Most products should not be a chat. And most products don't benefit from having an anthropomorphised AI concept.
It's really it's a trap to fall into when you're building a startup and going zero to one to look at a competitor and then make minor tweaks to it. It just never works. [...] When the product is going to be the way in which your business is differentiated, you kind of have to just ignore your competitors, I think.
I think prompting is the worst software experience ever. I mean, if you've ever tried to generate images, it's awful as an experience. But the payoff is amazing, right? So people do it. But we're it's just that we're in a small blip of software experience where this is even going to be a thing. I just there's no way it survives.
I kind of know how hard it is to get people to do anything. I think the most successful UI design has sort of a gravitational pull. You look at it, you squint, you kind of hit the brightest thing on the screen. Hopefully that aligns with what the product's supposed to do. I think that's the best you can do for consumer design. You've got like 300 milliseconds of someone's attention before they decide that they don't get it or that it sucks or whatever, especially a free product.
The dream interface system that I've always wanted as a designer is to be able to show everyone the right interface for them, like if you're a new user you get easy mode and then when you're a power user you get power user mode. [...] Even with our product, we have some generative interface moments where, as the designer, all I defined was like “dear AI, you have the choice between text input, radio button, and you pick the right interface”. We’re giving it the choice to present the right interface. I can totally imagine that is just like the beginning of a reality where we let the interface unravel itself as people use it.
When you boot up TikTok for the first time, it's pretty easy to figure out what it is. You don't learn how to make a TikTok by jumping right into the creation flow. You learn how to make TikTok by watching 20 TikToks. Maybe when you get in there, there's a little bit of help. I’m sure there's like some little pop-up maybe, but I don't think any of that actually works. Because when you watch people use software, they just click on stuff really fast. Nobody's reading anything. They're just trying stuff, which I think is totally fine. And so for us, if you go to our homepage when you're logged out or making a new account, there's just a couple of things you could click on. You can type in and it feels familiar, hopefully. [...] And then hopefully you get it, because there's a lot of things we could have put on the homepage that we didn't. It's all in the end, I think, distracting. My goal is just to get you to try it. And I'm gonna just keep thinking of ways to do that.