Kinopio’s Design Principles

The author of Kinopio, a bootstrapped product developed over more than four years, presents five product design principles used to design and redesign the app: embrace smallness, build for fidget-ability, embrace plain text, use a single interface for mobile and desktop, and refine by pruning. The text says Kinopio weighs about 220kb with libraries and assets, and that cards stick to the cursor after about 200ms of hover to create a playful interaction. It also describes removing a minimap feature after two weeks of work because few people used it, and removing Twitter/X thread saving after three weeks of work because saves happened only once or twice a day.