Hidden By Design

How many choices is too many?

A sandwich shop with 150 fillings on the board, and you order the first one you see. This week we look for the point where too many choices stops helping anyone.

The question

How do you know when you've given a user too many choices on a screen versus not enough? I never know where the actual cutoff is until something's already live and people are struggling with it.

This one's ours, sparked by a mouse that only mentions its battery at 1%. Hick's Law says more options slow people down. It doesn't say where the line sits on your own screen.

What we talk about

Where a battery warning should fire, and whether a percentage is even the right number. Designs that annoy on purpose, and friction put there for a reason.

Then Hick's Law: what a screen asks of working memory, how a thousand options can feel like three, and where the cutoff sits.

Professional tools get the hardest look. We test two ways to ease a beginner in, and ask why a busy screen makes its user look like an expert.

Then lunch. Why does a short menu read as the expensive one?

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• Hick's Law (S2E3): our first look, due a second round.
• Our earlier conversation on friction Friction (S2E31): the baggage claim example.

Also mentioned

• Adobe Audition: assumes you already understand sound.
• Adobe Photoshop: same assumption, different craft.
• Unreal Engine: where teenage level designers built their traps.
• Amazon's homepage: crowded, and built for impulse buys.
• The supermarket marmalade tasting experiment (link missing): numbers on air are illustrative.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

You've clicked through a checkout more times than you can count, and it's never felt like a story. This week we take storytelling in design to the least glamorous screens there are.

The question

I keep hearing that good design should tell a story. But when I'm working on something like a settings page or a checkout flow, it doesn't feel like there's really a story to tell.

From our own list. Is "tell a story" meant for everything, or only marketing sites and onboarding?

What we talk about

A painter's bowl of fruit, and the gap between a layout and a composition. Then how the screen you just left shapes the one you're on.

A wordless song about a chase through a forest, where art stops and design starts, and what a title does before the first note.

How a joke is built and tested, a spider that changed a whole night of jokes, a car crash study about one word, and anchoring. Then callbacks, albums heard start to finish, and a one-sentence story.

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• User interface design (S2E20): composition and story in interfaces.
• S3E5: the cup's first appearance.

Also mentioned

• Anatomy of songs and Anatomy of more songs: John Atkinson's genre cartoons.
• Jokes with Mark Simmons, the Gary Delaney episode: how jokes get written and tested.
• Elizabeth Loftus: the car crash wording study.
• Storyteller Tactics: storytelling cards.
• Peer Gynt: Grieg, music you can hear mountains in.
• The Four Seasons: Vivaldi, a title that primes you.

• The Real Slim Shady: Eminem, a callback.
• The Wall: Pink Floyd, one story start to finish.
• Levellers: an album tied to a life.
• Pulp Fiction soundtrack: teenage summers on repeat.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

Someone shares their work, and the only honest thought you have is that it won't work. You keep quiet, or you say it and the room goes cold. This week: what makes design feedback land.

The question

How do you personally create the kind of environment where someone can say "I think this is a bad idea" without it turning into a whole thing or an argument?

How it's said decides whether the next idea gets shared at all. Can that room be built on purpose?

What we talk about

A beautiful coffee cup with a bad last sip, and a yellow mug picked for its color alone. Then the cup goes into a meeting: critique that starts as a question, the five whys, the four stages of psychological safety, and one small word traced back to improv.

How do you separate what you make from who you are? And how much of a hard conversation does the room decide before anyone speaks?

Mentioned in this episode

Also mentioned

• The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clark: the four stages we walk through.
• The five whys: borrowed from customer interviews.
• "Yes, and": the improv rule behind avoiding stop words.
• Susan Weinschenk: research on how context shapes a conversation.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

You've been nudging the same layout by a pixel for the last hour. Is it finished, or have you just had enough of it? Knowing when a design is done is the one thing nobody teaches you, and both ways of getting it wrong have a price.

The question

How do you decide when a design is actually done, versus when you're just running out of time or patience and calling it finished?

Finished and out of time can look identical from the outside, and often from the inside too. Design thinking says iterate until it's done, which is fine until you notice that nothing in it tells you when a design is done. Anyone working without a client or a deadline runs into this one sooner or later.

What we talk about

Before that, a debt from last episode. The rule of thirds and the golden ratio turn up in every guide to composition, usually as one idea with a shell drawn over it. We trace where they actually come from, through a phrase coined in 1797 about something else, a Victorian photography book and a US Army manual from 1979. Then what happens when someone checks whether untrained eyes prefer them at all.

Then the thing every designer works out eventually. People say the process is what matters, and then they react to whatever looks nice. We pull that apart: why a polished prototype pulls a room into arguing about the details, what a deliberately ugly first version gets you instead, and where the line sits between how something functions and how it works.

Which brings us to the question itself. We get into imposter syndrome as something to calibrate rather than cure, and why being fast and right about everything can make you worse at the part of the job that needs doubt. Then how requirements, a specification and a definition of done turn a feeling into something you can check against.

And perfection, which doesn't exist. We chase what a deadline is for when nobody's waiting on you, and why saying one out loud to another person does something that setting it privately doesn't.

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• Design thinking (S2E8): the iterate-until-it's-done loop that the answer leans on.
• What is intuitive design (Episode 7): intuition being different from person to person, referred back to on air without a number.

Also mentioned

• Martin's audio drama: the self-written, self-produced passion piece with no deadline on it, which had to be called finished anyway.
• Steve Jobs on design: "design is not how something looks, it's how something works", the line the works-versus-functions split is built on.
• Remarks on Rural Scenery, John Thomas Smith, 1797: where the phrase rule of thirds is coined, in a passage about perspective and tonal mass in painting.
• Pictorial Effect in Photography, Henry Peach Robinson, 1869: the first to put the point of interest off dead centre, by observation and with no maths behind it.
• The Library of Amateur Photography, Volume 3: the first version that resembles the rule as it's taught today.
• Composition for Photographers, 1952 (link missing): where the golden mean gets attributed to Pythagoras.
• The US Army journalist's soldier manual, 1979 (link missing): where the rule of thirds and the golden rectangle get welded into one credible-looking thing.
• The nautilus shell: the reference everyone reaches for, and the one that gets checked here.
• Bartle's player types: killer, explorer, socialiser and achiever, used to settle who a piece of work is for.
• Rabbit Rocket Racing: the Polyspice game whose two pillars, fun flying and friendly chaos, work as the calibration example.
• Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion, looked up live at the end.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

Why is no-one talking about AI ethics?

Thorbjørn sent Martin a link. That link was for a company selling computers made of living brain cells. Nowhere does that company talk about the ethics involved here, which is a little bit worrying. Maybe even more than killer robots.

What we talk about

The Anthropic research who said there's more than 10% chance AI will wipe out humans. Is that really going to happen? Well, Thorbjørn gives another of his famed predictions. Let's see if it comes true. Although maybe if it does, we wouldn't know anyway. Gulp. Think about how it would happen and the you end up going in circles, because... surely someone would stop it. So why is someone on the inside saying it out loud? They can't slow down. They're not allowed! Whoever stops first, gets left behind immediately, because the money has got them by the throat. Really, they're hoping someone on the outside steps in. But nobody has.We also chat about how AI sells itself. Things that look good get believed, that's the aesthetic usability effect, and AI writes in a way that feels human, which means... we trust it more than we should. Thorbjørn also brings up The Matrix (and how The Animatrix is better, no arguing please) and says we're somewhere within that world right now. So, who's scared? Martin completely forgets how to form words when the conversation turns to Cortical Labs. They're selling a computer made of living tissue. Lab grown neurons wired to silicon chips, available to anyone. I'll ask again, who's scared?Why does this need to be a thing? The answer is in the episode and although logical, still feels wrong.

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• An earlier episode on the aesthetic usability effect (link missing): never named on air.
• An earlier episode on the brain and power consumption (link missing): same, no title.

Also mentioned

• Geoffrey Hinton: walked away from AI over AI ethics.
• Anthropic: whose researchers keep saying this out loud.
• The BBC report on the 10% kill estimate: where this one started.
• Cortical Labs and the CL1: the lab grown neuron computer.
• The Matrix: the first reference anyone reaches for.
• The Animatrix: rated above the film.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

A joke works because everything is predictable until it isn't. Thorbjørn thinks breaking design rules works the same way.

The question

"What's something you were taught early on in your career that you later found out was actually wrong, or at least way more situational than you were originally told?"

Off the hosts' own list. Martin's answer: every job used to be a pitch against rivals, and working alone now feels more like a team than employment ever did. Thorbjørn's: design school taught him that how a thing works counts more than how it looks, then he watched thinner ideas win on looks alone. He uses that lesson now, and hates it.

What we talk about

Martin asks where the rule of thirds came from. Thorbjørn reaches for the golden ratio, then admits he can't say why thirds please the eye. A tangent on green versus red.

Breaking rules in a video game: at the start, and one at a time, because breaking it all at once makes noise instead of surprise. Martin's voiceover parallel.

Then AI: posters that all look the same, and a novelty effect wearing off. Thorbjørn predicts subscription prices double once the fight for market share settles.

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• Colours (S1E10): the green-versus-red question

Also mentioned

• Kahneman's System 1 and System 2: reasoning after the observation
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone on "but, therefore": South Park plotting
• Polyspice Games: Thorbjørn's studio, how the two met
• talat: on-device transcription
• Natural Reader: reads papers to him on runs

• Spotify: the market-share comparison
• Paul the Octopus: the football-predicting octopus

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a

What's the one thing about human attention that most designers never learn to use on purpose?

The question

"What's the one design principle that you think is massively underestimated even by experienced designers like yourself?"

This one comes from Martin's own list, not a listener submission. Thorbjørn takes it as a chance to name three principles he thinks go under-used outside game design: flow theory, actually understanding a problem before jumping to a solution, and emotional design. Flow theory ends up carrying most of the conversation from there.

What we talk about

Thorbjørn walks through what actually produces a flow state: a clear goal, a challenge that matches your skill, and feedback that comes back immediately. He and Martin tie this to three different kinds of design problems that each create those conditions differently: games (where the designer defines the goal outright), personal apps like Duolingo (solving one immediate desire), and enterprise software (solving the business's problem through a tool built for someone else to use).

Some apps are built to produce a flow state on purpose. Thorbjørn points to TikTok and YouTube Shorts as the most dominant examples, engineered to make you lose track of time entirely. Other designs exist specifically to break that state: Netflix's "are you still watching?" prompt, session-limit warnings on gambling sites, and even something as small as a delete confirmation, which counts as friction doing its job on purpose. They also touch on genuinely dangerous, high-stakes situations, like bomb disposal, where flow is still useful but has to come from real experience rather than an interface trying to induce it.

Daydreaming comes up as a way into flow that needs no outside help or equipment at all, something Thorbjørn calls a superpower for creative people. That leads to a bigger question: can a whole stretch of someone's life, being a teenager, being in love, count as one long flow state, rather than something that only happens task by task.

Mentioned in this episode

From Hidden By Design

• Flow (S1E5) — the earlier Hidden By Design episode on flow theory that this conversation keeps referencing; Thorbjørn and Martin disagreed on air about which season it was in (Thorbjørn was right).
• Emotional Design (S1E11) — the earlier episode on the visceral/behavioral/reflective framework, named on air only as "we had an episode about emotional design."
• The Brain (S1E3) — the early episode on how the brain works and Kahneman's automatic vs. reflective thinking, remembered on air only as "episode two or something."

Also mentioned

• Duolingo — cited as a B2C example of an app solving one immediate, individual desire.
• Claude — mentioned as an example of how easy AI tools now make it to build something before checking there's a real problem behind it.
• TikTok — cited as one of the most dominant examples of an app engineered to produce a flow state on purpose.
• YouTube Shorts — cited alongside TikTok for the same reason.
• Netflix's "are you still watching?" prompt — cited as a deliberate flow-breaker for long viewing sessions.

Got a question of your own?

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

Hidden By Design is a podcast about design for everyone, hosted by Thorbjørn Lynggaard Sørensen and Martin Whiskin. Every episode digs into the design decisions you don't notice, because the best design is the kind that works without you seeing it.

We're back. After a break, Thorbjørn and Martin relaunch Hidden By Design in two tracks: Talks, opinion-driven conversations like this one, and Learn, deep dives into specific design mechanics and theory. This first Talks episode covers bad design, deceptive design, and what AI is doing to the design trade.

The question

"Do you think there's such a thing as objectively bad design or is it always contextual?"

This one comes from Thorbjørn and Martin's own list of talking points rather than a listener submission. No source platform (Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) is named in this episode. If you want your own question answered on a future episode, see "Got a question of your own?" below.

What we talk about

Thorbjørn's answer is yes to both: design is contextual, but there's still a floor under it. If a design doesn't solve the user's problem, or does something other than what the user expected (a button labeled "start" that doesn't start), that's objectively bad, whoever's judging. Two examples: No Man's Sky, which technically delivered the open-ended procedural worlds it promised, but with so little to actually do in them that players felt cheated, and other promised features missing on top of that. And the 1990s BBC soap Eldorado, badly made on every level, canceled fast, and later loved precisely for how bad it was.

Then design that works exactly as intended, just not for the user. Thorbjørn calls it "good design with a bad experience": airline booking flows that nickel-and-dime you step by step, mobile game ads showing mechanics the game doesn't have, "frustration" marketing baiting clicks by showing someone playing badly, freemium puzzle games that stall you right before a win. Thorbjørn shares a story from his own company, Keepit, targeted by a scam using its name and branding to sell fake storage devices. Martin connects it to AI-cloned podcasts lifting a show's notes, art, and titles while swapping in generated audio.

From there, the episode's central prediction: AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will, unless you keep the craft AI can't fake. Thorbjørn's parallel is Warcraft III's map editor, powerful and easy enough that it flooded the game with amateur maps; the real problem wasn't letting people create, it was surfacing the good stuff. He expects the same with AI-generated design and voice work: once speed stops being the differentiator, craftsmanship and knowing what actually works becomes the job.

Mentioned in this episode

• No Man's Sky — delivered the promised procedural worlds, but with too little to do in them; other promises went unmet too.
• Eldorado (TV series, BBC, 1992) — Martin's "so bad it's good" example.

• Candy Crush Saga — referenced for its near-win-then-pay mechanic.
• Warcraft III World Editor — referenced for flooding the game with user-made maps and the challenge of surfacing the good ones.
• Emotional Design (Don Norman) — source of the visceral/behavioral/reflective framework applied to the chair examples.
• S2E9 – Design and AI — the earlier episode where "AI won't take your job, but people who use AI will" was first discussed.
• S2E20 – UI is not design — referenced directly ("we touched upon that earlier in the episode about UI").
• S2E3 – Hicks Law — named as an example of the mechanic-level deep dives Learn will cover.
• Fitts's Law — not covered yet, named as a topic for a future Learn episode.
• Cognitive Load — not covered yet, named as a topic for a future Learn episode.

Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

Figure ground is a funny thing. In essence, it simply mean "forground and background" which should be pretty obvious to have. However, what its all about is how the forground and background of anything plays together, so that you as a designer can use the mechanics of this to your advange.

A lot of people think of figure ground as something that is only for visuals, but in reality, it is for everything that you design. So, sit down, and listen, learn and become smarter as we go through all of the things you should be aware of when designing and how to take advange of figure ground.

You will learn

• What Figure Ground is
• That figure ground is more than what the eye can see
• When do we learn it as humans
• Where can you use this when designing

This is the last episode of the season, but we are going to return in the fall with some brand new episodes.

Recently, I wanted a cup of coffee from a coffee machine. I put my cup roughly where I believed that the coffee would come out, I then pressed the coffee I wanted, and then waited.. and waited.. and waited.. then looked at the panel, and found out that it asked me "Are you sure you want coffee?" .. I clicked yes.. and 40 seconds later I had my coffee.

This is an example of poorly placed friction.

In this episode we are discussing the 3 categories of Friction

You wil learn what they are, and how to use them