The friction formula that makes AI Apps addictive

Hey, It’s Shane.

Welcome to Design for Builders, a newsletter for founders, operators, and builders who want to improve their design skills and create better products.

This week, I sat down with Midas Kwant, Product Designer at Captions. He's someone who:

• Started coding iOS apps at 12 because he wanted iPod headphones like pro skateboarders

• Built 24 consumer apps before age 25 and raised venture funding as a solo founder

• Thinks the best AI experiences don't feel like "AI experiences" at all

• Uses AI to critique his paywalls and simulate user journeys

Let's get into it.

1. The backstory: from dad's iPod to Stanford

Midas didn't set out to be a designer either.

He was skateboarding in the Netherlands at 12, obsessing over the fact that all the pros wore white wired headphones. So he borrowed his dad's iPod and became obsessed with the device itself.

That curiosity led him down a rabbit hole: exploring every Apple website, landing on the developer portal, and realizing people could make things for Apple without working there.

With zero technical background, he taught himself iOS development using Stanford's free CS videos and Stack Overflow. His first app? A mobile version of Apple's WWDC app wall just has app icons flying around the screen because it "looked cool aesthetically."

Those tools felt more accessible to him than Photoshop or Illustrator. Sometimes the hardest path teaches you the most.

Fast forward through years of deliberate decisions aimed at getting to Stanford (taking the SAT five times, navigating cultural differences), and he's studying Human-Computer Interaction while building a consumer social studio.

24 apps and 4 years later, he realized: "I really, really enjoy doing this product design work, especially the zero to one."

2. The slide-to-unlock philosophy

One of those 24 apps was SwipeChat, an experiment in removing all friction from voice messaging.

The constraint Midas set: design an app that never shows a keyboard. No typing. Just recording.

He took inspiration from the original iPhone's slide-to-unlock, recognizing its genius: it added necessary friction while keeping the interaction simple. Perfect for when Apple needed to solve pocket-dialing on the first touchscreen phone.

SwipeChat became a list of friends with one giant slide component. Slide to play messages. Slide to record. Slide to send. That's it.

"It was never picked up by thousands of people. But from a design point of view, it was probably one of the more fun things we ever worked on and arguably achieved what we set out to do."

This friction-first thinking shapes how Midas approaches design today: Is this really the easiest path for the user to get this job done?

3. Making AI invisible at Captions

When Captions started, automatically adding captions to videos wasn't obvious. This was before talking videos dominated TikTok, before everyone expected transcription.

The founders spotted the trend early: people were hacking the algorithm by adding captions so viewers could follow along without sound, making content more accessible and engaging.

But here's what makes Captions special: they never led with "AI this" and "AI that."

"AI is just a technology that powers a better tool or powers a better experience."

Midas breaks down when to make AI visible vs. invisible:

Invisible AI: Automatic captions, eye contact correction operations that make the experience factually better and faster. Just do it for the user.

Visible AI: Heavy operations like generating B-roll video or images, moments where users need to wait, and should understand why.

"If it's easier, just do it. Don't make users opt into an 'AI experience' unless they need to understand they're waiting for something to be generated."

4. Using AI as your design critique partner

Here's where it gets interesting. Midas uses AI not just for generation, but as a feedback mechanism.

When designing paywalls (where every pixel affects conversion), he feeds the design to ChatGPT with full context:

• Where it's shown in the app

• The target audience

• User types they hope will convert

Then he prompts it: "You are a super senior staff product designer with a background in data analytics who founded your own company..." and asks for a critique.

"Pretty often, something good comes out of it."

He also uses AI to simulate user experiences, writing scripts that test different user inputs and interface responses to understand the full range of what users might see.

5. Environment as a design tool

Living in Manhattan has been transformative for Midas's design process, but not in the way you might think.

Being in-person with his team at Captions is game-changing: "I love all my coworkers. They're so smart, so good at what they do. Just seeing the type of work they do is extremely inspiring."

But NYC's real value isn't the stimulation, it's the processing time.

"You take in so many stimuli day-to-day subconsciously. The job is letting yourself process those stimuli."

His solution: the West Side Highway. Running, walking, and giving his brain permission to calm down and process the day.

"Things that I might've subconsciously taken in need their fair share to find their way somewhere in the neural net of my brain, settle, and come out when it's the right time."

6. The curiosity engine

What drives exceptional designers? Midas traces it back to a simple system:

Look at people where you want to be. Figure out what they were doing at your age. Obsess over it while doing what you personally care about.

But the real key is following rabbit holes with "childish curiosity and almost naivety."

Whether it's a random color that catches your eye, an interaction that feels perfect, or a technical limitation that sparks creativity, the magic happens when you lose yourself for hours exploring something that genuinely interests you.

"That's what I do on a philosophical life level, but it's also what I do day-to-day with designs. I make one flow and think, 'I like this one part.' How can I make the entire flow just about that part?"

7. The future of vibe designing

Everyone talks about vibe coding with Cursor, but what about vibe designing?

Midas sees a shift happening. Early AI tools did 10-15% of creative work while humans did the rest. Now that ratio is flipping AI does the majority, humans provide the crucial 10-20% of taste and direction.

"As AI gets better at predicting human input, less interface might be required in applications."

This means designers need to think differently:

• Instead of rigid flows, design for ranges of possible UI states

• Use AI to simulate user journeys and understand what experiences could look like

• Focus on the minimum and maximum interface that users might see

"My job is changing from designing fixed flows to figuring out the range of UI that users could possibly see."

8. The speed of iteration advantage

For anyone building with new AI tools, Midas's advice is simple:

Use these tools to massively increase your speed of iteration, but don't get hung up on one idea.

"If you can spin up a new idea over a weekend, spend two days on the thing that might or might not be working, but spin up something new in the meantime."

The game is still speed of iteration. AI just makes it supercharged.

Final thoughts

Midas's journey from skateboarding with his dad's iPod to designing for millions at Captions shows the power of obsessive curiosity and intentional environment choices.

His approach to AI making it invisible when it improves experience, visible when users need context offers a blueprint for building products that feel magical rather than robotic.

Most importantly, his philosophy of following rabbit holes while maintaining speed of iteration feels like the perfect mindset for the AI-enhanced design era we're entering.

Great design still comes down to human curiosity, taste, and the willingness to process all the stimuli around us into something meaningful.

-Shane

P.S. If you're a designer using AI tools in interesting ways, I'd love to hear about it. Reply and tell me what you're building.