The superpower I seek is the ability to predict human behaviour. I design software products for a living and it is on my understanding of human behaviour that I place all my bets on. To help my quest I frequently get nudged by my peers to check out psychological experiments but instead, I find myself confined in a corner reading the work of philosophers grasping at the human condition.
I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science.
That last line was not composed by me but by an incredibly insightful writer: Zat Rana. When I read it, it was a moment of finding a friend in a desert of doubts.
As I was deconstructing my epiphany, I composed a statement of my own, making this a two-part essay:
Products test our assertions on human behaviour in the labs of Reality. Put another way, our understanding of human behaviour has to prove itself in the products we make.
This is the part one of two. Let’s begin.
What does the human desire
If ever I slip into the horrid mistake of confronting my dad right after he is back from work, I know what’s coming: An impulsive agitated voice aiming to shut down any conversation. My mom attributes this to hunger. “He is back after a long day. He is hungry.” And it is his intrinsic desire for food that will make him spend his remaining energy on nothing but food. Anything other than that will be ferociously pushed away. Since then, I’ve always known what to expect when someone is hungry.
Now, of course my mom’s theory is basic and applicable to only one context. But it’s the approach that has value: establishing a base context for human will and building on that logically (first principles reasoning) to arrive at varying behaviours.
“Every individual body that contains life has a will. Schopenhauer called it the will to live. Nietzsche called it the will to power.”, Zat Rana wrote. Similarly, Sigmund Frued called it the will to pleasure and Viktor D. Frankl called it the will to meaning. And unlike my mom’s, these theories attempt for a universal context to explain the dynamics of our mind.
Another is mimetic theory by philosopher Rene Girard. It builds on an assumption that all our cultural behaviors are imitative; that we derive all our desires from other people. Building on this, Peter Thiel was able to predict the virality of Facebook and became its first investor.
In his own words: ‘Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic. Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.’
Each philosophy is true within its stated context. And keeping this context, it shows how all aspects of human behavior connect by first principles reasoning within the framework of a language.
What logic expressed in language entails are words whose meaning we, with some sensation, understand. This bakes into our intuition, and in practice, our intuition is quite effective at distinguishing across these contexts. Thiel grafted mimetic theory to the story of Facebook and while many things would’ve contributed to the virality of Facebook, mimesis could explain a lot of it for Thiel to make a bet. This is what I seek.
Contrast this with modern science
Psychological experiments compartmentalize human consciousness into patterns and prove its existence in data. But our brains are complex systems, and with such systems, the cause and effect cannot be confined to any one dimension without considering how it relates with the rest.
This is a similar shortcoming in the field of nueroscience, where one presumes to accurately describe the working of the brain by observing what happens at the neural level while completing abstracting out what happens at the molecular.
Also, the setup of such experiments can’t be abstracted out of the result as constants, all of which became clear in an attempt to replicate these experiments.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes this in his book Skin in the Game:
“…a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated. Of these thirty-nine, I believe less than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine, (and) neuroscience.”
Human consciousness doesn’t compartmentalize in the same way modern science assume it to.
The data obviously don’t point at exact concepts like velocity, but inexact ones like biases. There can be no equations to connect these data and don’t have a logical framework to show how all of these patterns of human behaviour connect and interact with each other. This creates a concern for me as a product is an amalgamation of varying behaviours.
If not equations & data, then Time.
The human condition can’t be expressed (exactly) in numbers or equations. Mathematical theories or empirical methods cannot really capture our consciousness.
However, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in his book Skin in the Game, makes an observation:
“while our knowledge of physics has not been available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy*-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment.”
(You may read about the Lindy Proof, but for the purposes of this essay, all you need to know is its implication: Robustness to Time.)
All our assertions on human behavior must be tested over time in the labs of reality, as per the Lindy effect.
When I think about products, I realize that nothing can deem a product to be truly successful other than being seamlessly integrated in the lives of it’s users over changing times.
Hence, Taleb alluded that the philosopher who wins will be the one who finishes last. They’ve been in the race for centuries.
Multiple perspectives
From across time to across perspectives, Zat extends the underlying principle to imply that overlapping various philosophies can give us a better sensibility of human nature.
As Zat noted:
Language itself can never precisely capture the truth in words, which is why a deep affection to precise meanings is futile. But many different perspectives looking at the same thing defined in multiple ways, in different contexts, can pick out a general consistency. And it’s the sensibility gained from that consistency that is important.
In philosophy, by showing how it all connects within the said context, these theories allow a more nuanced understanding to come through. Something that cannot yet be described in exact concepts or data, but an understanding of human nature that can only be absorbed intuitively in our sensibility like the rhythmic implications of a song or poetry.
Studying works of art that have survived and been relevant for generations can give us significant insights into human nature, and might be one of the effective routes. When asked why the Beatles achieved the fame and longevity it did, Paul McCartney said, “Easy Lyrics.” This alone gives me significant insight into how consumer products must be.
Observing successful products like Facebook and old products like keyboards are significant ways to understand human nature like Marshall McLuhan has done in his philosophy on Media.
Memes that pierce through culture and stay relevant for years are something to keep an eye for. One that’s now increasingly obvious is if your business can be alluded to in a Meme, it will need significantly less marketing.
In practice
By establishing what one desires, you design a system around what incentivizes it’s participants. Charlie Munger coined the phrase “His bread I eat, whose song I sing” to remind us of how foundational incentives is to our nature. He says if you can solve for incentive design in a company, you would’ve solved half it’s problems.
I must assure you that learning about human nature is a discovery within yourself, hence your intuition is the ultimate tool in these matters. As Zat succinctly puts it:
“Philosophy shows how it all connects by first principles reasoning, which gives you a better intuitive sense than science breaking down one thing without the full context. That allows for more nuanced context to come through, and I think context is the big difference, and context is what the intuition is good at distinguishing, too, when practiced.”
Philosophy, by all means & purposes, is the landscape of human thinking. The various theories are vantage points directed towards the Truth. The discovery is done, I see no other means, but by self-awareness. A meditative indulgence in our lives.
Growing up, I had come up with various ideas for human behavior which is only valuable if it checks out in practice. I ultimately intend to test my understanding of human nature by expressing it on the canvas of a product, and my intuition must be nurtured at every step of the way.
This is a two part essay deconstructing these two statements:
I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science. – Zat Rana
Products test our assertions on human behavior in the labs of Reality. Put another way, our understanding of human behavior has to prove itself in the products we make. – Yours sincerely
In an email, Zat pointed out to me that a philosopher’s deep understanding of his own psychology is what allows him to be great. A philosopher puts language to his intuition and creating an understanding for human nature, baking into the instincts of the reader.
But so much bias in my intuition
Philosophy feeds into my intuition but our intuition is conditioned, far from the absolute Truth. We only see reality through our own filters.
This is especially concerning as my job revolves around baking a user experience into products that must appeal to the entire target demographic for it to succeed. And hence, an objective truth must ideally be abstracted out of my intuition for it to be applicable to a broader mass.
A philosophy is only true within its own context but perhaps, overlapping these philosophies can reveal commonalities that can get us closer.
As Zat once noted, “when two different contexts (parts) come into conflict, we have to merge them (into a whole) and then evaluate what is most true relative to this new context, and this can go on and go on towards infinity.”
Philosophy has many tools for that. Most notably, what studying philosophy equips me with is the ability to express my intuitive understanding in first principles reasoning, which as Paul Rosania (who has worked on Slack and Twitter) described can be a really effective way of arriving at a fairly objective thesis for a product.
First Principles reasoning
First principles reasoning is about building your body of knowledge from the ground up.
First principles reasoning could’ve anticipated Facebook’s eventual decline in usage as well. Let’s look at the core of what makes Facebook: the Network. While connecting with our friends sounds great, the question remains: what really defines who is a friend and who is not. Everybody has a different meaning for it and the implication of a friend spreads across a spectrum. Hence, our feeds were bound to get messy as we lost track of who we were sharing with and who are sharing with us.
Just like a philosopher, I can break down my understanding into a logical tree of design decisions (nodes) and see how the decisions guide the customer experience into various directions (branches). This is what Paul calls the hypothesis tree. Paul presents his colleagues this tree at which they can more precisely direct their arguments.
If you’ve to prove the whole thesis wrong, you’ll have to prove the base assumption doesn’t hold true. Philosophy is self-critical. You know what has to be proven wrong, for it to be wrong. This provides ammunition against biases.
What do we wish to be
One can break down complex problems or scattered observations to its bare essentials and logically assemble it bottom-up to uncover the ideas embedded in our subjective understanding.
Laying out ideas like this also allows us to see all the possible directions we can move, all the possible points new branches can grow out of, all the possible places we didn’t land up in our own experiences, but others can and will.
What follows then is a world of possibilities.
With first principles reasoning, an email product by Basecamp called HEY arrived at a UX that eliminates the need for AI to manage our emails, which was otherwise assumed essential by GMail.
/sidebar I’ve given a first principles breakdown of HEY in the following essay: Link. It starts by re-building email with the base question “How must a person A send information to person B in the digital age?”
An example of a First Principles breakdown of a Product
/sidebar_end
Running one of the most important blogs on the Internet for decision making, Shane Parrish, in his essay First Principles : The Building Blocks to True Knowledge, explains:
The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems.
The idea of biases is itself biased
In practice, one can direct their arguments at specific junctures or the root assumption of the hypothesis tree and collaboratively arrive at a close-to objective understanding.
However, in the entirety of our knowledge, absolute objectivity in the matters of human nature still eludes us. And this fact itself is the flaw in the idea of cognitive biases.
Pointing out a bias only goes so far to establish that our thinking is deluded. That an idea must be wrong as it is a result of a deluded behaviour. But none of us has access to true objective Reality and hence we’re inherently deluded and all our ideas are wrong or incomplete to some degree. Hence, while explaining why an idea is wrong, cognitive biases prove the obvious and can only be a means and not the end.
Zat Rana neatly captures this:
“The idea of cognitive biases is flawed because our entire perception of reality is flawed. And that’s fine. There is often a deeper wisdom to it. True, there are some patterns embedded in our evolutionary history that lead us astray in the modern world, but even so, neatly categorizing them into a list of biases itself is something that biases us. It’s a start, but it’s not an end. There are ways to think and to be attentive, which surpass the need for easy categorizations like that. I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science.”
Seeking the Superpower
What studying works of psychology can provide is new terminology as it attempts to describe various phenomena in our natures. Reading about cognitive biases in D. Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, my favourite part is the section at the end of each chapter where he gives the user a few sample statements to practice talking about our behavioral patterns.
One must not mistake this article to evangelize abandoning all works of psychology or such sciences. Although, this is a byproduct :
“Most of what is good about psychology can be found elsewhere.” – NNTaleb
When you can explain something from bottom-up, you stay within the confines of the Truth. Integrating your learnings through first-principles, creating your tree of understanding, allows you to branch out to new possibilities.
In product design, there’s a common debate around whether we should be designing for existing behaviours or creating new behaviours and I think philosophy reconciles the two in a very “human” way.
The philosophical investigation can encapsulate not only how we behave but also what we wish to be. There’s a compassionate spirit to this that I want to carry as I create products that become an inseparable part of people’s lives. For when seeking an understanding of human condition, one must ask not only how humans are, but also what humans yearn to be.
Footnote:
The Story to my Golden Dime
It’s hard to pin down the notion to come out of any specific moment. It was not a spike on an instrument. It’s a slowly germinating intuition. Growing up, I used to do or say things just to see how people around me react. And this was my penchant for always being keen to study human behaviour in the labs of my life. I picked all kinds of material from varying realms of knowledge to be able to explain the human drama unfolding around me. Eventually, I started sensing that the ideas I read in areas of philosophy surfaced more often than much of what I’ve read elsewhere.
The work of philosophers helped. It helped me to nurture better relationships and help nurture the people around me. And it helped me to understand why people reacted favorably to certain products and not others. Slowly, I was building this consolidated understanding of human nature with a foundation laid on the ideas of philosophers.
I used to be quite nervous in my assertions, not backed by data but intuition. Steve Jobs became my hero for rallying makers to rely on their intuition. I often found solace in the creators resonating similar thoughts in why they made something a certain way. It is when I stumbled upon Zat explicitly stating this notion, that when I found the strength to write this piece.
I’ve to thank Kathleen Martin for helping me with the outline. This is when I decided to go ahead with the piece. Cam Houser, Najla Alareify, Taylor Walters, Nate Gadlac, Siddharth Ravaal and Dan Greenwald are some of my friends who provided some valuable understanding in how the essay is perceived. Michael Koutsoubis restructured the article and pointed me to delivering the essay in two parts. And ofcourse it is all seeded from a conversation with Zat and an inspiration from Nicholas Nassim Taleb.
We humans are obviously different and surprisingly similar. And a product’s success depends on it serving everybody’s similar needs while ensuring it serves them in their different ways.
We all talk about products and in doing so I often think about how a product came to inject itself into a human’s life. This is the seedling for a mindset I’ll construct going forwards.
I will begin outwards with customers and product teams and then inwards to our own self. The underlying theme is to strive for an understanding of how we humans wish to live. This is my letter to every product designer out there.
A good product speaks to the entire set of people who will use it. And for me to understand this group of people, I have to be one of them. It’s hard to imagine designing a product that I am not going to use. Consider this the key disclaimer to this essay. In any case, you would probably be designing a product which has similar elements to products you use.
What shall we make
We don’t want to poke at screens with a stylus and hundreds of products made with that technology didn’t succeed to the scale of the iPhone. We want to point at things with our fingers and until we reached there, we didn’t have a computer that my never-used-a-computer-before-Mom would like to use.
It seems to me that every time a new technology is invented, a gold rush ensues as everyone tries to take their pick of the many new possibilities. But just because we can build something, doesn’t mean we should. Instead, we must come up with products that reaffirm how we wish to be as humans. And then we can about picking or inventing technology as we need.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience, and work backwards to the technology.”
This is the essence of “human-centered” design pioneered at Apple. Now, one can study a bunch of guidelines and processes to be a good “human-centered designer.” But I think that completely misses the point. To be a good designer, first and foremost, you must tap into your very own intuition.
“Intuition is more important than Intellect.”
With the above conclusion, Steve Jobs returned from India to create Apple: the most successful design-house in human history. Steve’s intuition was the Great Filter that dictated everything that was made at Apple.
When I talk about my product intuition, I often use the analogy of products as musical instruments. Philosopher Marshall McLuhan said that technology is an extension of the body. A car is an extension to our legs, a book to eyes, clothes to skin and a computer to our brain. This is most obviously visible in the case of a musician playing an instrument.
Who am I playing for
Every time you make a decision as a designer, you do it for thousands or potentially millions of users. And following your own intuition could seem extremely biased. You might be inclined to survey the consumers about what they want and simply make that. That’s what they will tell you to do. But that’s what has knocked giants out of the game. Take for example, Nokia.
In a stunning Ted Talk, technology ethnographer, Tricia Wang recounts her episode with Nokia in the year 2009 during the dawn of the iPhone. Her conversations with 100 or so people in emerging markets like India and China revealed the now obvious excitement for iPhones. But Nokia rejected her insight as their survey involving millions of data points said otherwise. The phone giant got acquired, the never-made-a-phone-before-company conquered.
The folks at Apple created the iPhone with a simple mindset: create products you would want to use. This is the guiding principle Steve rallied his team to follow through all of the revolutionary products Apple has created over the last 4 decades.
I believe
It is the life you wish to live that guides the life you make available to other people. Some of the best products are created when its creator wishes for a product and forces it into existence.
GoPro was invented when its creator, Nick Woodman, wanted to film himself surfing. Instagram was like the 20th photo-sharing app at the time but it embodied what Kevin & Mike (its creators) wanted photo-sharing to be like.
Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngeList and quite simply an industry legend who knows more about building businesses than most people in the world, recently tweeted:
“If you build for yourself, you’ll always have product-market fit.”
The masses won’t tell you the product you need to invent. New products are seldom conceptualized from the status quo. In fact, the most important products push the status quo.
In the year 1984, when Steve Jobs was asked about market research, he had this to say:
“Customers don’t know what they want, until you show it to them.”
The reason is whether your ideas in a product are good can only be truly known if it integrates seamlessly into the lives of its users. And nothing can definitively predict that.
You, your colleagues and everyone else has to use it to know for sure.
Thankfully today, we can quickly create animated design prototypes and “use” our ideas to some extent without coding a single line. Also, the ideas that go into a product are present to some extent in existing products in the market and observing how it is playing out can be really valuable.
Simply put, focus on building what works for you and you’ll be surprised at how many people like you in the world there are. Then observe and iterate.
There’s design in every designation
When understanding why Figma, a tool for designing software products dominated the industry,Kevin Kwok explains:
“The core insight of Figma is that design is larger than designers. Design is all of the conversations between designers and Product Managers about what to build. It is the mockups and prototypes and the feedback on them. It is the hand-off of specs and assets to engineers and how easy it is for them to implement them.”
You must note that no matter what position you’re designated, you’ll always be exercising your designer instincts. It’s how you choose to communicate your intuition for a product: code, marketing pitch, the written word, design mockups etc., that will determine your designation. But there’s design in every designation.
And hence, even as the designer in a product team, you won’t own a design, as Uber’s designer Didier Hilhorst pointed out. What you actually are in-charge of, is the Story.
Design is the story of ‘why, how & what’ of a product. As a designer, you’re the storyteller of the company.
Design is everything that brings us together to build. Design is how we go about building products. Design is not a step in the ‘manufacturing’ process. It is all-pervasive. Design is the interface between technology and culture and in being so it affects both.
Design creates culture and the culture of a team washes over it’s products.
Choosing your instrument
I write. Whenever I have an idea about something to design, I write. Some people doodle on a sheet of paper. I sometimes do too, but usually after writing, I immediately head to my computer to start designing colorful mock-ups. I was advised not to do so.
There are methodologies that dictate that you must first do extensive research, define the problem, create a user persona and make lo-fidelity wire-frames, before you start making hi-fidelity mock-ups. But I have always been interested in stories. So I write it and then tend to immediately design.
The methodologies are not wrong. But I think they should not be religiously followed either. The underlying purpose is to get feedback on the understanding you’ve consolidated so far. Ultimately, the way you communicate your understanding should optimize for being cheap, quick and objective.
Also, you should’ve a clear idea on what exactly it is you’re getting feedback on. A problem that I run into with colorful mock-ups is that the person gets distracted by colors when I am really trying to demonstrate the user flow. However, the problem with black and white sketches (wire-frames) is that it often makes it hard for the viewer to imagine the user flow. Wire-frames are recommended because they are faster to create but in the world of ready-made templates and design systems that is often not true.
In conclusion, know who your audience is and the demands of the situation you’re working in. And then pick the method that communicates your understanding in the optimal way.
After constructing a mindset towards the market and your team, we must now look inwards.
Your perspective
If you’re aspiring to be the Designer in a product team, you may plan to begin at the skill and grow your way towards the craft. What precedes skill is perspective — your perspective.
Try asking yourself questions like:
What are the products I like? What appeals uniquely to me, even if it’s not essential to my life? What products are essential to my life? Is there something about them I wish worked differently?
Answer such questions in as much detail as possible describing the journey, your feelings and the outcome of using the product, and you’ve just performed the first act of being a Designer — surfacing your perspective.
Another thing you can try is redesigning a product that is useful to you and can use an upgrade. This is how a musician learns by covering other songs.
Listening to yourself play
Colors, typography, iconography and animations, while serving their purpose, also carry the taste of their maker. This is where you act like a painter and respond to the zeitgeist of design trends and the culture at large.
As a product designer, your canvas is the product.
It is essential to learn the technicalities of typefaces, color palettes, etc., but guides that dictate decisions like which typefaces should be paired together, or what emotions are associated with which colour can be mostly ignored. I can almost hear the wrath of design schools but I firmly believe that these things should be absorbed from observations and baked into your intuition.
No word can truly describe how a colour makes one feel. What you observe must be felt and what you feel must be observed. Watching yourself go through these experiences, being self-aware, is a valuable asset to a designer.
Listening to yourself is how you nurture your intuition.
One thing I try is meditation. I meditate to be more self-aware and be a better designer.
Overall, the quintessential act of Designing products can be articulated into two parts:
First: how do I communicate my understanding?
The second half: how can it be baked into a product that successfully serves others?
Becoming the “Humanizer”
Having a sense of self-awareness (distinct from self-conscious in which you judge yourself for your vices) allows you to empathize with the most laziest, careless and dumb version of yourself. This is a version of yourself you should be stoically studying because guess what: the user feels no obligation to be smart or disciplined towards your product. The best products are the ones where the user forgets that he is using a product and transcends to doing things he wishes to.
Great products become an extension of a human.
To listen to ourselves, being self-aware, is to learn what makes us most effective and grow. Empathy, then, is not a ‘technique’ to understand the customers and your team. Empathy is a way to be more human. It is to sense something human that makes a great designer.
Additional Reading:
5 Habits of Design Thinking by Christian Woodtke is easily one of my favorite essays. Talking about intuition, our designs are often a direct output of our habits and Woodtke gets to the heart of it.
Starting with the base question “How can person A communicate with person B digitally”, I re-construct E-Mail in about 10 Minutes.
In every email app before Hey, the emails you receive are in the Inbox tab. And the emails you send are in the Sent tab. Two separate containers for sent and receive mails is analogous to how physical mail works. But physical mail works that way because of it’s technological constraints. Constraints that electronic email doesn’t have to live within. Yet surprisingly for 20 years, E-Mail has always been designed analogous to the Physical Mail.
Instead of building by analogy, if you build with first principles, if you simply start with asking the base question, “How must a person A communicate with person B digitally?”, what you will inevitably end up with is the e-mail client & service by the makers of Basecamp, HEY.
And ofcourse, all the sent and received emails will end up in one single tab/container like it’s on every Direct Messaging app in the world.
In the next 10 minutes, we’ll (re)build HEY starting with that base question. A lot of this will peel off the impressions you have of e-mail based on your past experiences, and re-introduce email to you. At the end, it might feel like this is how e-mail was always supposed to be. Such is the implication of reasoning from first principles.
//Let’s begin with a message, and an address.
How can a person A communicate with person B?
To send something to someone, one needs something that uniquely points to a person: An address. Anyone with your e-mail address can send you a message. And they don’t have to register themselves on the same platform as yours. Just like one doesn’t have to be registered to the same government as yours to send you a package.
Email exists on the open web. It’s not a closed system that has to adhere to the choices of a single ruler. It’s a technology any entity can use to send a piece of information to anyone. This is why E-Mail won’t die, even if it’s usage fluctuates. This is why it deserved the attention of people who made Hey. CEO, Jason Fried, had this to say:
“Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it.
And yet, email remains a wonder. Thanks to email, people across cultures, continents, countries, cities, and communities communicate every day. It’s reliable. It’s simple. It makes it easy for two humans to share their love, and for millions of people to earn a living.
So good news, the magic’s still there.”
Anybody can send you an E-Mail. Now, who should?
Anybody can send you an E-Mail. Next question is who should. E-Mail when designed in the image of Physical Mail, allows everything sent to you land in the “Inbox”. This is how GMail works and then tries to solve the problem of filtering emails with AI.
But when designed from first principles, it goes:
A person wants to send you a message. Do you want to let him? Yes / No. This is the “Screener” built into Hey!
/sidebar Why screening by sender, and not individual e-mail? Now, instead of screening by sender, one could think of screening every individual email before it arrives in your Inbox to be opened. The problem here is that you decide based on the external packaging (the Subject Line) to open an mail or not. Now subject lines can be misleading or click-bait, and your only option is to trust the sender. This is why Hey! has screening by sender. Not to mention, the option to screening individual emails is a lot of work, & probabilistic-ally unnecessary. /sidebar_end
You screen when a sender sends you an email for the first time, and then they can send you emails forever, or never. Now where does it go?
Part 1: The Where
After the screener, you’ve received a message. Where does this message go? This should depend on what you want to do with the message.
Once you’ve received a message, the first decision is:
To Save it? If yes, then
To Read it? If yes, then
To Act based on what you read?
Depending on the stage a message reaches, it gets collected into the 3 containers of Hey: ‘Paper Trial’, ‘The Feed’ and ‘Imbox’ respectively.
//Save only.
Stage 1: Message received. Should it be saved?
There are no archives in Hey. Archives is for stuff you don’t need, but for some reason you don’t delete. Take the case for old messages in DM Apps which don’t go into an archive, but naturally get pushed down to the bottom of an infinite stack. That’s the rightful place for messages you don’t need, but don’t wanna delete either. There are no archives in DMs and there need not be archives in E-Mail.
Archives was another element borrowed from the physical world. But the physical world doesn’t have an infinite stack, digital world does. In Hey, everything is in an infinite stack. You either choose to keep something in the system, or delete.
Messages that you don’t need to read, etc., go into the Paper Trail.
Objectively, by first principles logic → “Messages that needs to be only saved (Reach the stage 1 and stop there.”)
Let’s contrast this with how the copywriters at HEY have described it as (subjectively): “This is a receipt, an order confirmation, or something transactional.”
//Read only.
Stage 2: Message saved. Should it be read?
There are messages that you only need to read. You don’t necessarily need to interact with these emails like a forward or a reply. These are messages that go into the The Feed container of Hey!
First principles logic → Messages that needs to be saved & only read. (Message that reach stage 2 and stop there)”
The copywriters describe this set of emails as: “This is a newsletter or marketing email. It’s purely informational, I can read it whenever.”
Stage 3: Message read. Should it be acted upon?
A message may demand a reply, be forwarded to someone else, or any action in the outside world. Emails that probably demand further actions goes into “Im-box”.
First principles logic → “Messages that needs to be acted upon.”
The copywriters describe these emails as: “This is from a person, it’s something I might reply to, or it’s something I absolutely want to see when it arrives.”
To be comprehensive here, these are not just emails to act upon, but also emails that needs to be immediately seen. Till now we’ve only talked about the space dimension of emails: “where does the email go in your world”. Now, we shall talk about the time dimension of these emails: “when does the email appear to you”.
So far, we’ve talked about the actions on e-mails, now the question is “when”.
Part 2: The When
Notifications & the 3 Types of Information
On Hey, Imbox for emails that are important & need to be immediately. The moment you read “immediately seen”, you might think of notifications. But the immediacy referred to here is after you open the app. Notifications is a different type of information. Let me explain.
There are really 3 types of information:
Information pushed to you
Information you pull out
Information you create
An information that buzzes your phone is information that attempts to “push” itself into your attention. Beeping notifications is information that is pushed to you. Opening the app is choosing to pull out information. Up until now, all emails are treated as information you pull out.
One does have the option to selectively turn on notifications for certain threads or contacts.
When there’s new email in the Im-box, the user must be informed. Before jumping to the level of “pushing” information at the user, there’s two things that can be done at the level of waiting for the user to pull out information.
One way is a Red Dot on the App icon. Just to indicate there’s something new. It’s all a user needs to know to decide to open the app. Check out this tweet from Jason Fried:
But iOS only allows number badges. The other is widgets but more on that near the end.
* Fan Moment: Are you appreciating the attention to detail here? * Based on this understanding, I have crafted a framework for designing a “sincere” notification system you may check out.
When do you read, reply, forward or perform any action on/based-upon an email?
E-Mail, inherently by code, is an asynchronous form of communication. Push Notifications, or simply constant attention of the user have to be added to make it synchronous. The makers of Hey! understand that and keep all communication inside Hey or with the Hey-app asynchronous. No notifications by default! Hey doesn’t send you any notifications, until you explicitly turn on “Push Notifications” for certain E-Mail threads or contacts where you want to communicate synchronously.
There’s some deep Truth to communicating asynchronously. To reply, when the thought & the intent naturally arises. That’s why often when you reply later, you reply better. One of the towering figures on the matters of Truth, Kapil Gupta MD, conducts online Q&A with the following message:
This is Not an offering to the world Or an attempt to “help.” There are indeed a handful of Serious Humans living today. Serious human with a burning question Pledges a serious pledge I will address his Question via email. I do not know “when.” It will come when it arises.
Hey doubles down on asynchronous communication with “Reply Later” stack (more on this later). I must point out that Hey’s commitment to the default asynchronous communication is going to receive resistance from the typical behavior of “obligating the receiver to read or reply within your “assumed” expected time frame. This makes me smile.
CEO, Jason Fried (continues) : “The magic’s still there.It’s just obscured — buried under a mess of bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email software.”
The Private Note & Editable Subject Line
When you read an email, a thought arises. It may not include the intent to reply, but just a thought. The makers of Hey! have included a feature of a “Private Note” you can attach to an email.
This private note replaces the second line of the E-Mail Row on your feed. I like this, but first principles doesn’t fundamentally dictate such a use-case for the private note. It’s a nice to have, but maybe changed in future.
The idea of having something replace the second line of the E-Mail Row is a novel one. When an email arrives, the subject and the first line of the body describes the email to you. Hey gives you an option to change both of that for future purposes(like an ongoing thread, or searching for the email in future,etc.)
To solidify including this feature based on first principles, we have to dig deeper to question the nature of language itself.
Back before the first dictionary was ever printed, we didn’t have fixed spellings for words. All words with their meaning and their spelling were made up as it “felt” right. Awesome feels better than awful, even though semantically they must mean the opposite. Eventually, the spellings did start getting standardized with the printing press and the advent of dictionaries. Meaning is much more fluid and remains so.
Point is different people use different words & phrases to point at the same thing. If, say, I would have designed Hey, I would have probably come up with a different name than “Paper Trail”. This is most apparent across different cultures, but is also evident among people who grew up together. James Gleick, in his book Information Theory, explains:
“English is actually many different languages — as many, perhaps, as there are English speakers — each with different statistics (for using a word, phrase, sentence, etc.). “
I must recommend you to check out the book. It’s the book you read to look at the world from first principles for information forms the base layer of our universe. Let’s return to Hey!
Hey! allows each individual to identify an email in their own words.
First principles logic describes it as → Different people use different words for the same thing.
The Copywriters describe these emails as: “If you don’t start the thread, you’re often stuck with other people’s generic, non-descriptive email subjects. With HEY, you can rename a subject so it makes sense for you without changing things for the other person.”
I am extraordinarily impressed that the makes of Hey! thought of including this feature. It’s probably the case they didn’t arrived at it with the thought process of first principles, but purely based on intuition.
This might be true for everything I mention here. You can simply follow your genuine intuition to think of features. First principles is simply a great way of understanding, justifying and materializing those ideas. Ideas based on personal observations when expressed in first principles allow for the same to be found in everyone’s subjective experiences. The feature has a better chance to be universally applicable to people.
“Reply Later” & “Set Aside” stack.
Reply Later When you read an email, a thought arises. It may include the intent of replying to it, but not immediately. In which case, you must add it to the reply stack. Batching similar tasks is Productivity 101. Hey has a Focus & Reply mode for just that. The makers of Hey would know this from their years of designing the project management tool Basecamp.
Set Aside (actually is, Read Later) It is described by the copywriters as: “Sometimes you get emails you need to reference later — travel info, handy links, numbers you need, etc. With HEY, you can ‘Set Aside’ any email in a neat little pile for easy access whenever you need it. At hand, but out of your face.”
These are simply emails that needs to be read in a near future by you, or by an airport agent, or a bar-code scanner. Set Aside is just the “read later” stack. If you think from first principles, there are two primary actions you perform in an email app: Read & Reply, each get a stack.
Let’s quickly knock out other features
Now that you’re thinking in first principles, we can quickly build other nifty features of the app.
→ Speakeasy Code: There’s a screener in Hey to let someone’s message in. But what if you’ve already screened the person in the physical world. When you ask someone to mail you, you can give them the speak-easy code (a code-word) which when included in the subject line by-passes the screener.
→ Opt-ing out of Email Threads: This is simply the same question as Screen-er: “Do you want to recieve emails (of a thread)?”
→ Merging Threads: One fundamental argument is people like to organize differently. One may choose to maintain multiple threads, the other may choose a single thread. Organization is a subjective task. Another is simply fixing a supposed error from someone on the other side when they start multiple threads for the same conversation. The makers of Hey have only talked about the later.
→ Clipper & File Manager: So far, we’ve been surfacing relevant information to the user at the E-Mail level. But what about information within the emails itself? The Clipper allows the user to surface bits of information from a mail. HEY surfaces the attachments for you in an in-built File manager.
→ One Sender, One Row in your Imbox: This is not how Hey describes this feature, but this is essentially what’s happening. Someone is asking for your attention via email, and it arrives in your purview (feed). The fact that that person sends you multiple emails, doesn’t mean he should be allotted more rows, and hence, a bigger portion of your purview. He should get one slot to pitch for your attention like everybody else.
Human Intelligence > AI
Communicating with humans is fundamentally a creative task. There’s no technology available today that can inherently mimic human creativity. Putting an AI at the helm to organize your emails is an inherently poor solution. Hey wants to put a human in charge. As described by the makers:
“You’re better at deciding where things go, what your intentions are, and how you want things set up. The machines have a lot of learning to do before they’ll be able to second-guess.”
Some possible improvements
→ An E-Mail should exist simultaneously in both the stack and it’s original container: When you add an email to one of the stacks, it’s CUT-&-PASTEed to the stack, and when you’re done they land into the Imbox. If I say, ‘set aside’ a few newsletters to read later, it’ll be removed from “The Feed” and when marked ‘Done’ put into the “Imbox”. This choice as per my analysis here has no logical roots.
→ Sticky Notes is redundant to Private Notes: Private Notes are notes that replaces the second line of the E-Mail Row. Sticky Notes attach into a third line to the E-Mail Row. They describe it as something you add to your Imbox. But Private Notes can play the part. It kinda feels redundant, without a clear logical division on what to use when.
→ Indicator for “The Feed” : In the era of substack and newsletters exploding, “Hey” succeeding to collect them all in an unified feed for every user is a feat all by itself. It allows Hey to implement a “Feed” mode with expanded emails to create a social-media-esque feed. The problem is there’s no way to know if a new email has arrived in it until I open it.
→ Say Yes toWidgets: The above problem gets most ideally solved with widgets. About the only thing I am missing upon switching from G-Mail is a widget for the (Big 3) containers. Widget is still at the level of information you pull out. A widget allows at-a-glance info. and saves you a few taps along the way. The email widgets from G-Mail display the emails as you scroll to see if there’s anything worth checking out. But with Hey, if & when a new email requires your attention is signaled by virtue of which of the Big 3 Containers it arrives in. Hence, the ideal widget will simply be a dashboard showing the “system” status of your Hey, arranged by priority established above.
Here’s a rough design I put together:
The numbers indicate New E-Mails “unattended to”. This can be improved a lot. Though, this is a nice at-a-glance of what Hey is all about.
Final Word
One must not think that this is how they came up with all these ideas. In fact, reading the manifesto and other material by the makers of Hey, you can clearly see the intuition that guided their product thinking. Intuition is always a great place to begin as it attempts to imbibe the philosophy one lives by.
When a variety of people bring their intuition to the table cultivated within their own subjective experiences, the job at hand is to find the objective Truth that is true in all of their contexts. This is what you build into a product, if you want it to be compatible with varied lives of people. This is where first principles thinking comes in.
Intuition alone can feel like an opinion. Casey Newton from The Verge called Hey “a wildly opinionated email client.” I vehemently disagree. The ideas in Hey are not one-team’s-opinion, but a falsifiable argument where-in you structure the ideas on an objective logic, basing on a premises of clear assumptions. It’s similar to the way they do physics. ‘Hey’, or at-least it’s ideas, is here to stay until the very physics of email communication changes.
CEO, Jason Fried (finishes)
“Email deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today.
With HEY, we’ve done just that. It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be.
HEY is our love letter to email, and we’re sending it to you on the Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.” (Link Here)
PS. I’ve not talked about the Privacy choices made by HEY. It’s a broader topic which I want to separately study and write about. Please think about helping me out with the same.
Notifications should be (re-)designed in the template of time-keeping devices.
The notification area is the most lucrative spot on your smartphone. It is the first thing you see when you reach out for your phone and is always accessible at the top. It is the only spot where information announces itself upon arriving.
In context to all conversations about a healthy relationship with our smartphones, the notification shade is both an asset and a liability. It’s where the most timely information must be delivered to you, and it is where companies bait you into getting sucked in their apps. The latter is dominating the notification shade leading to an exploitative realtionship with our phones. This is why this essay needs to exist.
As designer, Jesse Weaver, puts it:
Over time, we’ve increasingly tied the value of technology to the revenue it can generate as opposed to the benefit it can deliver to the humans who use it.
The bare essentials of a Notification:
Notifications is time-sensitive. The notification system was concieved for information that needs to be delivered at a particular time. It’s the timeli-ness that ascribes value to a notification.
Notifications is at the top of your phone(Highest Accessibility). Whenever I pick up my phone, I must decide to not act on whatever is in my notifications, before I get to whatever I want to. It carries information that needs to be made most easily accessible.
Thesis:
Widgets, Alarms (& Calls), Reminders and Stop-Watch (& Timers) [W.A.R.S.] are four types of information that is inherently tied to time, and are designed in all devices to be easily accessible. I propose that a notification system should be (re-)designed in the template of time-keeping devices.
A filter based on these to identify information that must be delivered via different kinds of notifications is what I call the W.A.R.S. filter. I believe this can help to precisely design a notification system that is clear in it’s information choice, has an effective UI and is strictly useful.
Each of [W.A.R.S.] should be studied in the ways these
attract the attention of the user
when it demands the user to act
who/what generates this information.
I will explain these 3 attributes for each type, and show it’s implementation taking common examples such as emails, chat, food-delivery, cab-services, etc.
The Call/Alarm type
→ Information pushed at you with a ring. → It doesn’t turn-off until attended to. → It is initiated by others or your past self.
This information type requires immediate attention & quickest accessibility.
This way is only ever used for calls and alarms, but looking at the fundamental idea, it could be used for more. Consider the “Your uber has arrived” notification. This is a notification that requires your immediate action and must be delivered to you with a ring. Instead, the burden is left on the driver to call.
Note: While designing, vibrations and ring volume can be adjusted according to whether the user is using his phone or not.
The Reminder type
→ Information pushed at you with a beep. → It needs to be acted upon within a time-interval. → It is initiated by your past self.
This information type require tentative attention & easy accessibility.
Instead of a ring you’ve to act on, it is delivered with a beep that pokes your ears. A meeting reminder delivered half hour before the scheduled time requires you to act whenever in that half hour. You set reminders for something that needs to be taken care of in an morning. Daily reminders are used when you want to cultivate daily habits, exercised in the time segment following the reminder.
The phone should beep when the user needs to act. The phone should not beep when a Dropbox upload is complete, it should beep when it fails. It should not beep when a restaurant accepts your order, or your delivery guy is en-route, it should beep when none of those happen in the expected time. It should, perhaps, ring if it’s urgent.
The beep is the most abused form of notifying. Your phone should obviously be not beeping with news, offers, etc. My most radical take is it should not beep for chat notifications as well.
Beeping chat notifications is anti-thetical to what chat is supposed to be: a mode of asynchronous communication. Most messages don’t warrant your close-to-immediate attention.
An ‘ongoing’ (synchronous) conversation should be dealt with the stop-watch filter (more on this later), and asynchronous conversation shall be dealt with the widget filter.
The Widget type
→ Information that user pull out, and perpetually appears in the user’s peripheral vision. → user may/may not act upon the information but requires update on, → It is initiated at a singular moment and is generated event-based
This information type require on-demand attention & glanceable accessibility.
I have a widget for chat, SMS and E-Mail on my home-screen. I glance for new messages when I can & want to, instead of being bombarded by beeps.
iPhone has a widget section in the notification shade. Most notifications should land up in that section, for most of it doesn’t need to be pushed at you, but information you pull out at will. Widgets should move spatially (higher or lower) depending on any new activity (event-based).* This can be coupled with a habit-forming “reminder” at frequent intervals. I would like a reminder to check all my e-mails at lunch, and another at the end of the day.
Persistant Notifications are basically widgets sitting in your notification shade.
Widgets needs to be deployed by the user, but a designer can choose to deploy these widgets as persistent notifications. It must only be picked as the solution when user has asked for updates. Be wary of overloading the user with any extra information.
Persistent notifications can be deployed temporarily for scenarios like “food delivered.” In which case, it is more like stopwatches and timers : widgets with a time-interval.
*Android achieves something close to this in a single notification shade.
The Stopwatch/Timer type
→ Information pushed at you with a ring and/or appears as a widget, → appears for a time period (usually for an ongoing action), → initiated by the user and terminated by the end of an activity (a stopwatch) or at a set time (a timer).
This information type require sustained attention in something & accessible controls.
The StopWatch filter includes playing multimedia and should include ongoing conversation. You hit play for what you wish to indulge in. I might as well hit play instead of the send button for an ongoing chat (synchronous) conversation I want to opt-in. The phone beeps for every message appearing during this event, and messages appear “at the top” in a widget. The same thing works best for a live sports game.
For scenarios like waiting for a “safely reached home” update from a friend, the timer filter works best. If I don’t receive an update in the elapsed time, the timer should go off alerting me to check up on the person. ‘Finding an Uber’ and ‘Your uber is arriving’ should be a Timer-like widget. They should appear as a widget showing the progress. And when either of these events don’t happen in an elapsed time, the user must be alerted demanding for an action. Notifying the users when these processes start is absurd (which is how it is done today).
In summary
Designers can create widgets for information updates that needs to be glanced at occasionally by the user’s choice. It can be deployed as a temporary persistent notification or you may simply send a silent notification to check the app (only) when there’s new info for the user. Ideally, a beeping notification is something for the user to act on in a time-interval. Sound & vibrations should be employed only when it requires timely action. Extended activities on the app shall be handled like timers, and stop-watch.
One may describe aninformation as to be pushed at or pulled out, if & when the user is required to act, and who generates this information. Based on this, you can combine elements from either of these types to design how the information is delivered. If it doesn’t fit the time-liness and the accessibility criteria of any of these types, the information must not be delivered in the notification shade. This is the W.A.R.S. filter for non-intrusive, useful and aptly-delivered notifications.
Final Word
For Designers: Design such a notification system with meaningful controls for the user. It will help your users develop a healthy, long-term relationship with your apps. Relative to what you’ve today, the notifications/inbox within your app and the widgets will rise in importance. Roughly speaking, notifications tab will go back to being everything that requires user’s immediate attention within an app. You may reach out to me if you need any help with that.
For Users: Both android and iOS give significant control over notifications. Users can use the W.A.R.S. filter to customize and have a healthy relationship with their phones. You may reach out to me to know how exactly I customized mine.
Let’s create thoughtful designs that invite the user to immerse, not distract the user into feeding on your bait.
I seldom see you. But I often talk to you in my thoughts.
Your spirit stimulates just enough patience in me to not be angry, to not imprison that person within my fears, to not recede the all-encompassing space to a bubble. The bubble stretches to the limits of my curiosity and empathy, and you inspire me to stretch it out. To accommodate you and parts of me I left out.
Every interaction with you interacts with a part of me and the whole of me. But I seldom see you. I always look forward to meeting you. The future serving a hope, morphing into a bed of comfort to let myself talk to you in my thoughts.
“All I ask” was the pre-text to re-calibrating every desire. When the desires interacted with you, you said “No Expectations”. Soon, “No Expectations” decayed every seed of desire. My expectations must never weigh you down, imprison you into the focus of my narrowed consciousness.
Perceive. Let my consciousness expand infinitely within the infinitesimal small time of us. Create enough space to accommodate all of you in the bubble. My world.
My story is your story. Your story is mine. I need you take care of my story. Trust me to take care of yours.
Surrender. Let the story have it’s own life, have it’s purpose and meaning, as we embraced into the beauty of the us-ness of us.
But when I finally met you, shared these thoughts with you, my truth blinded you…
You are beautiful, I said. My words ricochet within you in disbelief.
And ignites my curiosity to ask: “Why are you beautiful? Why did we evolve to find the things that we find to be beautiful?” Will we want to explore the universe if it wasn’t so obviously beautiful? To only realize, what I think I’ve always known.
Wonder. Beauty takes shape in the focal point of our curiosity.
You are a focal point to my curiosity and my empathy.
The universe moves us. When you move me, I choose to act. About some of it you know, a lot of it you don’t. None of it anyone can ever grasp. What if you never know, what if we never interact, what if your presence is never there. Can you still move me to act, and would I still choose to act?
Life reveals itself in our actions. The purpose of life is to experience life. Life is a single-player game but is it inherently alone?
If not…
Is it you that makes life worth living? It’s a dangerous thought that can tether two lives with a fickle thread. It’s a pull that throws me off course. The pull bends the poignant resonance. I cannot flow in the power that flows from the epicentre. An interference in perfection.
“No expectations”, you said.
Empathize. I find you, within me. And you move me. And I choose to act. And my curiosity converges, my empathy encompasses more space. As you move me, you leave your footprints. Imprinting a path, to the epicentre of me.
You move me to act. And I do. I always do. I find your truth within me. I talk to you, in my thoughts. I must dive within myself, and carry on with the task. But the tether of expectations throws me off balance in my dive inwards.
A tangible weight seems to weigh me down. My heart takes over the bottomless time. And pumps my faculties into accommodating you. And I hold you in an embrace, hoping you know, hoping our contact may stop the implosion within me.
Let you go. The thread must be cut, and I must stumble into reality. And, perhaps, in this new reality… I will always find you within me.
You for me, I for you. I for I, you for you.
Explode the space to encompass all of us. …All because of a selfless, throbbing and expansive love.
I & Love & You.
Perhaps, there was something self-less about it after all.
It sounds like a fun, useful idea to have all your smartphone notifications delivered right to your Watch, until it isn’t. The core pitch here was convenience and less usage of your smartphone. But on the flip-side, it just makes you more aware of what’s happening on your smartphone. And it cancels out convenience by drawing your attention to notifications that don’t need you immediately or to those you can’t deal with on a smartwatch.
What warrants the urgency & the glanceability of Smartwatch Notifications?
Both iOS and Android allow for a lot of granular controls over your Notifications. I customize it opportunistically: turn off or de-prioritize it as they arrive. Now with Notifications there are 3 kinds:
Those that needs to be pushed at you with a sound or a vibration,
Those you choose to pull out as it waits for you to check your phone,
Those you don’t need in the first place and must be turned-off.
and there’s a fourth type: Notifications as Widgets. (but more on this later).
Of the three, the first kind is what needs to appear on your Smartwatch. Now as we become increasingly more aware of our smartphone usage, fewer notifications make the cut. Having your phone on silent by default is becoming increasingly normal as people put a higher value on their attention.
Chat notifications are antithetical to what chat is supposed to be: a mode of asynchronous communication. You can always reply later, and better with chats. Though sometimes, we do chat synchronously and notifications is designed for that. I instead like HomeScreen widgets, a place where new messages arrive, waiting for me to pull out and indulge the same way I do with e-mails.
Anything urgent can and shall be communicated through calls. And calls is what you should definitely screen on your watch. This directs to the core point: a smartwatch more seriously asks the question, “What immediately requires your attention?” I would instantly put calls, alarms, timers and reminders in the list. All of which are innately time-based.
Where the problem gets trickier are situations where notifications are not directly attached to time, but the intention behind is. This is where I wish for a SmartWatch to help but it often doesn’t. Take this for example:
In daily life, there are situations where you’re waiting for a status update via text. Like if a friend made it home or if a package arrived. Another is group chat notifications while managing an event, being on a trip, being in amusement parks, etc. I wonder if I would ever get into a habit of ephemerally turning on notifications for that scenario. Perhaps, this is something we can design for. We don’t know if that will be adopted as a convention and if it will be incisively used.
A majority of the notifications delivered by Apps these days needs to be completely turned off. This includes offers, the “we haven’t seen you in a while” kind, “this is trending” etc.
Some are simple status updates like “your order is in transit”. This is usually pulled out, and glanced at.
Now, I am not about to put much value on “but I can pull out notifications on my wrist instead of reaching for my phone.” I briefly entertained this idea for checking up on Uber. Though, the only notification that was worth it was “your Uber has arrived” and that value soon diminished for I would usually be on my phone anyways. In fact, we seldom forget our phones. They are always nearby, and Smartwatch is not a very good substitute by being nearer. It’s a non-solution to a non-problem.
A device must substitute for a use-case, instead of piling on.
This brings us to the fourth kind: “Notifications as Widgets”. This includes turn-by-turn navigation, music player, live scores, etc. It is these scenarios where smartwatches can usefully substitute a smartphone. The glance-ability & accessibility of smartwatches plays the key role here.
As of now, smartwatches still stand on a weak foundation of convenience with few discernible user flows to monopolize. All of this is to say, in a world where we’re already carrying a computer with us all along:
We’re better off without notifications synced to our watches.
abhishek1point0 