Dive Club 🤿 Rafa Conde - Make your designs memorable
30 snips
May 5, 2026 
Rafa Conde, design engineer and maker behind Hand Mirror and playful products at Retro. He talks about crafting surprising, emotional moments in software. Short videos, humor, sound, haptics, and tiny surprises make interfaces memorable. He also discusses trade-offs between delight and accessibility and the craft of prototyping in code.
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Origin Story Of Chasing Delight
- Rafa traced his obsession with delightful software back to his first MacBook experience and indie Mac apps like Panic that felt personal.
- He also cited Metal Gear Solid moments (Meryl frequency on the box, Psycho Mantis controller trick) as formative examples of memorable, fourth-wall-breaking design.
Why Small Apps Can Take Delight Risks
- Big companies avoid risky, attention-grabbing onboarding because they must design for every user and scale, which flattens opportunities for surprise.
- Indie apps and side projects can take those risks and accept losing some users to create memorable moments.
Retro Onboarding Slideshow With Haptics
- Rafa described Retro's onboarding: a short slideshow with synced haptics, soundtrack, and pacing that starts fast then slows to convey "let's slow down."
- They lost ~20–30% signups but found the long-run impact on retention unclear; they iterated (skip behavior, mute respect).