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All stories

Design decisions

The boring part is the product

A saved draft and a helpful error message are features worth caring about.

Nobody mentioned the save indicator in the first demo. They noticed it immediately when it stopped working. There is a whole category of product work that becomes visible only through its absence.

This week we spent our time on that category: keeping text after a failed request, explaining what happened, and making a retry safe. The screenshots looked almost identical.

The experience was different. People could trust the page enough to stop thinking about the page. That is a result worth shipping.

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A note from Sam Okafor

A place to return to.

A working journal of useful software, small experiments, and the decisions behind them. This is a fictional publication, made to show what you can build with Caveat.

Make something like this