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Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at

Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.

ehutch79 3y ago
That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it. That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Is it non-obvious? The page goes like: 1. Title 2. Screenshot 3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard marketing copy. Definitely nothing to say this isn't a thing someone intends on bringing to market.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
      - EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
        The screenshots tricked me.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      To me there were a couple of giveaways. 1. “Art direction” is the second tab. There’s no technical components, no installation info, no GitHub. 2. Jason Yuan Design in the footer. So clearly some kind of UX person/group built this, not a hacker collective. 3. Flowery UX-heavy language and the absence of concrete features. Focusing on the “what” rather than the “how”.
      - warent 3y ago
        I shouldn't need to be a detective to understand the point of a website lol, unless that is the point. It was completely non obvious to me as well.
    - afavour 3y ago
      Standard marketing copy does not have the word “speculative” in it because it’s not… speculation
- MadcapJake 3y ago
  Can you really identify usability issues on something that is both a) just a concept and b) is meant to shift the work paradigm substantially? Local optimization for your existing workflow is not the intended goal of this exploratory project.
rpeden 3y ago
I enjoy this kind of creative exploration. I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things. They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.
- _zzaw 3y ago
  Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS. I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.) I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.
  - ungamedplayer 3y ago
    Why wouldnt you build this on Linux?
    - _zzaw 3y ago
      No, I said the OS didn't look like something you'd use for heavy-duty development work. I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"
      - ungamedplayer 3y ago
        I don't actually see any os at all on this site. I see a ui design idea. Hence my assumption that you don't build your s on top of an os. Or maybe I'm just old and words no longer mean things the way that I am used to interpreting.
nsfmc 3y ago
that's great context, i started having a flashback to hypepitch around thegrid.io when i started reading the copy.
anonymouse008 3y ago
I don’t know how to feel about a promising designer only spending 2ish years with ADT and bolting. Perhaps if this work is paired with a personality of similar righteousness, that could be a team issue - otherwise to have someone attempt to do great things and see them immediately (in the relative product roadmap sense) leave, is troubling from the outside.
waboremo 3y ago
Being corner stones for conversations means that people are going to talk about things that matters to them, like usability or ability to deploy. These are good things! That's what design studies are supposed to do! I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.
aidenn0 3y ago
It's worth discussing implementation feasibility of product designs. While I think a modern Canon Cat would be awesome, there are reasons why such a device doesn't exist. For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.
SleepyMyroslav 3y ago
It is well known issue in products that require serious 'design' for human interactions that tech nerds are useless as target audience samples. In gamedev there are 2 groups of people first is 'game designers' or 'creative direction' and second is - 'tech people'. Best games for wide audience happen when 1st completely ignore 2nd on what needs to be done... And 2nd completely ignore 1st on how invisible bits have to implement it. Often 1st can not iterate properly without code changes on every step and it kills best ideas. I have seen a lot of success when design iterations can be done in no code or very low code environment.
hulitu 3y ago
And after 4 years no download link and no system requirements ?
mihaaly 3y ago
The ability of deployment of an operating (observe the word!) system is paramount and it IS the point here! Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties. Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile. We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!
- Unearned5161 3y ago
  I'm going to disagree with you here. Concepts have their place in the world, one cannot just have pragmatic ideas in a society, nor can you just have idealistic ideas, there must be a balance, they both feed each other. While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix. Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later. We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit. Just my 2 cents

ehutch79 3y ago

That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it. That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.

renewiltord 3y ago
Is it non-obvious? The page goes like: 1. Title 2. Screenshot 3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
- ehutch79 3y ago
  Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard marketing copy. Definitely nothing to say this isn't a thing someone intends on bringing to market.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
    - EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
      The screenshots tricked me.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    To me there were a couple of giveaways. 1. “Art direction” is the second tab. There’s no technical components, no installation info, no GitHub. 2. Jason Yuan Design in the footer. So clearly some kind of UX person/group built this, not a hacker collective. 3. Flowery UX-heavy language and the absence of concrete features. Focusing on the “what” rather than the “how”.
    - warent 3y ago
      I shouldn't need to be a detective to understand the point of a website lol, unless that is the point. It was completely non obvious to me as well.
  - afavour 3y ago
    Standard marketing copy does not have the word “speculative” in it because it’s not… speculation
MadcapJake 3y ago
Can you really identify usability issues on something that is both a) just a concept and b) is meant to shift the work paradigm substantially? Local optimization for your existing workflow is not the intended goal of this exploratory project.

rpeden 3y ago

I enjoy this kind of creative exploration. I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things. They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.

_zzaw 3y ago
Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS. I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.) I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.
- ungamedplayer 3y ago
  Why wouldnt you build this on Linux?
  - _zzaw 3y ago
    No, I said the OS didn't look like something you'd use for heavy-duty development work. I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      I don't actually see any os at all on this site. I see a ui design idea. Hence my assumption that you don't build your s on top of an os. Or maybe I'm just old and words no longer mean things the way that I am used to interpreting.

nsfmc 3y ago

that's great context, i started having a flashback to hypepitch around thegrid.io when i started reading the copy.

anonymouse008 3y ago

I don’t know how to feel about a promising designer only spending 2ish years with ADT and bolting. Perhaps if this work is paired with a personality of similar righteousness, that could be a team issue - otherwise to have someone attempt to do great things and see them immediately (in the relative product roadmap sense) leave, is troubling from the outside.

waboremo 3y ago

Being corner stones for conversations means that people are going to talk about things that matters to them, like usability or ability to deploy. These are good things! That's what design studies are supposed to do! I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.

aidenn0 3y ago

It's worth discussing implementation feasibility of product designs. While I think a modern Canon Cat would be awesome, there are reasons why such a device doesn't exist. For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.

SleepyMyroslav 3y ago

It is well known issue in products that require serious 'design' for human interactions that tech nerds are useless as target audience samples. In gamedev there are 2 groups of people first is 'game designers' or 'creative direction' and second is - 'tech people'. Best games for wide audience happen when 1st completely ignore 2nd on what needs to be done... And 2nd completely ignore 1st on how invisible bits have to implement it. Often 1st can not iterate properly without code changes on every step and it kills best ideas. I have seen a lot of success when design iterations can be done in no code or very low code environment.

hulitu 3y ago

And after 4 years no download link and no system requirements ?

mihaaly 3y ago

The ability of deployment of an operating (observe the word!) system is paramount and it IS the point here! Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties. Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile. We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!

Unearned5161 3y ago
I'm going to disagree with you here. Concepts have their place in the world, one cannot just have pragmatic ideas in a society, nor can you just have idealistic ideas, there must be a balance, they both feed each other. While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix. Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later. We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit. Just my 2 cents