![[images/The 7 Levels of Tech Design.webp]] **Creator:** Enrico Tartarotti · **Published:** 2026-01-20 · **Length:** 17:28 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVRfadJkJk) > *Why do some tech products feel incredible while others are so frustrating to use? In this video, we break down the 7 levels of product design, from tiny visual details to billion-dollar product vision.* (from the video description) Enrico walks up a ladder of seven levels that separate products people hate from products that earn billions and change the world: visual details, behaviors, enabling technology, defaults, structural design, strategic reframing and product vision. He ends by showing that the iPhone succeeded where an almost identical earlier vision failed because Apple got every level underneath right. Sponsored by **Magic Patterns**, which he used to build the working interface prototypes shown throughout. Written and produced by Enrico Tartarotti and Bartek Malinowski; edited by Seequence Studio. *Summary written from the auto-generated captions, the video description and the creator's chapter markers (Level 1 to Level 7). The captions garble several names ("Revolute", "Hyperard", "Ludvik Strius", "Superhum", "Ken Coena"); names below use the standard spellings of the people and products being described.* ## 1) Detailed outline ### [0:00] Level 1: visual details - **Google's homepage copyright line.** Early Google was far more minimal than rival search engines. In early-2000s user tests with Stanford students, people sat staring at the page for about 45 seconds waiting for it to finish loading, even though it had loaded, because everything sat at the top. The fix was a copyright notice at the bottom with no legal need to be there; it only signaled that the page was complete. - Enrico frames this as level one of seven, the difference between products that feel bad and products that generate billions and change the world. - **Round checkboxes.** Matching a rounded interface by making checkboxes round makes the app feel broken, because round boxes read as **radio buttons** (pick only one). Thousands of repetitions have taught us square means many and round means one. - **The hand cursor.** Blue underlined text without the cursor turning into a pointing hand doesn't feel like a link. Resize cursors work the same way when dragging panels; without these cues desktop computers would be unusable. He credits **Bill Atkinson** with inventing the hand cursor in 1987 for the Macintosh app **HyperCard**. - **Middle truncation.** Long file names normally get cut with an ellipsis at the end, hiding version suffixes like v1 or v2, and an ellipsis at the start would hide the name. **macOS** puts the ellipsis in the middle and trims letters progressively on each side, so you see both the start and the end. Someone had to write the code that calculates that; Enrico credits **Scott Jenson**, who built it for Apple in the '80s. - These details go unnoticed by 99% of people but make tech usable. Sometimes they're just fun: the **Google Street View** Pegman holds onto the cursor and swings with gravity as you drag him. ### [4:05] Level 2: interactions and behaviors - **Revolut's scam warning.** If you're on a call with someone claiming to be your bank and open the **Revolut** app, it detects the call and tells you Revolut is not calling you, countering one of the most common scams. - Level two is how things behave, and building behaviors that feel human. - **One-finger zoom in Google Maps.** Pinch-to-zoom needs two hands, which is the worst possible requirement when you're navigating on a bike. You can double-tap, hold and drag up or down to zoom with one finger, in Google Maps and almost every app with pinch-to-zoom. It's genius, but there's no way to discover it, so most people don't know. - **Pull-to-refresh** is the opposite: intuitive, used billions of times a day, and removes the need for a refresh button. Paired with infinite-scroll feeds like **Instagram**, it shows something new on every refresh and is probably responsible for billions of dollars in ad revenue. ### [6:03] Level 3: technology that disappears - In 2008 music had a piracy problem. Buying Enrico's current **Spotify** library legally on **iTunes** would have cost about $3,800, plus manual syncing across devices. - Spotify promised instant streaming, but mobile internet was slow. Streaming each song from its own servers took 30 seconds to a minute to start playing. - Spotify bought **uTorrent**, the piracy-powering BitTorrent client, and sold it almost immediately, to get its creator **Ludvig Strigeus**. He rebuilt Spotify's infrastructure on **peer-to-peer** technology: a song came at once from Spotify's servers, your local cache and nearby Spotify users. - A 2010 study found only 8.8% of music came from Spotify servers and 36% from other users, with the rest already on the device. The technology the music industry sued people over built the legal alternative, and users never noticed. - Lesson: great products usually start from an idea for the perfect experience, then find the technology that makes it possible, and the technology that matters is the kind that disappears. ### [8:03] Level 4: defaults - **Netflix autoplay**: the next episode starts before the credits finish. Defaults seem small but control the behavior of millions, for good or bad. - **Read receipts**: on by default in **WhatsApp**, a choice in **iMessage**, where people mostly turn them off because users tend to pick the option that reveals less about them. Since most people never change settings, the social dynamics differ: on WhatsApp "seen" without a reply is loaded; on iMessage nobody knows whether you read it. Same feature, different default, different relationship. This is **default bias**. - **Organ donation**: a chart of European countries splits into high and low donor rates, and the only difference is the default. Austria is opt-out; Denmark is opt-in. - **Defaults worth billions**: Google built or bought **Android** and **Chrome** and gave them away because whoever controls the platform sets the defaults, including the search engine. For platforms it doesn't control, Google pays **Apple** about $20 billion a year to be **Safari's** default and estimated it would lose 60–80% of iPhone search traffic otherwise, not because people would switch to **Bing** but because they use whatever is already there. ### [10:20] Sponsor: Magic Patterns - All the examples in the video are real working components built with **Magic Patterns**, which lets builders try designs, iterations and components by chatting in natural language rather than building whole apps. - You can set product styling, colors and visuals for prototypes to follow, upload screenshots as references, export to **Figma**, sync to **GitHub**, deploy to a custom domain, and collaborate on a shared real-time canvas. The description link includes a viewer discount. ### [11:17] Level 5: structural design - Level five blurs product design and product strategy: the structural decisions that shape how something is used. - Enrico's example is his own product **Flask**, a video-collaboration tool where recorded comments and screen shares appear on the video's timeline. Each comment needs its author, creation time, referenced timestamp and a way to mark it done. - The basic approach, used by his main competitor, lays that information out and adds a done toggle. Instead he built a general-purpose **tagging system** with default tags "done" and "important" (showing you can have more than one) that users can delete or repurpose. - As requests for filtering by user, tag and date piled up, he made one structural change: **everything is a tag**. Creator, creation time and linked timestamp became non-editable tags, so one filter system covers all of them and the dedicated header row becomes a list of tags. - Later, notifying users of comments added since their last visit needed no new view: just a "new" tag, and clicking the notice filters by it using existing features. - Good structural design makes everything else simpler; likewise **Notion** made everything a page (even when shown as a calendar, feed or table) and **Slack** made everything a channel. ### [14:09] Level 6: reframing (product strategy) - Video seemed solved (phone recording, **Zoom**, **YouTube**), but **Loom** asked what if video replaced meetings: record a video instead of scheduling 30 minutes. It didn't invent video, recording or players; it reframed what video is for, and **Atlassian** bought it for $975 million. - Email has existed for decades and **Gmail** is free, but **Superhuman** reframed email from an inbox to manage into the fastest email experience: keyboard shortcuts for everything, a measure of how long your inbox takes, and gamified inbox zero, which is how it charges $30 a month. - The technology and even the design may not change, but the right strategic decision can create a company worth billions. ### [15:20] Level 7: product vision - "Steve Jobs territory": get rid of the buttons and make a giant screen. At the time **BlackBerry** was king, physical keyboards were essential, and accurate touchscreen typing was considered fantasy. - It wasn't a new idea. **General Magic** spun off from Apple and shipped the **Sony Magic Link**, a touchscreen handheld with email, calendar and notes, "the first smartphone 13 years before the iPhone," and it flopped. (The captions give the year as 1984; 13 years before the 2007 iPhone would be 1994.) - Same vision, different outcome: General Magic had level seven but not the layers beneath. The iPhone team had them all: - **Level 6:** reframing the phone into a computer in your pocket, "not a phone with apps, but apps with a phone." - **Level 5:** everything is an app, with no file system or desktop-like UI, just a grid of apps. - **Level 4:** defaults, with Apple's apps front and center in the App Store, Safari defaulting to Google, and the home button always taking you home. - **Level 3:** **capacitive multi-touch** that works, **Gorilla Glass** that doesn't break, and a battery that lasts a day. - **Level 2:** pinch-to-zoom, slide-to-unlock and rubber-band bounce when you scroll too far. - **Level 1:** squircles on every icon, the weight of the animations, and **Ken Kocienda**, an engineer on a deadline, realizing the keyboard's invisible hit boxes had to grow dynamically based on the letter being typed or the keyboard wouldn't work. ### [17:10] Outro - The video is part of a series on the design, engineering and psychology behind everyday tech, and how simple-looking things hide absurd complexity; he points to the next video. ## 2) Things mentioned ### Products, apps and services - **Google Search** homepage (the copyright line), **Google Maps** (one-finger zoom), **Google Street View** (Pegman) - **HyperCard** (origin of the hand cursor) - **macOS** Finder (middle truncation of file names) - **Revolut** (call-detection scam warning) - **Instagram** (pull-to-refresh with an infinite feed) - **Spotify** (peer-to-peer streaming architecture) and **iTunes** (the 2008 alternative) - **uTorrent** (bought and sold by Spotify) - **Netflix** (autoplay next episode) - **WhatsApp** and **iMessage** (read-receipt defaults) - **Android**, **Chrome**, **Safari** and **Bing** (search-default economics) - **Magic Patterns** (sponsor; AI prototyping with Figma export, GitHub sync and deployment) - **Figma** and **GitHub** (Magic Patterns integrations) - **Flask** (Enrico's video-collaboration product) - **Notion** (everything is a page) and **Slack** (everything is a channel) - **Zoom**, **YouTube**, **Loom** (acquired by Atlassian for $975 million) - **Gmail** and **Superhuman** ($30 a month) ### Hardware and companies - **iPhone**: capacitive multi-touch, Gorilla Glass, home button, App Store, squircle icons, dynamic keyboard hit boxes - **BlackBerry** (physical-keyboard era) - **General Magic** and the **Sony Magic Link** - **Apple**, **Google**, **Atlassian** ### Design and psychology concepts - Completion cues (signaling a page has loaded) - Checkbox versus radio button conventions - Cursor affordances (hand and resize cursors) - Ellipsis and middle truncation - Delightful details (Pegman physics) - Discoverability of hidden gestures - Pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll - Experience-first technology choices, peer-to-peer distribution and caching - Defaults and **default bias** (read receipts, organ-donor opt-in versus opt-out) - Platform control as default control - Structural design and unified data models ("everything is a tag") - Reframing an existing technology's purpose - Product vision supported by every lower layer - Pinch-to-zoom, slide-to-unlock and rubber-band scrolling ### Figures cited in the video - About 45 seconds of waiting in Google's early user tests - About $3,800 to buy Enrico's Spotify library on iTunes - 30 seconds to a minute for early server-only Spotify playback - 2010 study: 8.8% of Spotify music from servers, 36% from peers - About $20 billion a year from Google to Apple; 60–80% of iPhone search traffic at stake - $975 million for Loom; $30 a month for Superhuman ## 3) Biographies ### Enrico Tartarotti Italian-born YouTuber, designer and entrepreneur whose channel goes "behind the scenes of the design and psychology and stories behind the tech you use everyday." He builds **Flask**, a video-collaboration tool used as his level-five example here, and offers one-hour consulting calls. He writes and produces his videos with Bartek Malinowski. ### Bill Atkinson Early Apple engineer behind MacPaint, QuickDraw and HyperCard. Enrico credits him with inventing the pointing-hand cursor for HyperCard in 1987. ### Scott Jenson Designer who worked on Apple's interfaces in the late '80s and '90s and later on user experience at Google. Enrico credits him with building the macOS middle-truncation logic for long file names (the captions spell it "Jensen"). ### Ludvig Strigeus Swedish programmer who created the BitTorrent client uTorrent. Enrico says Spotify bought uTorrent to hire him, and he rebuilt Spotify's early streaming infrastructure on peer-to-peer technology. ### Steve Jobs Apple co-founder and CEO who pushed for an iPhone with no keyboard and a giant touchscreen, Enrico's example of level-seven product vision. ### Ken Kocienda Apple software engineer who worked on the original iPhone keyboard. Enrico tells the story of him realizing, under deadline, that the keyboard's invisible hit boxes needed to grow dynamically based on the likely next letter. ### Bartek Malinowski Enrico's co-writer and co-producer, credited in the description.