The intelligence of a system is a measure of its skill-acquisition efficiency over a scope
of tasks, with respect to priors, experience, and generalization difficulty. – François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
The road to wisdom?
— Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
This is a wonderful way to explain why being hopeful and trying to change the world is hard, from climate scientist Kate Marvel:
Hope is not comfortable. It demands things, drains you, makes you sad and anxious. Hope is the knowledge that we can prevent bad things, and the realization that we might choose not to.
If something is guaranteed to happen, you don’t need hope. That’s faith:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1
Hope is for when you’re gonna have to work for it.
Superhuman is the new darling of Silicon Valley and productivity geeks worldwide. They promise “the fastest email experience ever made” and showcase testimonials from prominent customers citing how much time it’s saved them and how it’s made them more effective. This has led to a waitlist of thousands and a customer base willing to pay $30/month for access to their app.
Despite the attention, there is still confusion about why Superhuman has been successful so far. The main reasons people cite are the elegant design, UI responsiveness, and “exclusivity” factor. But I believe their success comes from a clever set of techniques that combine to change the behavior of their customers.
Since its early days, Superhuman has been criticized as “just a collection of browser extensions” with “a pretty UI” (the ultimate faint praise for designers). After all, behind the scenes it still uses Gmail (and only Gmail–no Outlook or other services are yet supported) to do the heavy lifting of sending, receiving, and storing emails, as well as filtering spam. Unlike the newer Hey service, Superhuman doesn’t change the basic mechanics of how email works–anyone can still email you, and you still deal with messages one at a time.
Superhuman’s interface (originally concepted with Ueno) is certainly elegant, packing a lot of information and power while still feeling simple and lightweight. Their keyboard shortcuts, and especially the CMD-K master shortcut (introduced with a clever interactive tutorial) are efficient and let them simplify and eliminate the visual clutter of buttons. The context panel updates to show helpful information about message senders and your schedule. And their dark mode is one of the best I’ve seen, good enough that I use it all the time. There’s certainly room to criticize (lack of visual contrast is a common issue), but overall it lives up to the “premium” design bar that their marketing promises.
The app is also very responsive. Superhuman makes offline access first-class, feeling like a native desktop app despite being built on web technologies. They promise “the fastest email experience ever made” in their marketing, and back it up with detailed engineering optimizations. Gmail has always prioritized speed, but Superhuman–especially with their desktop app focus–makes it significantly faster.
In theory you can combine a few browser extensions and settings (Simplify, Flash, Clearbit, Gmail offline, Mixmax, etc) to simulate the Superhuman experience. I think the packaging Superhuman has done is a significant improvement, and lots of extensions are likely to torpedo your UI responsiveness, but the basic features are available cheaper (or free) elsewhere.
The team has indeed built a beautiful interface to email, with clever interactions and impressive responsiveness. But Superhuman’s slick UI hides the fact that what they really sell is behavior change.
Some former Superhuman customers have said that the biggest value they got from the app was changing their workflow. Superhuman is designed around the belief that you should empty your inbox every day (“inbox zero”) and most of its features and tips are aimed at helping you do that. Many people (and apps) have tried to implement the inbox zero philosophy, but most find it too difficult to continue.
While that can be used as a criticism (“You don’t need the app, just change how you do things”), it’s actually much harder to change someone’s behavior than to simply help them with their current behaviors. Entire professions exist to help people change their behaviors, and even they struggle to make a lasting impact. Email is a daily activity for billions of people, and for “an app” to change your behavior around it is an impressive achievement.
Superhuman combines a number of behavior change techniques to help ensure that you change your behavior and stick to it.
Commitment
All of these contribute to the commitment effect which keeps you invested in continuing the behaviors long enough to become your established workflow.
Signaling/pacts
These aspects build up the social identity of the user, one of our most powerful motivators, and tie it to attributes of the Superhuman product. You can’t stop now–you’re superhuman!
Reinforcement
The more that Superhuman can reinforce your new behaviors, the stronger they become. Video games are the gold standard for this; think about all the “Level up!” and “Achievement unlocked” celebrations a typical game employs. Vohra regularly speaks about how they use game design techniques to build Superhuman.
The first rule about behavior change…is you do not talk about behavior change.
One of the interesting aspects of Superhuman’s marketing is that they don’t mention behavior change at all. Their homepage is entirely focused on speed and product features; their tagline is “THE FASTEST EMAIL EXPERIENCE EVER MADE.” Despite the benefits of inbox zero and the value of the commitments in their process, neither of those things make the homepage.
In an interview, CEO Rahul Vohra noted that they draw their marketing copy from the testimonials of their happiest customers. So this focus on speed and product features is something that their customers share.
So why isn’t anyone talking about the new behaviors (besides the former customers mentioned above)? One theory is that nobody wants to change; they want to want to change. Telling people that they’re doing something wrong, and asking them to change, is rarely well-received.
On the other hand, telling people that they are good (and busy, and important), and that their current tools are holding them back, is flattering. Lots of people will identify with that kind of messaging, and reflect it back to others.
The combination of these techniques leads to a feeling that:
1) You are important and your time is valuable
2) The creators of Superhuman care about you and your success
3) You’re indebted to the person who referred you.
It’s a powerful combination, and one that I haven’t experienced from any other software application. The closest analogous experiences I can think of are a professional development course, a therapist, or a university education.
I’m not the target Superhuman customer. I don’t get all that much email, nor handle important, time-sensitive information that way. I don’t subscribe to their “inbox zero” philosophy. As a designer of productivity software, it’s interesting for me to see their design choices, but I don’t need to pay $30/month to do my email with Superhuman.
And yet I did pay them, for a long time, because I felt that by canceling I’d be disappointing Paula, Rahul, and my referrer David, who had all invested in my success. I’d have to move my old email apps back into position, and set up the shortcuts and extensions that I do use from Superhuman in another email client. I’d be admitting that my email messages aren’t all that important after all–and that maybe I’m not either =) And I’d miss those regular reinforcements that I’d done well at a difficult task.
So while I admire the beautiful design and speed of Superhuman’s apps, I was really paying for the commitment, signaling, and reinforcement techniques they used to change my behavior.
Changing apps is easy.
Changing yourself is hard.
Kudos to Superhuman for understanding the real challenge for their customers and designing to support them.
Love this definition of democracy by E.B. White:
[Democracy] is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
The real politics of the future is going to have to square the circle. It’s going to have to allow you to still feel that you are an individual and in control of your own destiny…
Its roots are going to lie in two places: one is the fusion of keeping the idea of individualism yet giving you a sense of being part of something, but you are not a slave to it, and the other is that you are going to re-energise the idea of science and fuse it to the idea that there is a purpose to your life.
Small talk builds relationships because it says “I care more about you than being productive.”
David Perell
When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle.
Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.
C Thi Nguyen
Why do QAnon conspiracy theories (and Dan Brown books) fool people despite being easily disproven? Because on the internet, if you only search for what you want to be true, you’ll always find “evidence” validating your beliefs:
The reader no longer needed to rely on the experts to determine whether the book was a gimmick (and maybe couldn’t trust the experts either, if the conspiracies are correct!). The reader could go to Google and find articles of undetermined quality and unverified accuracy in order to form their own opinion.
The ultimate genius of “The Da Vinci Code” wasn’t in its bad writing or its poor plotting; it was in the book’s ability to allow the reader to LARP being an investigator and religious scholar to uncover arcane knowledge that “they” don’t want you to know.
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. – Elie Wiesel