SaaS · consumer · designing without precedent

A browser with no tabs to copy.

Stack is a spatial, multiplayer browser — the internet arranged in space rather than in a row of tabs. There was no established pattern to borrow from, which is the whole reason the case is interesting.

ROLE: UX/UI Designer
WHEN: Apr 2022 – Dec 2023 · Amsterdam
SCOPE: UI · design system · 200+ screens · real-time collaboration
TOOLS: Figma · FigJam · Discord · Adobe CC
PRODUCT: stackbrowser.com

Mindful, spatial, multiplayer. Three words that had to become an interface with no prior art to lean on.

/01 — the situation

Tab-heavy browsing produces digital overwhelm.

Traditional browsers offer a fragmented, tab-heavy experience. Users needed a fundamentally different approach to browsing — one that supports focus and collaboration rather than accumulation.

$4Minvestment secured

25,000+users

200+screens and interactions

1new interaction model

Designing without precedent is a specific discipline. When there is no convention, every affordance has to be taught inside the product, and every novel interaction is a bet you can only settle by putting it in front of people.

/02 — the approach

Space instead of a row.

A spatial browsing experience that reimagines how people interact with the web: multiplayer collaboration, mindful browsing patterns, and a spatial UI designed to reduce cognitive load rather than add to it.

Fly Mode, Realms and multi-profile workflows each needed their own mental model and their own way of being introduced — which is what pushed the work past 200 screens and into a system rather than a set of layouts.

The design carried a fundraising job as well as a product one: an unfamiliar idea has to be legible to investors before it can be legible to users.

Cards instead of tabs. Pages sit side by side in a spatial environment rather than collapsing into a strip of favicons. Everything downstream — Fly Mode, Realms, multiplayer — depends on this one substitution holding up.

Fly Mode. One-key shortcuts move the space around you. Navigation stops being a click target and becomes movement — which is why the product is keyboard-first rather than keyboard-friendly.

Multiplayer. Files, messages and links shared inside the same space, Figma-style. The feature that turns a browser from a private tool into a shared room.

Product footage from stackbrowser.com

LIVE — TABS VS CARDS

The model, not a screenshot. Switch between a tab strip and the spatial card layout — then Fly Mode, where one keypress moves you rather than a click. Realms recolour the whole environment. This is the interaction argument the case is about; the product is discontinued, so the demo is a reconstruction of the model, not a capture.

DECISION

Teach the model inside the product

With no precedent, onboarding is not a phase — it is a property of every screen.

CHOSE: A system that introduces its own concepts as you use them
OVER: A conventional tab UI with spatial features bolted on
COST: Higher design cost per surface, and no borrowed patterns to fall back on

[FILL] — PROCESS & SCREENSProduct screens, flows and process artefacts for this case. The live site has a screenshot set; higher-resolution versions and one before/after belong here.

/03 — the surrounding system

A new model needs more than one good idea.

Cards, Fly Mode and Realms only work if everything around them agrees. The feature surfaces had to teach the model while doing their own job — an assistant that speaks the spatial vocabulary, a shortcut layer that rewards learning, and settings that behave like the rest of the world expects.

Stack feature cards: the Special assistant with an active-card command palette, and a keyboard-first panel showing Fly Mode with Command and Escape keys

Teaching the model inside the product. The assistant is a command palette that speaks in cards — and the keyboard panel states the promise plainly: navigation should feel like playing a game.

Stack feature cards: Chrome extension support, and Colorful Realms with five environment themes

Familiar where it should be, new where it counts. Chrome extensions carry over untouched, so the novelty is spent on the browsing model rather than on relearning tools; Realms recolour the whole environment as a mood, not a skin.

Stack feature cards: tracker-free browsing, and multiple profiles switching between personal, work and incognito

Mindful is a product decision, not a slogan. No ads or trackers, and profiles that separate personal, work and incognito — the concrete form of a browser that claims to reduce cognitive load.

This is where designing without precedent gets expensive: every one of these surfaces needed its own onboarding moment, because none of them could assume the user already knew what a card or a realm was.

/04 — outcome

An idea made legible.

$4M investment secured
25,000+ users
200+ screens and interactions designed
Real-time collaboration experience shipped

[FILL] What would be done differently, and the honest failure or reversal from this project.

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