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Ve is
A short note on the shape we noticed Ve taking in users’ lives last winter — and the design discipline it forced on us.
Most products want to be visited. They are designed as destinations: a homepage, a dashboard, a landing surface where the user pauses, looks at metrics, decides what to do next. The product’s success is measured in time-spent.
For a long time we assumed Ve would be one of those products. A place users came to talk to their model, draft, plan, decide. Then we watched the actual usage data and the assumption fell apart.
They don’t pause inside Ve. They pass through. A reply gets drafted in 8 seconds. A summary read in 12. A schedule confirmed in 4. The median session is well under a minute.
When we tried to design more for the destination — richer dashboards, more metrics — the data got worse. The dashboard sat unused. The drafts got slower because the surface had grown louder.
A bridge is a different design problem. It has to be sturdy, frictionless, and almost invisible to the person crossing it. Nobody admires a bridge from the middle of it. They notice when it sways.
Ve is a bridge between intent and action. The product’s job is to compress the distance, not to invite a stop along the way.
Once we said it out loud, design got cleaner. Every surface got the question: is this a bridge or a place to stop? If a stop, why? Most things turned into bridges. The dashboard moved from a destination to a digest. The chat moved from a window to a passage. The notch became the most-used surface because it was the shortest passage of all.
The bridge frame has another consequence: a bridge takes a lot less marketing than a destination. People cross bridges. They don’t need to be sold on visiting them.