Superhuman's Founder on How to Move Beyond Gamification

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imagine you're playing a game like Street Fighter it would be incredibly frustrating if the game ignored half your inputs and your character flopped around and then you died but that is the

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status quo for business software today [Music] good afternoon everybody I'm Rahul I'm the founder and CEO of super human where we make the fastest email experience in

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the world our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before reply to their important email sooner and many see inbox zero for the first time in years now superhuman is

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productivity software but I'm really a gamer at heart and I'm here to share how you can apply game design to business software today our business software feels like work you have to do your

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email you have to submit your expense reports you have to enter data in your CRM but what if we could make it less like work and more like play with game design we can I will shortly share what

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game design is but first let me say what it isn't game design is not gamification it is not simply taking your product and adding points levels trophies and badges 10 years ago

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gamification was a big deal but it didn't work and to understand why we have to understand human motivation in the 1970s Stanford researchers recruited 50 kids aged 3 to 4 all of these

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children were previously interested in drawing some of the kids were told they would get a reward a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon the other kids weren't told about a reward they didn't

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even know one existed the children were then invited into separate rooms to draw for six minutes and they would either get a reward or not and over the next few days they were observed to see how

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much they would continue to draw by themselves the children who didn't get a reward they spent 17 percent of their time drawing but the

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children who did get a reward they only spent 8 percent of their time drawing the reward had halved their motivation so what's going on here well researchers distinguish intrinsic

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and extrinsic motivation with intrinsic motivation we do things because we find them inherently satisfying and interesting with extrinsic motivation we do things to achieve rewards and that's

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the problem with rewards they massively undermine intrinsic motivation and this is also why gamification does not work when gamification appears to work it is because the underlying experience is

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already a game and so that brings us to the question how do you design a game and this is a question that I have been obsessed with for a long time as a kid I learned how to code just so I could make

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my own games before I was a founder I worked as a game designer and as a founder I've gone deep into the theory of game design and as it turns out there is no unifying theory of game design to

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create games we have to draw upon the art and science of psychology mathematics interaction design and storytelling these are 5 factors to consider for each of these factors I'm

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going to share how we use it at superhuman and how you can use it in your own products games need goals in fact goals are a defining feature of games but we can't just have any goals

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we need good goals and for a game good goals are concrete achievable and rewarding it's superhuman we set a very concrete goal get to inbox zero but the goal must also be achievable which is

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why we onboard our users for each new user we do a live concierge concierge onboarding this is a one-to-one 30-minute video call with one of our wonderful onboarding specialists we

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teach faster workflows to get to inbox zero we show powerful shortcuts so you never have to touch the mouse and if you're far away from inbox zero we'll wipe the slate clean

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so you're close thus making the goal more achievable but the goal must also be rewarding when you hit inbox zero you feel triumph over your email a previously rare and incredibly rewarding

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experience most business goals aren't clear business software does not have clear goals and if they are clear they are usually unrewarding and unachievable and so this brings us to the first

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principle of game design if you want to make software like it's a game then create goals that are concrete achievable and rewarding now the best games create strong emotions because

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emotions are the foundation of our memory we must therefore be able to analyze emotion and to do that we need vocabulary there are many models of human emotion the most famous is plot

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Chuck's wheel plot chick identified eight core emotions and opposite emotions are across from each other for example joy is opposite grief and you can blend adjacent emotions to create

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new complex feelings for example when you can buy in joy and anticipation you get optimism and when you combine joy and trust you get love but as game designers we need a much richer

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vocabulary than academia provides the emotions we are aiming for are much more nuanced this is the most useful model I have found by the hunter Institute it contains the subtleties that we need to

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care about at superhuman we care deeply about joy we design for enthusiasm and excitement how our users come to a super excited to use the product we design for hopefulness and optimism our users

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really want superhumans to improve their lives and we designed for pride and triumph for when you hit inbox zero especially if it's the first time in years you rightly feel like you

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accomplished something special and when you do hit inbox zero we show you stunning and gorgeous imagery and we do this to widen our emotional repertoire beyond joy into

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love and surprise we show images that are serene and peaceful images that create a sense of longing and sentimentality images that even amaze and inspire a sense of or you can also

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use the wheel to find emotions to remove many people come to us with negative feelings about their own email they may feel helpless anxious annoyed guilty even powerless and this brings us to our

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second principle of game design designed for nuanced emotion controls can be one of the main reasons why a game succeeds consider the Wiimote the original we sold over 100 million units and every

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controller since incorporated motion but games require much more robust controls than we typically build for business software imagine you're playing a game like Street Fighter it would be

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incredibly frustrating if the game ignored half your inputs and your character flopped around and then you died but that is the status quo for business software today let's say I want

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to email my co-founder Conrad in Gmail the shortcuts to compose an email is C so I hit C and then I type Conrad in Gmail if I do this too fast I end up with two drafts and I'm sending an email

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to rad in super human we pipeline our keystrokes so this can never happen and in case you think I'm picking on Gmail this kind of error is status quo for business software today and this brings

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us to our third principle of game design creates rapid and robust controls our toys the same as games we play with toys but we play games a ball as a toy but baseball

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as a game and as it turns out the best games are made with toys and then they have fun on multiple levels the level of the toy and of the game itself and superhuman a favorite toy is the time

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autocomplete er you use this to snooze your emails you can type in whatever you want it may be gibberish and it will do its best to understand you for example 3 D

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becomes 3 days 3 H 3 hours 1 M o 1 month and the time autocomplete er is fun because it indulges playful exploration what does it do how does it work when does it break and it's not long and on

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boardings before people start trying to do things like this well I wonder what happens if I keep on typing 10 well it turns out that's October the 10th at 10:10 p.m. well what happens if I put

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the p.m. in the middle well it seems like that stills works what happens if I type out a sequence of two's well that's February the 2nd 2020 at 2 p.m. and then you might might start to

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try more complex inputs how about in a fortnight and a day and it's not long before you find pleasant surprises for example you never have to do time zone math again 8 a.m. in Tokyo no problem

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that's 8 p.m. Eastern and many of our users are delighted to find that if they really want they can snooze an email until never principle 4 make fun toys and then combine them into games

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consider your own product is it fun even without a goal does it indulge moments of playful exploration and does it create moments of pleasant surprise if so congratulations because then you have

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a toy and you're on the way to building a great game now the previous four factors are critical to game design flow is perhaps the least understood flow is the intense and focused concentration on

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the present flow is so absorbing the we don't worry about the past or think about the future flow is so demanding that we don't care about what others think about us flow is so easy that we

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always know what to do next flow is so powerful that we lose track of time it can either flash by in an instant or stretch out for infinity and flow is so rewarding that our activities

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become intrinsically motivating which as we know from earlier is the most powerful and effective form of motivation in other words flow is incredible

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how do we make it well these are the conditions number one you must always know what to do next number two you must always know how to do it number three you must be free from

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distractions number four you must get clear and immediate feedback and number five and this is the hardest to get right you must feel a balance between challenge and skill we

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can visualize the relationship between challenge and skill with the experience fluctuation model if the activity is too hard you'll feel anxious if the activity is too easy

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you'll feel relaxed or bored to truly feel in flow you need to perceive a high challenge and match it with high skill so how do we create flow and superhuman well let's take these conditions one by

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one number one knowing what to do next you can make product decisions that make this dramatically easier for your users in Gmail when I archive this email I end up back on the inbox

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I now have to decide what to do next and I have to do this every single time this destroys flow in super human when I archive the same email I immediately see the next one I don't have to take any

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decisions at all this creates flow number two knowing how to do it early on we saw that users would forget our shortcuts they knew what they wanted to do but they didn't know how to do it so

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we built super human command simply hit command K and to what you want to do not only will it do it for you it will teach you the shortcut for next time next up freedom from distractions in

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super human you can only see one conversation at a time and you cannot see the inbox at the same time as the conversation and so quite deliberately you can't see what's coming next or any

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new email you can design your interfaces like this to reduce distraction and so create flow and the thing that I'm most excited to share is this balance between challenge and skill this is the

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experience fluctuation model for most people Gmail is the left-hand slice some people feel apathetic or worried the skill level is low smedium but their email doesn't matter that much some

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people feel further up the left-hand side the skill level is low to medium but their email does matter many people feel anxious the skill level is low to medium but the email really does matter

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and they are failing at it this is actually how most users come to us at superhuman we massively increased the skill level for almost everybody but what happens if your email wasn't that

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challenging to begin with or you were already highly skilled well then and this is going to sound crazy we increase the challenge level we give you a really challenging goal hit inbox zero without

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ever touching the mouse and this bounces your perceived skill with the perceived challenge thus resulting in flow flow is so important that it actually gives us three

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principles make the next action obvious give clear feedback immediately and with no distraction and balance high perceived skill with high perceived challenge this may counter-intuitively

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mean making your product harder to use these are our seven principles of game design if you follow these your users will be intrinsically motivated they will use your products not because

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they have to but because they find it inherently interesting and satisfying with these seven principles you can create products that are delightful amazing magical and which fundamentally

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are games thank you for listening [Applause] you