The evil genius of cursed app design

Soren Iverson's satirical ideas go viral on Twitter

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

The things I’d do with a movie theater eject button… — Kate

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I write an internet culture newsletter, but I’ve fallen victim more than once to Soren Iverson’s app edits on Twitter. The Southern California-based designer has grown a substantial following across Twitter and other social media for his daily satirical app ideas, which he designs with such a perfect mix of understated humor and realistic visuals that even geniuses like me sometimes don’t realize they’re looking at a joke. After all, who among us doesn’t believe Apple is capable of putting ads into our camera roll or Google of charging us for open tabs?

Iverson, who has been posting his designs for around 600 days straight, has gone viral countless times for the ways his unhinged ideas play on the anxieties and inconveniences of our new tech reality. “I never go into creating something where I'm like, I'm trying to say this thing,” he says over Zoom. “But usually I make a thing and I'm like, that's actually pretty interesting.”

Iverson follows a simple formula: What if you identified a problem with an app or app experience, and made it worse? Other times, inspired by real-life frustrations, he attempts to show what a one-button solution would look like. Naturally, he’s turned it all into a coffee table book.

Iverson, who runs his own agency by day, is also the creator of the app Stompers. At 4am you can find him frantically coming up with that day’s cursed idea, posting it a few hours later, and logging off—sometimes entirely unaware that it goes on to earn thousands of retweets and millions of views. In this interview, we chat about how he comes up with his ideas, if any of his unhinged app scenarios have come true, and the one he actually stands behind. 

How did your satirical designs get started?

Before I started doing it every day, I noticed that a lot of products were converging on this idea of Spotify Wrapped. Everyone was just ripping off Spotify Wrapped and figuring out how to put in their product. And I was like, okay. As a thought exercise, what happens when we push this to the extreme? What happens when Starbucks shows me how many caramel macchiatos I've had? What happens when Google Maps shows me how many miles I drove? What happens when DoorDash shows me how many times I ordered from Tommy Pastrami? So there's something interesting there. And then Chat GPT really had a moment, and I started doing thought experiments of like, okay, what if Chat GPT was an entity that was agnostic of this platform, and it could do Reddit AMAs, or it could be with you in Figma? And then after that I started mashing apps together, like Zillow with a comment section. And then I combined the product constructs of multiplayer and iOS alarms. So it was like a multiplayer alarm where everyone had to wake up for the alarm to turn off. And that went crazy viral. And I was like, oh, okay. Interesting. People get a kick outta this stuff. 

Algorithms are ruining Spotify Wrapped

How do you come up with the ideas? Do you schedule them out in advance?

I haven't designed tomorrows yet. Up until a couple weeks ago, there was no plan. It would be four in the morning and I'd post around 7:00 AM every day and I'd be like, “I gotta come up with something in the next three hours.” And then I would slap something together. The agency I've been building has been growing, and so I've started to operationalize a bit more. And so I have an operations personnel and I also have an assistant. And my assistant has been helping me compile...a lot of people treat me like a visual chat GPT. So I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of suggestions. A lot of times it's something that I've already actually made, but every once in a while I'm like, “Wait, that's actually really good.” Or that will get me thinking about a product, and then I'll think about the product and I'll be like, okay, what if we did this? So a lot of this stuff is really inspired by real life. I had a one that went really viral that was the United option to duel someone for a seat. I had been on a flight that was overbooked, and then I was running in LAX to another flight and someone slammed into me and pushed me outta the way. And I was like, that's really aggressive. And internally, I'm like, wait a minute, that's an idea. And then I banked it and made it when I got home. I think the constraint of it being a daily thing has forced me to kind of brute force get something out the door, and it's also just forced me to be a lot more efficient and faster at what I do.

I've been writing recently about how there's so many little human interactions that apps try to solve for, maybe to the point of detriment. Is that something you're satirizing?

I think the great thing about satire and comedy in general is you put something out into the world and then you let people do whatever they want with it. It's a bit art and it's a bit science where I'm putting something out there and I'm really letting people interpret it how they want to. Today's was the Google Meet skip intro button, and that's implicitly nodding to: people are annoyed with having to do intros over and over again on a call. I wish I could just skip that. And then I write a tiny blurb about each idea because I think the interesting thing with skip intro buttons is it killed an art form, which was title sequence design. I never go into creating something where I'm like, I'm trying to say this thing. But usually I make a thing and I'm like, that's actually pretty interesting.

I very intentionally stay out of any rhetoric because the last thing most people want a brand or a person that they follow to do is tell them how to think and feel. It's like, “No, make me my content and get out of the way.” I think I've gotten to a really good place where I can compartmentalize super well. Something will be going crazy viral, and I don't even know. And someone's like, “Dude, that one blew up.” I'm like, oh, cool. So I make a thing, it's a daily exercise. People get a kick out of it, which I'm really happy about, but it's not something that I'm constantly thinking about and checking, 'cause I just don't have the time or the bandwidth. I put something out there every day and then if it hits, that's great. And if it doesn't, that's fine too.

I just started The Artist's Way and so I've been doing morning pages every day and the whole idea is to just get something out. Do you see this as a similar exercise, or am I taking it way too seriously?

I think that is a way to interpret it. I didn't intend for it to be this exercise that would shape and inform my work, but I think it accidentally became that. Sometimes I have the idea during the day and I'm like, okay, cool. I'm gonna make this and I'll schedule it. And then other times it's like I'm working on ten other things and then it's four in the morning. I'm banging my head against the wall like, I gotta come up with something. And, ironically, that's when some of the best stuff comes out.

I resonate with that because for the newsletter, every week I have to write something and there really are times where I get to a Friday and am like, I have no idea. But I am forced to write something no matter what. And then you are like, “Oh, wait, this actually is good.” Do you have any idea of what your most popular ones are?

Yes. It's an iMessage typing indicator that shows how long the message is, because normally a text preview is three dots, and then this one would scale or shrink with how long the message is. So it shows someone's typing and it could be really anxiety inducing. That one got almost 200,000 likes, went crazy, crazy viral. Most of the concepts are set up in a way where they take a certain amount of writing and text in order to get the idea into someone's head, and most people that use devices are familiar with the construct of a message preview or a typing indicator. That is a universal sign that I don't need to append anything to in order to get an extremely visceral reaction. So visually it's immediately identifiable and then conceptually or emotionally, everyone's been in a situation where they're earnestly waiting for someone to write them back. And it's someone typing something super long, it's extremely obvious that everything is in fact not okay. And so I think part of the reason that it was so successful is because so much was said with so few words

There was one that I shared without realizing and was like, “Why are they doing this?” And my friend was like, “That's not real.” I felt so stupid. Does that happen a lot?

I'm sure some people are like, “Wait, what's going on here?” I don't track every instance of it. If it really blows up, there'd probably be a fact check. Like, I got fact checked for the Uber Hotbox option back in the day. 

Have any ever come true? You posted one recently that was ads in the camera roll, and I was like, “Don't put that out there. They're gonna do it.”

Yeah. People are always like, “Don't give them ideas.” I'm like, if I've thought about it, a company with infinite resources has probably thought about it as well, but they've probably taken a principled stance, at least for now, not to do it for any number of reasons. I made a concept that was pay to undo deep likes [on Instagram]. So it's like, I'm three years deep in someone's feed and I accidentally liked a photo and then a modal pops up and it's like, "Do you want them to not see that? We can hide it for a dollar." An engineer at Instagram was like, “This is great. I want to implement it but without the payment mechanism.” I don't think they ever did, but that was something they talked about. I did a Gmail emoji reaction thing, and then that happened. I don't know if I was actually ahead of the curve on that or if they were already planning that. I'm not so bold as to claim that I'm shaping people's roadmaps. 

Is there one where you're like, wait, this is actually a really good idea and they should do this?

Isolated parts of them are really interesting. Like there was a Google Maps Fog of War where the whole map is undiscovered. And I think that's an interesting discovery mechanism to get people to go outside. I made a Chipotle portion score, but their CEO has recently commented that he wants everyone to synchronize their portions. I sometimes make some joke ones about Fandango, where it's like you can eject someone from the movie.

Do you have any idea why this is something that people really relate to and enjoy so much?

I think part of it is hopefully they're funny. I think I make some of 'em just like, that's funny. I'm never going to be like, this is this problem with society, but if you point at some of the side effects or you take a thing in a product that really stinks and then you make it worse....'cause I think most people design things with the intent of improving the experience. So to intentionally design something like, “Let's make this worse.” It's like, wait, what?

I have now built and kind of trained an audience to expect a very specific thing. I think of the internet as an information superhighway, and you are a billboard. And if someone's on any given social network, they might drive by your billboard every once in a while. And for most people, it's like one day they're posting about the Met Gala and the next they're posting about the Olympics, and then they're posting about the 4th of July. I view most social networks as a tool. So I think the more consistent and streamlined I can have the way I show up be, the more recognizable I become to someone that is a passerby.

You also have an app called Stompers. How does that fit in with what you were just describing?

So a friend of mine, early on he was working on something, he and I started texting more and more. And every once in a while he would just text me with the most deranged unhinged app concept. And then every once in a while I would send something to him and be like, “What do you think about this one?” And then last fall I taught myself the very bare bones of software development and made a step tracking app with a leaderboard just as a proof of concept on TestFlight. And people were like, oh, this is super fun. And it was horrible. The database was so bad. It was very shoddily constructed. So I started talking with Josh, my co-founder. I was like, we should really make a step tracking game. And then we made a very crude prototype of it and we were both like, this is interesting, but not differentiated enough from what's on the market today. And so we ended up working with an animator from Looney Tunes and Cuphead and he designed the characters that are in the app today. 

I've noticed this over the last couple years, a lot of consumer social apps launch and they just do whatever they can to get to the number one chart on the app store. And that's cool. That'd be great if we did really well. But my co-founder Josh and I both have the conviction that we have the opportunity to build something that can stand the test of time. And I think my quote unquote personal brand is very unhinged and zany. And so Stompers is like, you can track your steps, but you can track your steps compared to your friends. But then on top of that, there are items. So it's like, “Oh, I picked up a baseball bat, I'm gonna hit Soren with a bat and he's gonna fly back 500 steps.” Most apps are predicated in step tracking or predicated on maximizing your step count for the day. How do I get as many steps as possible? We're like, how do you beat your friends for the day? And also, what if step count isn't sacred and it can be sabotaged by your friends?

Do you envision you're just gonna keep doing your Twitter designs for as long as possible? 

Pulling back the curtain a little bit more, I stopped drinking a little over two years ago. Depending on the circumstances around your sobriety, some people are like, oh, I'm just like not gonna drink anymore. And other people are in a bit more of a formalized environment around that. And part of becoming sober and pursuing sobriety is often embracing the mantra of one day at a time. And so I really took that to heart on an existential level where it's like, life is really busy. I have so many plates spinning all the time and it's very chaotic and if I zoom out too much, I'm sure I would freak out. But there's something really grounding where it's like, tomorrow maybe be gnarly. Maybe it'll be chill. I could also get hit by a bus when I'm walking to my car from the WeWork today. And so it's like, why would you worry about tomorrow when tomorrow isn't even promised? And so just take it a day at a time. I don't know if I'll be able to make an idea tomorrow, but I know I can come up with one today.