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The Nightmare Bicycle
March 2025 Avoid the nightmare bicycle In my opinion, one of the most important ideas in product design is to avoid the “nightmare bicycle”. Imagine a bicycle where the product manager said: “people don’t get math so we can’t have numbered gears.
Imagine a bicycle where the product manager said: “people don’t get math so we can’t have numbered gears. This is the hypothetical “nightmare bicycle” that Andrea diSessa imagines in his book Changing Minds. Bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users’ ability to actually build a clear model in their heads.
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