Designing for decades
March 30, 2026 · by QuizMe Team
Software designed for a demo looks different than software designed for a decade. Demo software wins by being shiny on stage. Decade software wins by being faithful in week 312.
What changes when you design for decades
You stop chasing dark patterns. Streaks, XP, push notifications - they boost DAU charts and corrode the very habit you claim to support. A streak that guilts you into a 30-second review is the kind of feature that costs you the user a year later, when they realize the streak was the point.
You start treating exports as a first-class citizen. Your users will outlive your product. If your data does not export cleanly, you are not a study tool. You are a hostage situation.
You stop adding features for their own sake. Every feature is a future maintenance burden, a future onboarding cost, a future support thread. Most of what makes software last is what isn't there.
You write the privacy policy in plain language. The kind your mother could read. Because she might.
What we have not done, on purpose
QuizMe does not have:
- Decks. We use spaced repetition without forcing you to organize.
- Notifications. The popup nudges you when you choose to open it.
- Streaks, XP, or "study time" gamification.
- A mobile app. Yet. Not until we trust it.
- A team plan. We are not a productivity company.
What QuizMe does have, in absurdly small quantities, is focus. The whole extension fits in 200 kilobytes. The backend is a few thousand lines. The shortcut is two keys. We hope to keep it that way for a long time.
A test we run on every feature
Before we add anything, we ask: will this feature still be valuable in ten years, or are we shipping it because we just thought of it? Most of the time, the answer is the second one. We don't ship those.
The features that survive that test are the small ones - the ones that don't make a great launch tweet but are quietly worth using forever. The keyboard shortcut. The single-tap save. The reviews that arrive at exactly the right time, then disappear.
We are still small enough to make those choices. We hope to stay that way long enough to deserve them.