This difference also affects what we make.

Anyways, most design tasks involve a mix of these three parts.

Imagine you're making a messaging app, like Telegram or Messenger.

• Sometimes you open the app, search for who you want to send a message to, and send it. Then, the app is a tube, getting you to your goal of sending a message.
• But the messaging app is also a kind of exploratory space—a space for thinking about who you want to stay in touch with, about which kind of correspondence you want to have with who, at which kind of rhythm; a space for being thoughtful about your correspondence, for being vulnerable, and more generally for expressing whatever values you have about keeping in touch. In this sense, the messaging app is a space.

A messenger app can be thought of as a tube, or it can be thought of as a space. And there are many, many things like this.

Same with that educational platform I mentioned before. If you focus on your users’ goals, you’ll think of it as a funnel or tube. If you focus on their sources of meaning, it’s a space.

This is even true with something like advertising analytics: it may seem like your customer has a straightforward goal—to have the most people see their promoted tweets. But you could also design an advertising analytics tool as a space—a space to explore your audience, to find audiences who meet you in certain ways, to build up a certain kind of meaningful rapport in a community.

So designers can often decide whether to make a funnel, a tube, or a space.

Or—as with our messaging app—they might make a mix of all three, where each screen or UI component participate in one or more funnels, tubes, or spaces.

• Older snippers