Tag: Design

AI Musings #8 – Thoughts from South Park Commons Demo Day

Quick observations on the latest AI startup products.

Attended an amazing South Park Commons Summer Demo Faire yesterday!

Reporting back a few thoughts running through my head in real-time:

1. Essentially, the capabilities & design of every core SaaS use case are being reimagined by AI founders as we speak. In a future steady state, I see many of them living inside larger product suites as “features”, either via the incumbent fast-following and shipping them, or via small acquisitions/acqui-hires.

2. Consumer AI products remind me a lot of the 1st gen iPhone apps. Founders (developers) rapidly shipping entertaining, almost “toy-like” use cases. Like in mobile, will something massive eventually come out of these? So hard to tell…

3. An underlying capability of AI that a majority of products seem to be leveraging is “contextual artifact creation”. Eg. creating videos & decks in real time, replacing specific elements instantly in pre-existing media etc.

4. While the underlying “intelligence” capabilities of the products seem to be next-level, the UI/ UX as of now seems quite incremental relative to the mobile/cloud era. Lots more discovery & risk-taking needs to happen here.

5. Across enterprise & consumer/prosumer, it’s clear that these products can only manifest their power when they have access to extremely differentiated & diverse sources of data. In some contexts, it was unclear how a startup would get access to many such datasets in a fresh & relevant manner.

6. In legacy industries like govt/ public sector, AI-native products, even with game-changing capabilities, will still need to deal with age-old GTM challenges (long sales cycle, who will buy, what are the incentives for users to adopt etc).

7. Finally, it’s still pretty effin’ hard to pull off a glitch-free, low-latency AI demo.

Congrats to all the presenting SPC founders. Can’t wait for how these products shape up going forward!

Game design playbook for products

Recently came across an amazing talk by Rahul Vohra on how to incorporate game design principles in any software product (Superhuman has, of course, nailed this). Sharing my notes from it below:

#1 Similar to how games have levels & rewards that create instant gratification, create in-product goals for the user that are concrete, achievable & rewarding. For instance, the #inboxZero goal that Superhuman sets for users. Goals take any product beyond just utility & make it fun 🎯

#2 Design for nuanced emotion. Product value needs to be defined beyond just tangible jobs-to-be-done, to include “how it makes the user feel”. Emotions like joy, pride, achievement, trust, fun! Eg. showing a serene pic 🏞 to the user on achieving the in-product goal.

#3 Similar to how games have complex control sequences that are fun to master and expand the game’s potential, software products too, can have rapid & robust controls that match the user’s context of multi-tasking & expecting instant gratification. Eg. smart keyboard shortcuts 🎮

#4 Introduce toys that increase the fun quotient and incent users to spend more time with the product, while also strongly gelling with core features and enhancing value delivery. Eg. fun universal search bar with surprising auto-suggest elements 🔍

#5 Help the user get zoned into the product experience to create extraordinary engagement (almost a “flow” state💻) by making each next step obvious and minimizing energy to be spent in any sort of decision-making. Eg on archiving, moving the user to the next message in milliseconds 🚴🏼‍♀️

#6 Continuing the objective of creating an in-product “flow” state for users, giving clear and immediate feedback to users with no distraction ⛷

#7 Final strategy for creating a “flow” state within the product is to introduce certain challenging skills and make it a little hard for users to master them. Overcoming challenges create dopamine, a feeling of achievement within the user. That feeling will stick with users for a long, long time 🧗🏽‍♀️

Finally, these game design principles need to be executed within the wrapper of your product’s core design language. This includes design principles that you have specifically chosen like say, minimalism, full screen to minimize distractions, there when you need & away when you don’t, etc.

If I have to summarize my overall takeaway — in this era where any software is cheap to replicate, products can stand out by designing for what emotions your target users will feel as they use the product. And making it fun!

PS: Suhas Motwani, great job in organizing this session!

Note: this article first appeared on the Workomo blog here.