UX Case Study / 2025
Nothing shipped a phone with a dedicated key for its AI capture tool — then watched people call it “useless” and leave. This is how I rebuilt the experience around the one thing the hardware couldn’t fix: what happens after you press the button.
Essential Space is Nothing’s bet on an AI “second brain” — a quick-capture app with its own physical key. On paper it’s a flagship feature. In the community, it had become a punchline.
Problem
High-intent users were abandoning Essential Space for Google Keep and Notion. Capture was fast; everything after it — finding, fixing, trusting — was broken.
Approach
A mixed-methods, NN/g-led process: 100+ real user voices affinity-mapped into 13 themes, two evidence-based personas, and every decision traced to a Nielsen heuristic.
Outcome
A redesign that turns a passive screenshot gallery into a searchable knowledge workspace — targeting 100% task success, −40% time-on-task and an SUS of 80+.
Nothing’s pitch for Essential Space is seductive: one press of a dedicated hardware key captures whatever’s in front of you — a screenshot, a voice note, a reminder — and AI files it into a “second brain.” It’s meant to be the fastest way to offload a thought. It even earned its own button, the kind of hardware commitment most software features never get.
That button matters. It’s a daily, physical entry point into Nothing OS — so if the feature behind it feels pointless, the damage isn’t just one app; it’s the brand’s whole “AI done differently” promise, and the retention that rides on it. The pitch was capture at the speed of thought. The reality, three months in, was a feed full of things you’d never find again.
The word followed Essential Space everywhere — reviews, Reddit, Nothing’s own community forum. Users weren’t rejecting the idea; they loved the idea. They were rejecting the execution, and quietly moving their notes back to apps that simply worked.
Strip away the venting and the same three structural failures repeat across every channel — the brief I set out to solve.
Essential Space is sick, but it’s basically useless having all that data for work stuck on my phone where I don’t actually do the work.
Low utility
The features people actually needed — search, editing, desktop access — were missing, so the app read as a novelty, not a tool.
High friction
Workflows were manual and clunky: every capture forced a screenshot, sorting was date-only, and basic edits meant leaving the app.
Broken trust
“Summarising…” would hang and the app silently logged people out — violating the first rule of UX: always show system status.
The biggest risk in a redesign like this is solutioneering — falling in love with a feature before you’ve proven the problem. So I anchored everything in NN/g’s design-thinking process and set one rule: nothing ships unless it traces back to a validated insight and the usability heuristic it serves.
I also defined success before drawing a single screen, so “better” could be measured rather than argued: a 100% task success rate, a 40% cut in time-on-task, and a System Usability Scale score of 80+ — a “grade A” benchmark.
EmpathiseDefineIdeatePrototypeTest
Churned users rarely show up to a usability session — but they’ll write 200 unsolicited words on a community thread. So I started where the honesty already was: I gathered 100+ comments from Reddit’s r/NothingTech and the Nothing Community forum and affinity-mapped them into 13 themes, backed by 60+ verbatim quotes.
That secondary base was triangulated with primary research — user interviews and a survey — and competitive teardowns of OnePlus MindSpace, Shots Studio and Google Pixel’s screenshot tools, to see which “table-stakes” features Essential Space was missing.
The 13 themes · red = drove the redesign
Why is there no option to search my Essential Space? I’m taking lots of notes and screenshots… some I’ll need months from now.
One pattern sat underneath almost every complaint. Getting things into Essential Space was effortless — that’s what the button is for. Getting them back out was nearly impossible. With no search and only rigid, date-based sorting, every capture fell into what users described as a “black hole”: a feed that grew more cluttered and more cognitively overwhelming by the day.
High-intent users abandon Essential Space because they cannot organise, search, or retrieve what they capture — turning a “second brain” into a cluttered digital graveyard.
That reframed the whole project. The job wasn’t to add features — it was to change what the product fundamentally is:
From a passive Screenshot Gallery → an active Knowledge Workspace.
From “I hope I find this later” → “I know exactly where this is.”
The data clustered into two distinct mental models — one capturing for long-term reference, one for instant action. They fail at the same point for different reasons, which made them the perfect lens for prioritisation.
“I capture everything for inspiration, but it just disappears into the void.”
“The button’s great for speed, but the data feels stuck in a dead-end.”
The redesign groups into four jobs, mapped to the personas and the heuristics they serve. Each move below states the insight it answers, the decision, and why that choice. The phone visuals are placeholder mockups — hi-fi screens drop into these slots as the Figma matures.
A redesign that doesn’t feel like Nothing would be rejected no matter how usable it is. So every solution lives inside the brand’s visual system — dot-matrix detailing, monochrome with a single red accent, transparency, and a ruthless minimalism that removes chrome instead of adding it.
There was one non-negotiable interaction principle too: speed. Essential Space only earns its button if it beats the alternative — so if a flow takes four taps to save a note when Google Keep takes two, the design has failed, regardless of how it looks.
Dot-matrixMonochrome + 1 redTransparencySpeed over chrome
Task success — every tested user completes core capture and retrieval tasks.
BehaviouralTime-on-task — target cut in the time to turn captures into actions, e.g. calendar entries.
EfficiencySUS score — a “grade A” usability benchmark on the redesigned prototype.
AttitudinalStatus — honest version: the redesign is at hi-fi prototyping, so the numbers above are validation targets, not yet measured. Usability testing (5–8 users, think-aloud) is the next phase — that’s where these get earned, or corrected.
Forums are a churn lab.Silent, churned users won’t join a usability session, but they’ll write paragraphs unprompted. Affinity-mapping that is one of the highest-signal, lowest-cost research moves I have.
Scope is a decision, not a constraint.The button drew the loudest complaints, but retrieval drove the churn. Naming the real lever — and saying no to the rest — is what kept the redesign honest.
Heuristics make taste defensible.Tying each choice to a Nielsen heuristic turned “I think this is nicer” into “this serves visibility of system status.” That’s the difference between a portfolio piece and an opinion.