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The Five Percent Rule

Last updated:

August 21, 2025

We spend a lot of time creating. You may wonder why I didn’t say designing. For us, creating goes further. It is design, but also engineering, product thinking and even how we tell our story. Creating is where all these disciplines meet.

We thought it might help to distill the most important parts of this philosophy into a guide we could share with fellow developers and startups. Then we realized: we should just share it with everyone.

This is for people who want to understand what curiosity and creativity look like in practice. Most of what’s here won’t be new if you’ve read a lot about building products, but we hope it sparks you to find the five percent difference that makes a project truly yours.

Your goal as a developer is simple: make something users love. If you don’t, your project won’t survive. For us, this means constantly looking for ways to make the experience five percent better than the status quo. Good design makes intent obvious, guides attention, connects code to experience, goals to outcomes and expectations to reality (I could go on, but you get the idea).

For many people, the creative process feels unfamiliar. One of the most common mistakes we see is outsourcing those first designs. We’ve worked with people who had plenty of ideas, but they meant little because they asked others to realize them. The project then grows without them ever understanding the first conceptual steps themselves.

That early stage is where the real difference is made. You need curiosity to understand the process before you can improve it. If you skip that, you lose both understanding and ownership.

The creative process is both uncertain and wonderful. On Wednesday, there’s nothing. On Friday, there’s an idea. The hard part is: which Friday? You can’t predict it. But if you keep searching the five percent way, one day it will set you apart, and your project will be truly yours.


export async function getCurrentAuthUser() {
  const supabase = await createClient();
  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.getUser();
  const locale = await getLocale();

  if (error) {
    redirect({ href: /login?error=${error.message}, locale });
  }

  if (!data?.user) {
    redirect({ href: "/login", locale });
  }

  return data.user;
}


export async function getCurrentAuthUser() {
  const supabase = await createClient();
  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.getUser();
  const locale = await getLocale();

  if (error) {
    redirect({ href: /login?error=${error.message}, locale });
  }

  if (!data?.user) {
    redirect({ href: "/login", locale });
  }

  return data.user;
}


export async function getCurrentAuthUser() {
  const supabase = await createClient();
  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.getUser();
  const locale = await getLocale();

  if (error) {
    redirect({ href: /login?error=${error.message}, locale });
  }

  if (!data?.user) {
    redirect({ href: "/login", locale });
  }

  return data.user;
}

First Principles

We prefer composition over reduction. Reduction can strip away the context that gives meaning. Composition respects what came before, arranges parts with purpose, and keeps the message whole. We start with identity and decide how strong the form and color should be. Then we look for the five percent, that small extra that makes it ours.

Cognitive load is the effort the brain spends to understand. We aim to make it as close to zero as possible, so the message feels effortless and natural to grasp.

The surface must not fight the text. Always let the text speak for itself. Use a calm palette of white, gray and black. Use one careful accent color. Give the page air with generous white space (after all, you need air to live too).

The Idea

Before placing the first pixel or writing the first line of code, it helps to ask the right questions.

The first thing to ask is what the true intent is. Why are you creating this, and why does it matter? We look for clear, simple answers here. If the intent is vague or overly complicated, that’s usually a bad sign. Intent has to be sharp enough to give direction, shape the first version, and excite at least some people the moment they hear it. If it can’t do that, you don’t yet have the clarity to build.

The second thing to ask is what could make this hard to use. Every design has friction points. Things that confuse, overwhelm or slow the user down. The important part is to spot them early. If you can't clearly name what a first-time user might struggle with, you probably don’t understand the experience well enough yet. Keep testing assumptions with real users, because every obstacle you uncover at the start saves ten later on.

The third thing to ask is what the five percent is that will set it apart. Good design is often invisible, but users feel the difference immediately. If you can’t explain what makes your work unmistakably yours, you’re at risk of building something generic. The five percent can be a detail of clarity, a flow that feels effortless or a finish that shows care. Whatever it is, it has to be real. People may not name it, but they will sense it and that’s what makes them love it.

The key is to ask clear questions, not to chase perfect answers.

From there, work in short loops. Define the problem, sketch the expected outcome and explore candidate solutions. Decide together, always with empathy for the user. Switch quickly between low and high fidelity until the right feel emerges.

When trade-offs appear, keep it simple: choose the option that’s easiest to interpret. Step back until the concept feels fully right. Remember to take your time. The difference comes from wanting to create, not from rushing to rationalize or optimize.

In brainstorming and exploration, allow noise and rough edges. But once the direction is set, be very strict about consistency and detail. As we mentioned before, people sense the five percent difference, even when they can’t name it.

That’s why the early steps matter so much, because they shape how everything else unfolds.


export async function getCurrentAuthUser() {
  const supabase = await createClient();
  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.getUser();
  const locale = await getLocale();

  if (error) {
    redirect({ href: /login?error=${error.message}, locale });
  }

  if (!data?.user) {
    redirect({ href: "/login", locale });
  }

  return data.user;
}

The Interface

Here is the secret to a great interface: clarity and control. If you don’t design with these in mind, your product will confuse users, and confused users don’t come back.

Animation is often where design goes wrong. Motion should serve meaning, not decoration. Avoid full-page fades, scroll fade-ins and galleries that exist only to impress.

The right kind of motion is subtle. We call it micro-motion: animations that respond to the user’s actions. A button that fades in softly as you scroll, catching attention right where the user is already looking. A copy button where the icon slides out as a checkmark slides in. These transitions are small, but they guide attention without stealing it.

Good animation should last about four-tenths of a second, with a soft ease. Just enough to feel natural, never enough to feel distracting.

Consistency in type, spacing and rhythm builds trust. Without it, design feels unfinished. Rhythm sets the pace and users sense it even if they can’t explain it. These details are not optional; they are the structure that carries your intent. Get them right and the interface feels calm, credible and unmistakably yours.

Think of the designers you admire most. You can probably name part of what makes them great (their consistency, clarity, rhythm and other details), but not all of it. The rest lives in the precision you feel but can’t quite put into words, the part that makes all the difference.

The Role of AI

And now we face a new layer: AI. Think of it like a lawyer who drafts a contract. It can produce something fast, but if you don’t understand what’s inside, it will eventually work against you. AI can assist, but it cannot replace the thinking, the questions, and the five percent of care and character that make your project authentic.

The same is true for design. If you ask AI to “build me this”, you skip the very steps that make a project yours. You don’t wrestle with intent, you don’t face the obstacles, you don’t search for the five percent that makes the difference. You hand over the process, and with it the ownership.

Used well, AI can accelerate the loop: helping you test options, refine copy or generate variations. But it should never replace your curiosity or judgment.

AI should never act in the dark. Every suggestion needs a why behind it. That context is what makes it trustworthy. From there, the choice stays with the designer: accept it, edit it or leave it.

That’s the paradox of AI in design: it can make you faster, but only if you already know where you’re going. Without that, speed just takes you in the wrong direction, faster.

Measuring What Matters

Measuring design is tricky. Numbers alone don’t capture creativity, but they can reveal when clarity breaks down. We don’t track metrics to fill dashboards, we track them to stay honest about whether the interface is really doing its job.

One of the first signals is time to first value: how quickly a new user experiences a real outcome. If this takes too long, they will rarely come back.

Then there are steps per task: how many actions are really necessary. Every extra click or field is a small tax on attention, and taxes compound quickly.

Alongside this, we look for frustration signals: repeated clicks on the same element in a short span. That’s usually the interface saying “no” without explaining why.

And finally, there is dwell without action: people spending time on a screen but not making progress. Sometimes that means they are reading or thinking, but often it means the path forward isn’t obvious enough.

These are not abstract numbers. They are signals that highlight how the experience is unfolding. In other projects, we’ve found them useful to keep focus on clarity and flow, but they are not the only ones that matter. The real value lies in choosing the signals that fit your product and your users, and using them to guide.

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