thing app
For the Config Makeathon, I designed and built a concept app solo in two weeks, taking a saturated category: The hobby discovery app, and stress-testing it from a design point of view. The goal was to resolve its central contradiction: an attention product built for an off-screen activity.
The premise
I picked a common app category, the “discover a new hobby” app, and stress-tested it from a design point of view. Hobby apps are built like content apps: browse, save, scroll, come back tomorrow. But the actual job is the opposite of screen time. Someone who wants to make something with their hands needs the app for about ninety seconds, then they need to leave.
So Thing became an app about making, not about hobbies. The word “hobby” does not appear in the product. Its position: pick one thing, get the simplest possible way to make it, make it, keep a photo, stop there or make another.
The loop
One loop, two modes.
Idea mode. A stack of cards, one thing per card. Swipe for the next idea. No lists, no categories, no search. Browsing is intentionally shallow because browsing is not the product.
Making mode. Hold the card to commit. The hold is deliberate friction: swiping is cheap, starting is a decision, and the gesture should feel like one. The app then walks you through one step at a time and ends by asking for a photo, which goes to a private collection.
That is the entire app. No feed, no profiles, no streaks, no sharing.
Design decisions
Curated by how safely they fail, not by difficulty. Every item in the small catalog passed the same test: its failure mode has to be benign. First attempts are guaranteed to be bad, so the product only includes things where bad is still usable. Difficulty-based curation protects the user from effort; failure-based curation protects them from quitting.
Instructions written for zero purchase. Every step assumes you own nothing: materials are scavenged from the house, substitutions are the default. The copy also refuses perfectionism directly: “leave it crooked, do whatever, don’t decide the shape beforehand.” Lowering the cost of starting is a content decision as much as a UX one, so the instructional copy is part of the interface.
Making mode is designed for busy hands. One step at a time, two tap zones: left for previous, right to keep going, with the forward zone taking most of the screen. Nothing small to hit, nothing to manage while your hands are dirty.
The photo is the completion mechanic. Finishing means photographing. The photos build a private album that gives a sense of progression (the wonky first attempt next to the fifth decent one) and closes the loop without a social layer. No audience, no external pressure. It is an app for yourself.
One tone, everywhere. Near-monochromatic palette, uppercase editorial type, flat declarative copy (“The first one is always the worst one. Make it anyway.”). The restraint is the brand: an app arguing against app-industry habits should not look or sound like one.
Imagery
All images and illustrations were created by me, generated with Midjourney and Weavy and art-directed to fit the identity. Two registers, each with a job: idea cards use still-life photography with hard editorial lighting, the object as a thing in the world, not a lifestyle shot; steps and collection use loose hand-drawn line illustrations on near-black, one accent color per thing. The sketch quality says “this does not need to be precise” in the same voice as the copy. Both registers share the same restrained palette, which is what holds the identity together.
Process note
Screens were produced through my agentic workflow: a text-file design system as source of truth, generated and validated with Claude Code, synced to Figma via MCP, shipped as a working prototype in Figma Make. The two-week timeline was only realistic because the system, not memory, enforced consistency.
Scope and honesty
Thing is a two-week concept, not a shipped product, and has not been validated with users. What it demonstrates is a way of working: take a saturated category, find the contradiction at its center (an attention product for an off-screen activity), and let one clear thesis drive every decision down to the copy on a single step.