个标签页，我们获取名称并稍微整理一下，或者你用 Command-F 查找东西但找不到，然后我们说，嘿，你想问一下语言模型，看它能不能在文档里找到你要找的东西吗？所以是非常非常小的增量式的东西，我们用了这些，然后我们觉得，是的，这些感觉就像是在以一种非常……的方式增强我们的体验。

One is the AI products that we worked on a while back. We built like 20 or 30 prototypes internally, and we had like a whole idea for the kind of problem we wanted to solve, because we were just playing around with this Play-Doh and we said, hey, we're going to go into this project. We know that we have this new technology available for us, let's build something new, and let's kind of go out and try to find problems to solve, which in most cases I think is a pretty bad thing to do, but when you have a brand new technology that can solve a lot of problems and you feel conviction around it, I don't think it's a terrible idea to go around and see, like, I have this hammer, let me go find some nails. And so we had one idea that we really, really wanted to nail, which was this idea of like, let's help you discover more websites. You're on a website, let's show you something related to that that's really interesting and engaging, almost like TikTok, like how you swipe down on TikTok and you find something that's new and exciting every time you do it. And we pushed on this for a long, long time. We tried like 20 or 30 ideas, and eventually at the end of the day we were kind of like, yeah, you know, we put some in the builds and we edited them occasionally, and we were kind of enthused when we used them, but at the end of the day we were like, hey, you know, we really love this idea and this direction, but like, we just can't ship anything like this. It doesn't feel like it is wildly meeting our own needs as people, like it doesn't feel like it really has a reason to exist. And so we actually like totally went back to the drawing board and said, okay, what are other things we can use this technology for? And we landed on something totally different, which was like really small interactions in tiny parts of the product, like you pin a tab and we take the name and we tidy it up a little bit, or you're using Command-F to find something and you can't find it, and so we say, hey, you want to ask a language model if they can find what you're looking for in this document. So really, really small incremental things, and we used those and we were like, yeah, these just feel like they're powering up our experience in a way that is very much...

确实如此，我们很多探索通常都是这样进行的。我们会尝试很多东西，对某个主题（比如互联网上的发现）特别感兴趣，然后会非常努力地推进，但你不能强求。我觉得过去我们在很多领域都做得不错，没有强行推进，希望我们能继续保持。

Warranted, and so that's typically how a lot of our explorations will go. We'll try a bunch of stuff, we'll really be interested in a theme like discovery on the internet, and we'll push on it really hard, but you can't force it. And I think we've done a fairly good job in the past of not forcing it in a lot of areas, so hopefully we continue that.

我非常同意，虽然这不算什么。我觉得当 AI 爆发刚开始时，到处都在贴聊天机器人，你几乎以为你们也会这么做。但你们有明显的延迟——你们是典型的后来者。而当你们发布时，感觉非常新鲜，因为它不是那种开放式的。你们用非常精准的方式引入 AI 来解决非常具体的问题，我认为这在更广泛的领域里是一个相当独特的切入点。

I very much agree, for what it's worth. I think that when the AI explosion first started, everyone was slapping a chatbot everywhere you turned, and you were kind of almost expecting you all to do the same. And there was like this pretty significant delay—like you were very much so a second mover. And then when you did release, it felt fresh because it wasn't very open-ended. You had these very pointed ways of introducing the AI to solve like very specific problems, which I think was a pretty unique entry point in the broader landscape.

是的，我们试图从别人的产品中学习，并以有用的方式加以利用，但这很大程度上只是上万次广泛探索的产物。

Yeah, we tried to take what we learn from everyone else's product and work it in a useful way, but it was very much just the product of like 10,000 wide explorations.

那我们能不能再多聊聊这些探索？因为你一直把我们带回到这个想法：想法从来不缺。我们能从你自己的构思过程中学到什么？比如你作为设计师，是如何产生想法，并识别出要解决的正确问题或值得探索的机会的？

Can we talk a little bit more about the explorations then? Because you keep bringing us back to this idea that there's no shortage of ideas. What can we learn from your own ideation process? Like how are you as a designer generating ideas and identifying the right problems to solve or opportunities to explore?

这是个好问题。对我来说，我从来不是一个特别擅长构思的人。我觉得当我试图列出一堆要点或一大串想法时，我并不高效。我做两件事。第一，我试图增加我的想法表面积。我尝试做很多我认为能帮助我在当下随机产生想法的事情。所以我很多时候就是在做随机项目，希望其中一些最终能变成有用且有价值的想法。一个重要的例子是，大概是去年三月，我在玩 API，然后有了这个想法。我意识到你可以让它输出 HTML。于是我想，哦，如果我在手机上用 Swift UI 做一个小浏览器，输入 URL，而不是获取并显示 HTML，我直接让模型去“幻觉”出 HTML，比如你输入“Nate 的酷网站，我卖小玩意”，它就会生成一个合理的网页。我当然在提示词里说，让它感觉像 GeoCities 复古网站，用一堆跑马灯标签之类的。这真的很有趣，我为自己建了一个小小的平行网络，玩得很开心。当然，我当时没想这会不会变成浏览器公司的产品。但有趣的是，大约八个月后，我们在考虑这个移动应用，我在想原型做什么功能作为亮点。我想，嘿，那个让电脑做网站的东西挺酷的。如果我能让电脑做网站，但给它一些网络数据，这样它就不是凭空捏造了？这就是 Browse for me 背后想法的原始火花，它是我们的 AI 搜索摘要功能。早期原型真的是在做一个网站并写自己的 HTML，现在不是这样了，但核心想法——电脑可以为你生成一个完全根据你输入定制的网页——就是从那来的。所以我觉得你能做的最好的事情之一就是跟随自己的好奇心，去玩，去沉浸在这个领域里，去体验什么是可能的、什么是好玩的、什么是感觉好的。然后当需要认真做事、构建人们真正想要的东西时，你会有更多的想法。

That's a good question. I mean, I think to me, I've never been like much of an ideator. I don't think I'm very productive when I try to make a bunch of points or make a big list of ideas. There's two things I do. The first is I just try to increase my idea surface area. I just try to do a bunch of stuff that I think will help me generate ideas randomly in the moment. And so a lot of what I do is just around doing random projects in the hopes that some of those will eventually turn into useful and valuable ideas. And so one big example of that is, I think this was maybe in March of last year, I was playing around with the API and I had this idea. I realized that you could ask it to output HTML. And so I had this idea of, oh, what if I made a little web browser in Swift UI on my phone where I could type in a URL and rather than fetching it and displaying the HTML, I just asked a model to hallucinate the HTML and say, you could type in 'Nate's Cool Website where I sell knickknacks' and it would just generate a plausible web page for it. And I of course in the prompt was like, make it feel like a GeoCities retro website, use a bunch of marquee tags and stuff like that. And it was this really fun thing where I built this little parallel web for myself and had a lot of fun doing it. And of course I wasn't thinking about, oh, this is going to turn into a browser company product. But it's funny because then about eight months later, we were thinking about this mobile app and I was thinking about ideas for what to prototype for what would be the hook feature. And I was like, hey, that thing where I asked the computer to make a website was kind of cool. What if I could ask the computer to make a website but I gave it some web data so that it wasn't just making it up? And that's what kind of was the original spark for the idea behind Browse for me, which is our kind of AI search summary feature. The early prototypes were literally making a website and writing its own HTML, and now it doesn't do that, but this core idea of the computer can make you a web page personalized to exactly what you typed came out of that. And so I think one of the best things you can do is just follow your own curiosity and play around and immerse yourself in the space, and immerse yourself in what's possible and what's fun, what feels good. And then when it comes time to get down to business and build real stuff people want, you'll have a lot more ideas.

有意思的是，Browse for me 现在成了很多人最喜欢的功能——我每天用很多次——它源于你了解 LLM 的可能性，并且更多是在技术层面摆弄，而不是探索 UI 和 Figma。

It's interesting that Browse for me, which is many people's favorite feature now—I use it so many times a day—came out of you knowing what is possible with LLMs and tinkering more like the technical layer rather than exploring UI and Figma.

是的，我真的很喜欢这样。而且我最近其实很感兴趣的是，我们能做些什么让更多设计师也能接触到这些。因为我觉得作为设计师，我的技术背景还算不错，所以我能跳进这些工具里真正感受它们。但生成式 UI 和让 LLM 输出不仅仅是文本墙，你能做的太多了。我觉得到目前为止，我们在 Browser Company 的成功很大程度上是因为我们在这方面做得不错。但还没有一个好的设计工具能让你不用编码就沉浸其中。所以希望很快，希望很快。我深信不疑。

Yeah, I really like that. And I've actually been really interested recently in what we can do to make that more accessible to more designers. Because I think I have a pretty technical background for a designer, and so I was able to jump into these tools and really feel it out. But there's so much you can do with generative UI and asking LLMs to output more than just walls of text. I think a lot of what we've been successful with at the Browser Company so far is that we're pretty good at that. But there's not really a good design tool that lets you immerse yourself in it without coding. So hopefully soon, hopefully soon. I'm a big believer.

在创建界面以帮助用户与 AI 互动的最佳方式上，你的想法是如何演变的？

How is your thinking evolved in terms of the best ways to create interfaces to help users interact with AI?

我非常认同这个想法：我们的更多工具应该感觉像电动自行车，你在做事情，电脑提供辅助，让你更强大一点。我是 GitHub Copilot 和这类产品的忠实粉丝。但随着我开始构建更多这些东西，我实际上越来越感兴趣的是把工具拟人化，并认为这是一种有用的互动方式。我认为作为一个职业，设计师真的不想把 LLM 拟人化。他们想把它当作为你生成 UI 的机器，或者像没有个性、全知全能、只是软件反映的助手。这很好，也没问题。但我实际上认为，给这些语言模型一个名字、一张脸和一套个性特征，实际上是展示它们做什么、如何表现的好方法，并提醒人们它们会犯错，它们并不总是对的，它们有怪癖，它们有擅长和不擅长的事情，它们有偏见。就像，你知道，我们不习惯软件有偏见。现在我们有这些有用的 LLM，但你必须记住，它们可能不认同你的价值观，它们可能不对，它们可能不可信，它们可能搞砸。我认为给它一个名字和一张脸确实对此有帮助。

So I very much buy into this idea that more of our tools should almost feel like e-bikes, where you are doing the thing and the computer is providing an assist to make you a little bit more powerful. And I'm a big fan of GitHub Copilot and products that feel like that. But as I've started building more of these things, the more I've actually been interested in this idea of anthropomorphizing the tools and that being a useful way to interact with them. I think as a profession, designers really don't want to anthropomorphize LLMs. They want to treat them as like machines that generate UI for you, or like assistants that specifically do not have a personality and are kind of omniscient and just like reflections of the software. And it's like, that's great and that's fine. But I actually think that putting a name and a face and a set of personality traits on one of these language models actually is a great way to surface what they do and how they behave, and to remind people that they're fallible, they're not always right, they do have quirks, they do have things they're good at and they're bad at, they have biases. Just like, you know, we're not used to software having biases. And now we have these LLMs which are useful, but you have to remember they may not share your values, they may not be right, they may not be trustworthy, they may screw up. And I think putting a name and a face on it actually really helps with that.

我们一直在围绕设计中的个性这个想法打转，我想再深入一点。我在这里尝试一些东西。假设你在原型设计一个新功能。你有一个能用的东西，你能想象自己使用它，它解决了现有产品中的某种问题或不足。现在你开始注入个性和灵魂，真正……

We've kind of been orbiting around this idea of personality in design, and I want to go a little bit deeper. And I'm going to try something here. So let's say hypothetically you are prototyping a new feature. You have something it's functional, you can imagine yourself using it, it solves some kind of a problem or shortcoming in the existing product. And now you are embarking on this process to inject personality and soul and really...

让这个东西活起来。从原始功能到令人愉悦的东西，你的创作过程是怎样的？

Make this thing come alive. What's your creative process look like to go from raw utility to something that is delightful?

很大程度上就是出去寻找自己的灵感。所以我有 Figma 画板，里面收集了大约 1 万个我从网上找到的、我真的很喜欢的小东西，我把它们收集在这里，然后尝试从中借鉴灵感。或者我会在团队里其他设计师的作品基础上继续构建。

A lot of it just comes down to going out and finding your own inspiration. So I have Figma boards that are just like 10,000 little things that I've found from across the web that I really enjoyed, that I've just collected here, and I'm going to try borrowing inspiration from. Or I'll build on the work of other designers on the team.

你能再多谈谈你的灵感过程吗？比如你从哪里获取灵感？

Can you talk a little bit more about your inspiration process? Like where are you sourcing inspiration?

这很粗略。这些天我会浏览 Dribbble，我知道现在这已经非常老派了，但我会用 Google 搜索，然后想，嘿，不同的引导流程是什么样的？我会回到几个我经常接触、深受启发的应用，比如星座应用 Co-Star。我就是喜欢它那种小巧的感觉。还有像 Zley 这样的应用，虽然已经不在了，但它是一个被 Snap 收购的、非常棒的位置共享工具。我觉得我经常回到这些标杆，试着看看能学到什么。

It's very rough. These days I'll go through Dribbble, which I know is super old school now, but I'll Google stuff and be like, hey, what do different onboarding flows look like? And I'll go back to a couple apps that I feel like I touch on a lot, that I'm very inspired by, like Co-Star, the astrology app. I just love how it feels so little. Other apps like Zley, which is not around anymore but was an incredible location sharing tool that was acquired by Snap. I feel like I go back to those touchstones a lot and just try to see what I can learn.

有一件事让我深受启发——我完全忘了做这个演讲的人的名字，但你很可能看过——关于游戏和给电子游戏增加“果汁感”。在电子游戏的每一次交互中，有实际发生的交互并在屏幕上反映出来，然后还有大约 20 层的快乐和兴奋。会有声音，会有弹跳和混响，屏幕会亮起不同的颜色，球会稍微弹一下。所以我非常受这类东西启发，就是看看这些东西上每一层的细节，以及我如何在我正在构建的任何东西之上添加我自己的一层层细节和保真度。

One thing I'm very inspired by is—I'm going to totally forget the name of the person who did this talk, but you've probably seen it—about gaming and adding juice to video games. How in every single interaction in a video game, there's the actual interaction happening and it's being reflected on screen, and then there's just like 20 layers of joy and excitement that happen there. You'll have a sound, and you'll have a bounce and a reverb, and the screen will light up in a different color, and the ball will pop a little bit. So I'm very inspired by stuff like that, just looking at what are the layers of detail on each of these things and how can I add my own little layers of detail and fidelity on top of whatever it is I'm building.

好，我们回到技术领域。我想了解一下你在 Arc 上如何与工程师合作。也许我们可以谈谈 Boosts。在那个项目上，协作是什么样的？

Okay, let's go back into technical land here. I want to learn a little bit about how you work with engineers on Arc. So maybe we could talk about Boosts for a second. What did collaboration look like on that project?

是的，Boosts 真的很有趣，因为它也是一个非常技术性的项目。我们的想法是让人们能够在有护栏的情况下编辑网页，而无需了解任何编码知识。我一开始的工作方式实际上是和一位名叫 Patrick Moberg 的设计师合作，他是一位了不起的原型设计师、工程师和设计师。他基本上在代码里瞎折腾了几个星期，试图找出编辑网页的真正好的原语。他提出的我最喜欢的一个想法是在网页上查找并替换颜色。因为如果你试图重新主题化一个网站，有太多颜色，作为人类你不可能重新着色每个元素。但如果你能在页面上的颜色之间做一种模糊查找和替换呢？他设法用一种非常粗糙、黑客式的 JavaScript 方式实现了这一点，他遍历了所有元素并查看了它们的颜色。这效率不高。

Yeah, Boosts was really fun because it was also a very deeply technical project. Our idea was we wanted to let people kind of edit the web with guardrails, without knowing anything about how to code. The way I worked in the beginning actually was I was working with a designer named Patrick Moberg, who was this incredible prototyper, engineer, designer. He basically just screwed around in code for a couple weeks trying to figure out what are really good primitives for editing the web. One of my favorite things he came up with was this idea of find-and-replacing colors on a web page. Because if you're trying to retheme a website, there's so many colors, as a human being you can't possibly recolor every element. But what if you could do a kind of fuzzy find and replace across the colors on a page? And he figured out how to implement this in a really rough, hacky JavaScript way, where he iterated over all the elements and looked at their colors. It was not very efficient.

所以当我们坐下来想要真正构建这个功能时，我和工程生产团队坐下来，那有几个人——Darren Fisher，他是 Chrome 的早期成员之一，还有 Victoria Kirst，她也在 Chrome 工作过——以及项目中许多非常技术性的部分。我说，嘿，Patrick 构建了这个非常粗糙的颜色替换工具，你们能想办法让它真正工作并工作得很好吗？我们坐下来，Darren 实际上进入了 Chromium 代码，我们通过视频通话讨论，他进入 Chromium 代码试图找出是否有办法做到这一点。但他没找到。所以最终他回来对我说，你知道 Nate，我们实际上做不到这个。如果你能应用这些各种颜色滤镜呢？他带着一个完全不同的系统回来了，比如，这是 Chromium 允许你做的。

So when we sat down and wanted to actually build this feature, I sat down with the engineering production team, which was a couple folks—Darren Fisher, who was one of the early folks on Chrome, and then Victoria Kirst, who also worked on Chrome—and a bunch of very deeply technical parts of the project. I said, hey, Patrick built this really hacky color replacement thing, can you figure out how to make it work for real and make it work well? We sat and Darren actually went into the Chromium code, and we were talking over video call, and he was going into the Chromium code and trying to figure out if there was a way where he could do this. And he couldn't figure it out. So eventually he comes back to me and he's like, you know Nate, we can't actually do this. What if instead you could apply these various color filters? And he came back with this whole other system of like, here's what Chromium will let you do.

然后我花了——我自己去尝试做了一个小原型，比如，我能否用 Darren 给我的这些控件重新主题化一个网站？我在 Patrick 的东西基础上进行原型设计和构建，然后我回来发现我能做到。所以我回到 Darren 那里，我说，太好了，我们能做这个。于是他去实现了。同时他也在实现所有的 UI 等等。所以在这个特定项目中，因为这是一个跨学科的事情，我们有点像在构建一个设计工具，但我们是在 Chromium 的深处做的。所以很多时候是我、Darren 和 Victoria 频繁地来回讨论，我去做原型并把代码交给他们，他们告诉我这段代码效率不高，我们无法实现，或者这在某些情况下实际上行不通，然后我回去想办法做得更好，他们提供想法和建议。

Then I spent—I went off on my own and I tried to do a little prototype of like, can I retheme a website using these controls that Darren has given me? And I was prototyping and building on top of Patrick's stuff, and I came back and I realized I can do it. So I went back to Darren and I was like, great, we can do this. So he went off and implemented it. Meanwhile he's also implementing all the UI and everything like that. So in that particular project, because it was such an interdisciplinary thing, we were kind of building a design tool but we were doing it deeply within the bowels of Chromium. So it was very much a lot of me and Darren and Victoria talking back and forth pretty frequently, and I going off and doing prototypes and handing them code, and them telling me this code is not efficient and we can't implement it, or this won't actually work in these cases, and me going back and trying to figure out how to do it better, and them providing ideas and suggestions.

所以这实际上几乎不像设计工程协作，而更像是——你知道，他们是负责一部分的工程师，而我有点像在不同层面运作的工程师。我们交换代码示例，还有模拟图、设计以及各种工件。而且非常临时。

So it was actually almost like not design engineering collaboration as much as—you know, they were the engineers in charge of one part, and I was kind of like an engineer operating at a different level than them. We were exchanging code samples and just like mocks and designs and all sorts of artifacts. And it was very, very ad hoc.

相当多。通常我的过程是——我会开始，比如，我不能在纸上素描和绘画，我希望我能。如果我那样做，我可能会花更多时间在那上面。但我会在 Figma 中做线框图和粗略的模拟，然后跳入代码看看我们是否能实际实现它们并让它们工作得很好，然后再跳回 Figma 尝试迭代，看看视觉上什么好看。所以我会说现在大约是 50/50。对于交互问题，我会用代码做。对于视觉问题，我会在 Figma 中做。当我想做得很宽泛时，我会在 Figma 中做，然后在那里写一堆小便利贴，讨论交互可能如何工作。所以我会说大约是 50/50。

A decent amount. Typically my process will be—I'll start off like, I can't sketch and draw on paper, I wish I could. If I did that, I would probably spend a lot more time doing that. But I'll do wireframes and rough mocks in Figma, and then jump into code to see if we can actually implement them and make them work well, and then jump back into Figma to try to iterate and see what looks good visually. So I would say it's about 50/50 right now. For interaction questions, I'll do in code. For visual questions, I'll do it in Figma. When I want to go really wide, I'll do it in Figma and then I'll write a bunch of little sticky notes on there talking about how the interactions might work. So I'd say it's about 50/50.

好的，我很好奇，因为现在团队已经扩大了，我想象你正在与更多可能没有类似工程背景的设计师合作。我想知道你是否最近甚至被更多地拉入 Figma。

Okay, I was curious because now that the team has grown, I would imagine you're doing more collaborating with other designers who maybe don't have similar engineering backgrounds. And I was wondering if maybe you were even being pulled a little bit more into Figma as of late.

我的意思是，不完全是。我认为我们公司做得非常好的一件事——回到你关于每个人都有自己指纹的观点——是团队中的许多设计师都有自己的工作方式，团队中的许多工程师也有自己的工作方式。

I mean, not really. I think that one of the things that we've done really well as a company—you back to your point on everyone having their own fingerprints—is that a lot of designers on the team have their own way of working, and a lot of engineers on the team have their own way of working.

我们有自己的工作方式，所以你知道，我们经常会做非常传统的事情，比如有人会做一个模型，然后交给工程师，然后他们会在 Figma 里标注实现，然后说‘嘿，请改这些地方’。有时候有人会去找工程师说‘嘿，我信任你的产品直觉，你先做一版，我们直接讨论’。一直到有技术背景的设计师直接进代码里改，因为这样比来回沟通更快。所以就是非常非常灵活。我们确实会以传统方式交接，也会以非常非传统的方式交接，但我觉得在这个团队的好处就是每个人的角色都非常非常灵活。

own way of working and so you know often we will do very traditional like somebody will make a mock and they will hand it off to an engineer and then they will you know annotate the implementation in figma and be like hey please change these things and often somebody will go to an engineer and be like hey I you know I trust your product sense to do a first pass on this do it let's just talk about it all the way up to somebody who is technical who is a designer like just going into the code and making the changes because it's a little quicker to do that than to do the back and forth so it's like it's very very fluid um we do hand off the traditional way we do handoff like in very non-traditional ways but I think it's like a the nice thing about being on this team is that everyone's role is super super fluid

这让我想再问一个问题，因为你知道，这又是你的第一个传统设计岗位，我想象你有很多事情是第一次做，现在你突然被非常非常厉害的设计师包围，他们某种程度上都在用自己的方式做事。那么你注意到其他设计师的工作方式中，有什么让你觉得‘我喜欢这个，我想把它融入自己的实践’？

makes me want to ask another question then because you know again this is your first traditional design role I would imagine you're doing lots of things for the first time and now all of a sudden you're surrounded by I mean really really incredible designers who I guess are all kind of to an extent doing things their own way so what's something that you've noticed in the way that another designer is working where you're like I like that I like to incorporate that into my own practice

我们团队里有一位设计师叫 Carla Cole，她之前在 Facebook。我非常非常欣赏她的一点是，她每次开始一个项目时，都会跳出技术本身。她做了很多品牌相关的工作，也做了很多产品设计，她是团队里最擅长把情感带入产品的人。她的做法是，她会找一个愿景板，或者创建一个愿景板，上面有 10 种产品可能有的不同感觉，然后加上大量跨文化的例子，比如电影、电视、时尚、艺术，所有这些都通过一条共同的主线连接起来。然后她会找到那条主线在软件中呈现的方式，非常非常酷。所以我渴望成为那种了解时尚、电影制作、文化等等的人，但我不是，我了解得不多。但那个领域是我非常向往的，我觉得那才是做很多事情的正确方式，就是暂时忘掉技术，去体验人们创造的世界。

we have this one designer on the team Carla Cole who who was previously at at Facebook and what I've really really admired about her is the way that she just steps out of like Tech whenever she starts a project um so like she will she she does a lot of our brand stuff but also does a lot of our our product design and she's like the the best person on our team in terms of like bringing feeling into a product and the way she does it is like she will find a vision board or create a vision board of like 10 different like Vibes that a product could have uh and then tons of examples across culture across you know movies across TV across fashion across art of like things that all kind of connect with a particular Common Thread and then she'll find a way that that Common Thread shows up in soft Ware uh in a way that's really really cool and so like I aspire to be the person who knows about you know fashion and film making and culture and all this stuff and I'm not I don't know very much about it but like that's an area where I'm like very much like that that to me feels like the right way to do a lot of the stuff is to like forget about tech for a bit and go off and experience the world that people have created

我点头表示同意，因为我觉得我有非常相似的经历。我当时是更偏技术的设计师，我们请来了一个来自 Airbnb 的人，她在那个领域熟练得多。我记得她第一次带来情绪板，上面有纽约地铁广告牌的海报，我当时想‘哇，我绝不会这么做’，但最终它影响了我们整个项目的视觉方向。我永远不会忘记那个时刻，‘哇，这完全超出了我作为设计师的传统操作范围’。

I'm nodding my head in agreement because I think I have a pretty similar experience where like I was a more technical fting designer we brought in someone else you and who was coming from Airbnb who was like so much more skilled in that area and I remember the first time she brought in like a mood board and it had like Billboards from New York Subway posters and I'm like whoa I would never have done that but it ended up influencing this entire visual direction that we went for this project and I'll never forget that moment of like wow that is way outside of my traditional operating box as a designer

有趣的是，把它和 AI 联系起来。我觉得我们现在生活在这个时代，我们有技术去做那些文化界人士多年来一直梦想、思考和设想的事情。当然有电影《她》，还有无数其他东西。有趣的是，我们有庞大的文化积累，现在可以转化为软件，而他们在这些虚构世界中学到的经验可以应用到我们的工作中。

it's funny too to connect it back to AI it's like I feel like we we live in this era now where it's like we have technology to do stuff that people in culture have been dreaming about and thinking about and envisioning for years and years and years that it's like there's you know of course there's the movie her and then there's like a million other things and it's it's funny because like we have like this enormous backlog of culture that can now be turned into software and the lessons that they've learned in these invented worlds can be applied back to what we do

是的，我也能理解你不会素描，我也不会，我从来不画，我什么都画不出来，我嫉妒那些会画的人。但现在突然这些生成工具鼓励我更多地关注艺术指导，因为突然我有了某种能力去‘黑’艺术指导，而以前我 100% 依赖别人。

yeah you know I relate also to your inability to sketch like I can't sketch I never sketch I can't draw anything I'm jealous of the people that can but now all of a sudden these generative tools are encouraging me to pay more attention basically to Art Direction because all of a sudden I kind of have the ability to hack art Direction in a way that previously I would have been 100% reliant on someone else for

是的，我还没怎么用过。我一直觉得生成艺术工具有点像……我不太能像我希望的那样控制，但还是很想学怎么用传统方式画画，如果 AI 能给我一些建议，那我会很乐意。

yeah I haven't I haven't done a ton of it I've always found the like generative art tools kind of like a little bit like you don't I don't really feel like I'm in control as much as I would like to but but still very much like I I would love to go and learn how to how to draw the the oldfashioned way and if an AI can give me tips on how to do that it's something I would love

嘿，各位，快速说一下，如果你认识我，你就知道我热爱产品，所以我想花 30 秒介绍三个我最喜欢的。现在任何时候我设计和搭建网站，你最好相信我会用 Framer。我最近切换过去了，再也不回头了。当需要给我的设计做动画和展示作品时，我会用 Jitter，它就像专门做动效设计的 Figma。每一步我都会一直用 Raycast，它是我使用电脑的基石，也是我工作时保持心流的方式。我亲手挑选了 Framer、Raycast 和 Jitter 作为合作伙伴，这样我才能全职做这些访谈。所以如果你想支持他们，我会非常感激。好了，现在继续看剩下的内容。

hey guys real quick if you know me then you know I love products so I want to take just 30 seconds to tell you about three of my favorites now anytime that I'm designing and building a website you better believe that I'm going to use framer I made the switch recently and I'm never going back now once it's time to animate my designs and showcase my work that's when I'm going to use Jitter it's like figma only for motion design and every step of the way I'm gonna be using raycast constantly it's the Cornerstone of how I use my computer and the way that I stay in flow while I work now I hand selected framer raycast and Jitter to partner with me so that I could do these interviews full-time so if you want to show them some love it would mean a lot okay now on to the rest of the episode

我想谈的另一个功能是分屏视图，因为你们在那个功能上迭代了很多次。你能给我们讲讲幕后的过程，以及你们是如何走到今天的吗？

Another feature I want to talk about is the split view because man you iterate on that a lot so can you give us behind the scenes of the process and how you got to where you are today

是的，分屏视图是我们早期构建的功能之一，在我们漫长的探索中，试图找到有用的浏览器功能。它是最早构建的功能之一，我们真的非常喜欢。这是一个相当明显的功能，我不认为它有什么特别突破性的，但一旦我们意识到‘哦，我们想要分屏视图’，我们意识到实现分屏视图的实际机制非常非常复杂。你可以有一个包含两个不同窗格的单个标签页，你可以选择两个不同的标签页并同时显示在屏幕上，你可以有一个标签页像侧边栏一样停靠，然后自由切换其他标签页。我们遇到了这个问题，我们心里都知道想要什么，但我们必须填补隐喻，弄清楚它实际上如何工作，以及边缘情况是什么样的。所以我们从第一个方向开始，用了几个月，然后觉得‘这还行，但感觉很不直观’。然后我们尝试了另一个方向，觉得‘这很棒，但我觉得我们让很多事情变好了，也让很多事情变糟了’。最后我们说，好吧，我们必须一劳永逸地解决这个隐喻问题。我们真的要出去，像做基础的设计师问题解决一样，我们要画出所有用例，以及它们在三种分屏视图隐喻中如何工作。

yeah I mean splitview was one of the first features that we built in our like long journey through the desert trying to find useful browser features to build it was one of the first that we built that we actually really really liked and it's a pretty obvious feature I don't think it's nothing particularly groundbreaking but once we figured out like oh we want to have a split view uh we realize that the actual Mechanics for how to do a split view are really really complicated you can have you know a single tab that has two different panes in it you can have the ability to have two different tabs selected and show them both on screen you could have one tab that's kind of docked as a sidebar and then you know freely switch other tabs and like we had this problem of like we all knew in our heads we wanted but we had to fill in the metaphor for how it actually worked and what the edge cases looked like and so we started with One Direction and we used it for a couple months and we were like this is okay but it feels really unintuitive and so we tried another Direction and we were like this is great but I feel like you know we we made a lot of things better and a lot of things worse and so finally we said okay we have to solve this metaphor thing once and for all we're literally going to get out and like do like basic designer problem solving we were going to like sketch out all of the use cases that we have and how they would work in each of the like three metaphors that you could use for split view and

然后我们会去调查用户，问他们这些用例各自有多常见。接着我们会挑出哪些要做得特别好，哪些我们愿意接受说这些不会太好用，然后就在产品里实现。整个过程非常有条理，几乎可以说是数据驱动。但我觉得归根结底，它让我们能最大程度地贴近大多数人的实际需求，同时引入尽可能少的摩擦。这和我们平时很不一样——我觉得我们在 Browser Co 非常依赖直觉或感受，而这是一个我们真正能跳出那种模式、脚踏实地、非常理性分析的例子。我觉得效果不错。

Then we're going to go and survey people, and we're going to be like, how common are each of these use cases? And then we're going to pick which ones we're going to make work really well, and which ones we're going to be okay with saying these aren't going to work great. And then we're just going to implement that in the product. So it was very methodical and almost data-driven. But I think at the end of the day, what it enabled us to do is meet the most humans where they were and introduce the minimum amount of friction possible. And it was very much like—I feel like we're very intuition-driven or feelings-driven at Browser Co, and this is an example of a case where we actually were able to get outside that and just get down to brass tacks and be very analytical. And I think it worked out.

嗯，听到数据驱动的故事很有意思，因为我记下的一个关键短语是 Josh 说你们优化的是感受而非数字，这太罕见了。你几乎听不到哪个 CEO 这么说。我对此的看法一直是：数字很重要，能告诉你方向是否正确；用户研究在另一端也很重要，能告诉你是否做出了能引起共鸣的东西。但归根结底，我认为你需要一个非常强的观点，需要非常强的愿景——你想唤起什么感受，你想把什么样的产品带到世界上。你可以用数据和用户研究来更新你对世界的认知模型，了解人们想要什么、需要什么、感受如何、行为如何。但最终，决策必须由设计和他们的愿景来决定。这也是我们目前的做法。

Yeah, it's interesting to hear the data story because one of the key phrases I had written down was how Josh said that you all optimize for feelings over numbers, which is so rare. You never hear a CEO say that. My take on this has always been like the numbers are really important to tell you if you're directionally correct, and user research is also very important on the other end to tell you if you're building something that resonates with people. But at the end of the day, I think you need a really strong opinion, you need really strong vision—like what feeling do you want to evoke, what kind of product do you want to bring into the world. And you can use data and user research to update your mental model of what the world is like, what people want, what people need, how people feel, and what they do. But at the end of the day, the decision has to be the design and their vision. And that's kind of how we've approached it so far.

在你穿越沙漠的旅程中，有没有其他你个人非常喜欢、希望未来能重新出现的原型？

In your journey through the desert, were there other prototypes that you personally really liked that you hope resurface in the future?

有很多。有一个我非常喜欢的，还有一个想法——我们有几个想法反复回来尝试，但一直没能做好。其中之一是多人模式。我们一直对这个想法着迷：如果有一个多人浏览器会怎样？然后每个人都会说，酷，如果有多人浏览器会怎样？然后你问，好吧，你希望你的多人浏览器能做什么？他们说，我不知道。我们目前就卡在这里。但另一个想法是拥有一个主页，一个互联网上的家。这个想法在各种产品中反复出现。我记得小时候用 iGoogle，你可以在 Google 上设置自己的主页，带各种小工具。当然，各种操作系统的桌面也反复添加和移除小工具，大概有 16 次了。但我一直对这个想法很感兴趣：一个浏览器能给你一个为你打造的个人主页，包含你想要的内容、媒体，或者只是你想要的感受。所以我们最开始构建的原型之一就是这个主页想法，你可以自定义打开新标签页时看到的内容。你可以只放一张照片，或者一个时钟，或者一个记事本，或者一个巨大的数据仪表盘，包含你的邮件、日历和你最近的所有标签页。那感觉真的很酷，因为它非常个性化，而且也是一个真正全新的可以消磨时间的空间。感觉就像——互联网对很多人来说没有重心，而这个想法似乎在某种程度上把互联网集中了起来，这是你很少见到的。所以我们尝试了，然后意识到想法和氛围感觉很好，但在产品中的定位感觉不对。你知道，你不应该把它放在新标签页上，因为当你打开新标签页时，你想要一个新标签页，你不想看到一堆内容。所以那感觉不对，但背后的想法是对的。我希望有一天我们能带回类似的东西，因为它感觉很特别。

There were a bunch. One that I really enjoyed, and one kind of idea that we have—we have a couple ideas that we've come back to again and again and haven't been able to nail. One of them is multiplayer. We've always been fascinated with this idea of, what if there was a multiplayer browser? And everyone's like, cool, what if there was a multiplayer browser? And then you're like, okay, what would you want your multiplayer browser to do? And they're like, I don't know. That's kind of where we're at with that. But then the other one is having a homepage, a home on the internet. This is an idea that has come around again and again in various products. I think back to iGoogle when I was a kid—you'd be able to set up your own homepage on Google with widgets and various things. And of course, the home screens on various OSes have added and removed widgets like 16 times. But I've always been very interested in this idea of a browser that gives you a personal homepage that is built for you, with the content or the media or just the feeling that you want to feel. So one of the prototypes we built at the very beginning was this homepage idea where you could customize what you saw when you opened a new tab. You could just have a photo, or you could have a clock, or you could have a notepad, or you could have this huge dashboard of data with your emails, your calendar, and all of your most recent tabs. And it felt really cool because it was really personal, and it was also just a genuinely new space that you could spend time in. And it felt like—the internet kind of has no center of gravity for a lot of people, and it felt like it kind of centered the internet in a way that you don't really see. So we tried that, and we realized that the ideas and the vibe felt really good, but the positioning in the product felt wrong. You know, you shouldn't put it on the new tab page because when you open a new tab, you want a new tab, you don't want to be shown a bunch of content. So that felt wrong, but the idea behind it feels right. And I hope at some point we can bring something like that back because it felt very special.

在你离开之前，我想再问几个更个人化的问题。一个我特别喜欢问很多人的问题，而且我对你的观点特别感兴趣：关于设计，你个人相信什么，而你认为很多其他设计师可能不同意？

Before I let you go, I want to ask a few more personal questions. One that I really like to ask a lot of people, and I'm particularly interested in your perspective: what's something that you personally believe about design that you think a lot of other designers might disagree with?

在这个设计时代，很多人非常崇拜像史蒂夫·乔布斯这样的人。但你可以认为乔布斯创造了你真正喜爱的所有技术，但实际上是团队里的人——团队里有人，而他们作为公司决定除了他之外不提升任何其他人。而我认为 Browser Co 非常幸运能做到的一件事是，我们非常擅长让每个设计师都能发声，有自己的声音，来播客上谈论我们构建的东西，并且对我们构建的东西有各自的风格。我可以看着团队里任何人创作的东西，就能知道是谁做的，甚至不用别人告诉我。我就能看出来。我喜欢这样。在很多领域，这是非常非常正常的，但出于某种原因，设计领域不是这样。所以这不是常态，但我非常珍视这一点。不管怎样，我认为很多公司即将模仿这种工作方式和展示作品的方式，因为我认为你正因这个原因而看到成功。这是新鲜的。

A lot of people in this era of design really lionize people like Steve Jobs. And it's like, you could think that Steve Jobs made all of the technology that you really love, but it was people—there were people on the team, and they as a company made a decision to not elevate any of those people besides him. And one of the things that I think that Browser Co has been really fortunate to do is we've been really good at letting the individual designers speak up and have voices, and come on podcasts and talk about what we've built, and have individual styles for what we've built. And I can look at something that anyone on the team has created and kind of know who made it without even being told. I can just tell. And I like that. And there are a lot of fields where that's very, very normal, and for some reason design it's not. So it's not really the status quo, but it's something that I very much value. For what it's worth, I think a lot of companies are about to copy the style of working and showing the work, because I think you are seeing success for that reason. It's fresh.

我们能聊聊 Feed 吗？因为你知道，我从 Twitter 上搜集了这些问题，天哪，很明显很多人真的很喜欢你的 RSS 应用。

Can we talk a little bit about Feed? Because you know, I sourced these questions from Twitter, and man, it is quite apparent that a lot of people really like your RSS app.

我是说，这很有趣，它回到了——实际上触及了我之前说的关于主页的想法，关于人们希望在 Arc 里有一个主页。我非常觉得互联网现在没有重心，也许浏览器应该加上它，或者也许是另一个应用。你知道，在疫情期间，我意识到我一天打开 Instagram 很多很多次，只是无意识地滚动，然后退出应用，然后想，我甚至不知道我刚才看了什么。我觉得我就像被喂了垃圾。我是说，Instagram 上有很多好东西，但我觉得我想对自己看到的内容有更多控制。所以我说，好吧，让我为自己构建一个完全由我控制的新闻源，我可以调整所有旋钮，我可以精确控制放入什么，我可以把 RSS 和 Twitter 的新闻与照片库中的记忆闪回、提醒、联系人生日混合在一起，甚至如果需要的话，还可以加入闪卡。

I mean, it's funny, it comes back to—it actually touches on what I was saying about the homepage earlier, about people wanting to have a homepage in Arc. I feel very much like the internet does not have a center of gravity right now, and maybe the browser should add it, or maybe it's another app. And you know, in the middle of COVID, I realized that I was opening Instagram many, many times a day and just kind of mindlessly scrolling, and then quitting the app and being like, I don't even know what I just watched. I feel like I was just kind of fed slop. I mean, there's a lot of great things on Instagram, but I felt like I wanted to be a little more in control over what I was seeing. So I said, well, let me build a news feed for myself that I'm totally in control of, and I can tweak all the dials, and I can control exactly what is put in, and I can mix news through RSS and Twitter with flashbacks of memories from my photo library, and reminders, and contacts' birthdays, all the way up to flash cards if I want.

我想学点新东西，所以这个想法基本上就是给自己在互联网上安一个家，把正在发生的新鲜事都带给我，让我感觉完全掌控自己的媒体食谱。所以我为自己做了这个应用，发布出去后，人们一直在用，似乎也很喜欢。这对我来说纯粹是个兴趣项目。但“如果互联网能更像 Instagram 一点，你可以关注各种事物，构建一套每天推送给你、带给你的互联网内容，而你是绝对的主人”这个想法，我觉得真的很有意思。

I wanted to learn something new, so the idea was basically to give myself a home on the internet that brings me everything new that's happening, in a way that I very much feel like I'm in control of my own media diet. So I built the app for myself, put it out there, people have been using it, people seem to enjoy it. It's very much just a passion project for myself. But this idea of what if the internet felt a little bit more like Instagram in that you could follow things and build up a set of the internet that was pushed to you and brought to you each day, in a way that you were very much like the boss of, is an idea that I think is really interesting.

是啊，听你这么说真的很有吸引力。你走之前最后一个问题：你在这个第一份设计岗位上，说实话是在一个相当大的舞台上，和很多非常有才华的人一起，做一个那么多人喜爱的产品。回顾过去几年的旅程，你觉得在 Arc 工作期间，作为设计师，你在哪些方面成长了？

Yeah, it's really compelling actually to hear you talk about it. Last question before you go: you're in this first design role, honestly designing on a pretty big stage with a lot of really talented people, on a product that so many people adore. When you reflect on your own journey over the last few years, what's a way that you think you've grown as a designer while working at Arc?

第一个我觉得是意识到“感觉”不只属于 Snapchat 这样的应用，它属于浏览器这样的应用，甚至属于表单这样最无聊的东西。我学到了很多关于简单隐喻的价值。我觉得作为设计师早期，我非常想为每件事想出完美的系统。后来我意识到，其实不，你不应该试图为人们想出完美的系统。你应该构建真正简单的工具，让人们能够理解并凭自己的判断去使用，去做他们需要做的任何事。很容易想要对某件事苦思冥想、把它高度理性化，但通常更好的做法是直接参与进来，开始动手做。

The first one I think is realizing that feeling does not just belong in apps like Snapchat; it belongs in apps like a browser, and even in the most boring things like forms. I've learned a lot about the value of really simple metaphors. I think early on as a designer, I was very much trying to come up with the perfect system for everything. And then I later realized that actually no, you shouldn't try to come up with the perfect system for people. You should try to build really simple tools that people can understand and wield based on their own judgment, for them to do whatever it is they need to do. It's really easy to want to think really hard about something and really intellectualize something, but it's often much better to just kind of weigh in and start doing something.

最后，我觉得我学到的一个比较大的教训就是，直接开始做事。让你的身体动起来，让你的铅笔和像素流动起来，让你的光标动起来，这通常是前进的方向。别焦虑，直接画草图。

I think finally, one of the bigger lessons I've learned is that just kind of start doing things. Get your body moving, get your pencils and pixels flowing, get your cursor moving, and that's generally the way forward. Don't fret, just sketch.

我喜欢这个。我喜欢用“直接参与”作为结尾，这对任何正在听、心里有个想法但还没开始的人来说都是一个挑战。就像直接开始。我觉得这很棒。

I love it. I love ending on 'weigh in' as a challenge for anyone listening who's kind of just had this thing that they're considering but haven't started. Like just start. I think it's great.

是的，还有，把你想到的最蠢的个人网站点子，把它做出来。

Yeah, also take the stupidest idea you can think of for a personal website and make that.

天哪，谢谢你。我差点忘了。我会把它放在节目笔记里。如果你还没上过 Nate 的个人网站，你一定要去看看。这绝对是我在互联网上见过的最独特的作品集，肯定会拓展你对个人网站的认知。所以我们一定会把它放在节目笔记里。Nate，这太棒了，伙计。听到你的旅程真是太好了。为你高兴。从你说话的方式就能听出来你玩得很开心，所以我很期待看到你接下来的发展。

Oh my gosh, thank you. I almost forgot. I will put it in the show notes. If you haven't been on Nate's personal site, you have to check it out. It is easily the most unique portfolio that I've seen on the internet, and definitely will extend the box of what you think of when you think of a personal website. So we will definitely put that in the show notes. Nate, this has been amazing, man. It's so great to hear your journey. Happy for you. You can even just hear in the way that you're talking that you're having a lot of fun, so I'm excited to see where you take this.

是啊，聊得很开心。

Yeah, wonderful chatting.

嘿，我是 Red。别忘了，如果你想更深入，我每周都会给超过 1 万名设计师发送邮件，附上额外资源和这些对话的要点。所以去 dive.club 注册吧。好了，下周见。

Hey, it's Red. Don't forget, if you want to go even deeper, each week I send an email out to over 10,000 designers with bonus resources and key takeaways from these conversations. So head to dive.club to sign up. Okay, I'll see you next week.