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🦄 You’re shipping vague buttons

April 15, 2026

What makes good digital products work.

A weekly read for people who design, build, lead, and improve digital products. The decisions, details, and trade-offs behind better product work.

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Hey again 👋

This week's picks all sit in the gap, where the thing technically works but the message doesn't, and the fix is usually a better label, a sharper hypothesis, or being honest about what your product is actually competing with.

Enjoy 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.

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The three picks I'd send to a teammate:

Build: Your UI might look fine and still sound broken

Shape: A fast MVP still misses if you learned the wrong thing

Ship: Solving the problem isn't enough when people can leave

Top 3 this week 👇

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Build: The invisible layer of UX most designers ignore  ↗

A polished UI can sound like a messy one.

Why: If the role, name, or state is missing, a screen reader turns your nice interface into a stream of vague buttons and links, not really the experience you want for folk.

Adopt: Keep coming back to "role, name, state" and you'll start to catch a lot before handoff.

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Shape: Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Definition  ↗

A fast MVP is still a miss if you tested the wrong thing.

Why: The useful split here is value first, implementation second. Otherwise you're testing code when you really you were meant to test demand.

Adopt: Write your hypothesis first. If the risk is understanding then prototype it. If it's behaviour, ship the smallest real thing.

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Ship: Commercial vs Internal Products  ↗

Shipping gets harder when people have an alternative.

Why: Internal tools get more slack and commercial products have to beat whatever people already use, even if the fallback is clunky and bad.

Adopt: Good reminder to ask what you're asking someone to switch from, not just whether the feature works.

Dive into more

Build: Personal website redesign project post: Getting started with the HTML only build  ↗ Temporary UI, permanent structure

Build: Vertical Slice Architecture in Node.js: One Folder Per Use Case  ↗ Organise by use case

Shape: AI Agents as Users  ↗ Interfaces change when software uses them too

Ship: Designers will never have influence without understanding how organizations learn  ↗ Influence usually follows decision flow

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Adam Marsden at Unicorn Club

Thanks for reading

Adam from Unicorn Club

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Curated by Adam Marsden