We design on the phone, not in Figma
The first time you open your carefully-designed Figma mockup on a real phone, something always surprises you.
Text is smaller than you thought. Tap targets are closer together than you thought. The whole layout feels busier than it did on the monitor — because on the monitor, you were looking at the design in isolation. On the phone, you’re looking at it alongside everything else your hand is doing.
We still use design tools. They’re good for exploring ideas quickly, comparing options and keeping components consistent. What we don’t do is treat them as the place where a design gets approved.
Our rule
No design decision is final until it’s been on a real phone for at least 48 hours. Not on a simulator. Not mirrored from a laptop. A phone, in a hand, in daylight, in a dark room, on the subway, in a pocket while the screen is off and then on again.
Most decisions change after that test. Fonts go up a size. Padding gets slightly more generous. That elegant thin stroke becomes a 2px stroke because 1px doesn’t read on a sunny bus stop.
How we get designs onto a device
The fastest route is usually a rough build rather than a polished prototype. A screen with real data, real fonts and real scrolling tells us more than a perfect clickable mockup, because it behaves the way the app will. For small changes we simply build them into a test version and install it on our own phones the same day.
Real data matters as much as the real device. A mockup with three neatly named entries says nothing about what happens when someone has a long list, a very long name, or nothing at all yet. So we test with messy content: a guest list with names in several scripts, a trip with a dozen stops, a garden with plants added over months.
Beyond the phone
The same principle holds on our other platforms. Windows apps get tested on an ordinary laptop screen at normal scaling, not just a large external monitor. Browser extensions get tested in a real toolbar, with the popup opening over real web pages. iPhone apps running on a Mac get checked in a resizable window. Every surface has its own version of the gap between mockup and reality.
What the phone teaches you
It teaches you humility. Designs that looked sophisticated in the mockup tool look sparse or confusing on the actual device. Gestures that felt clever become awkward when you’re trying to one-hand them. Animations that felt slick on a high-refresh monitor look laggy on a three-year-old Android.
What we got wrong
We used to polish mockups to a high finish before anything ran on a device, then spend days defending decisions that clearly didn’t work in the hand. The polish made designs feel settled when they weren’t. Now we keep mockups deliberately rough and get to a device as early as possible, so changing our minds is cheap.
The trade-off is that early builds look unfinished, and it takes some discipline not to judge them on looks. But fixing a layout in the first week is far cheaper than fixing it after it has shipped.
This is not bad news. It’s just the real surface your work lives on. The sooner your design meets that surface, the better the final result.