Zillow Rate Your Neighbors? Designer Soren Iverson Reimagines Apps

Soren Iverson guilty Spotify, if “mistakes” is the right word.

In the year In 2015, the music streaming company launched Wrapped, a year-end recap that gives every user insight into their music listening habits and the year’s most popular artists. Other brands started borrowing the idea, a fun way to break engagement is shame. This December, digital designer Iverson imagined what a package might look like when applied to our most basic apps.

Using the interface design tool Figma, Iverson a Wrapped for google maps, Robin HoodAnd Starbucks And shared the images to Twitter. The tweets received some attention, with hundreds of likes each, but Iverson was just getting started. Almost every day since then, he’s thought of new features that add unexpected touches to already well-worn apps. he said. Discussion GPTBut in Apple messages. Instagram, but with an alternative To pay to reverse “deep likes”. Lyft-style reviews, but for Tinder (“They look like pictures!”). And, the ones that went with a confirmed virus: Beat the Minesweeper. To cancel your subscription and iOS alerts, but for the whole familySo the alarm will only go off after everyone wakes up.

Iverson’s satirical design concepts started popping up on my own timeline regularly, and it’s hard to say whether that’s because they’ve gone viral or Twitter’s timeline algorithm has changed (it could be both). So I caught up with Iverson, who works full-time as a Cash app designer when he’s not creating other apps, to ask about his design process. We talked about how tech companies are responding to his ideas and what the popularity of his no-nonsense app features says about our current relationship with technology. Iverson shared an idea that an Instagram engineer really liked: “Get me inside.”

The discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What inspired you to start sharing these app ideas?

Soren IversonWell, many years ago, Spotify created this bundled experience, and from a product management perspective, it was a huge success. People loved it. And now it seems like every product manager working on every other app is trying to transfer this thinking model to their own apps. This December he felt like everyone else was doing it. So I just decided, OK, as a thought experiment, what if Starbucks did this? What if DoorDash did this? What if Google Maps did this? The idea was around taking their internal measure of success – did this person drive this far or order this many cups of coffee – and throw it back at you, the user.

I often think in pictures, so I immediately pictured it in my head and mocked it up. And people responded positively to it. They thought it was funny. And just like an explosion.

At first my layout was, “This product, insert comma, other feature or UI here. But now my position is more, what if PM Fessman knew exactly and proposed an application that would be very intrusive? And it was a really fun workout. There are a couple that I particularly miss. [Sorensen later identified them as Josh Rozin and Gauthier Le Meur]And sometimes they write me things and I’m like crazy.