This past week we hit 24,000 subscribers and so wanted to find a powerful way to say thank you, not just the pro forma thank you that other newsletters do.
With this in mind I’m opening up 4 slots in my calendar at absolutely no cost and would love to help anyone working at a B2B software company on how to improve their GTM or pricing.
Just book using this link and provide your website URL and some of your priorities (e.g. reducing churn, increasing NRR) so I can come prepared with strong recommendations.
Who are Superhuman?
Superhuman was founded in 2014 by Rahul Vohra, with a mission to redefine how people use email. Fuelled by Vohra's own frustrations with the inefficiencies of traditional email clients, Superhuman was conceived as a premium service designed to help users hit inbox zero, with powerful features engineered to streamline workflows.
Vohra's background in product design and his regular critiques of gamification has led them to cult status in Silicon Valley, emphasising speed, powerful keyboard shortcuts and a clear focus on game design over simple gamification mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards.
Does Gamification Actually Work?
A decade ago, "gamification" was a hot trend in business and tech. By taking the motivational power & ‘fun’ of games and applying it to work, companies hoped to boost engagement and productivity. However, the gamification craze largely fizzled out as implementations often failed to deliver on those lofty promises.
“Our team at the time was hooked on a game called Gardenscapes… We saw several parallels: A three-minute Duolingo lesson felt similar to a Gardenscapes match-3 level, and … both used progress bars to provide visual feedback on how close the user was to completing the session. Gardenscapes, however, paired its progress bar with a moves counter… The moves counter … added a sense of scarcity and urgency to the gameplay. We decided to incorporate the counter mechanic into our product. We gave our users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly…
Depressingly, the result of all that effort was completely neutral. No change to our retention. No increase in DAU.
In hindsight, … the Duolingo moves counter was simply a boring, tacked-on nuisance. It was the wrong gamification mechanic to adopt into Duolingo.” Jorge Mazal, Former CPO Duolingo
To understand why, we need to revisit a Stanford psychology study that revealed key insights about human motivation.
In the 1970s, researchers recruited 50 children aged 3-4, all of whom had previously shown an interest in drawing. The kids were split into two groups - one group was told they would receive a reward for drawing, while the other group received no such promise. After being given 6 minutes to draw in separate rooms, the children's behavior was observed over the following days to see how much they continued to draw on their own.
The results were counterintuitive: kids who had been offered no reward spent 17% of their subsequent time drawing, but those who had been rewarded only spent 8% of their time on the activity. In other words, the promise of a reward had cut their motivation in half.
The researchers concluded it came down to the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation drives us to do things because we find them inherently enjoyable. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, propels us to act in order to attain some external reward. Introducing extrinsic rewards, it turned out, could undermine intrinsic motivation for an enjoyable activity like drawing.
Superhuman pursue a slightly different approach, instead choosing to incorporate features & principles of game design over gamification.
What is Game Design?
There are 4 core principles for making games that are truly engaging:
Clear and Rewarding Goals: The best games provide (1) concrete, (2) achievable objectives that (3) feel rewarding when completed. Goals need to be specific enough to make progress tangible, yet challenging enough to feel like an accomplishment.
“We decided to bet on leaderboards. Duolingo already had a leaderboard for users to compete with their friends and family, but it wasn’t particularly effective… I had hypothesized… that the closeness of the competitor’s engagement would be more important than the closeness of personal relationships, (thus opting to introduce a league based system).
Leagues provided users with a greater sense of progress and reward, an integral element in game design. They also increased engagement over time, since engaged users move up to more competitive leagues week after week. We felt this feature would translate well… because it tapped directly into… competitiveness and progression.
The leaderboards feature had a huge… impact on our metrics. Overall learning time increased by 17%, and the number of highly engaged learners tripled.” Jorge Mazal, Duolingo CPO
Leveraging Emotions: The ability to provoke powerful emotional responses is what separates great games from mediocre ones. Understanding frameworks like Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions allows designers to craft experiences that make users feel excitement, curiosity, accomplishment and more. Celebrating small wins, like a user's first trade or purchase, can spark positive reinforcement that compels them to keep going.
Intuitive & Powerful Controls: Typically business software requires far less robust and delightful controls than games. These controls make the user feel powerful and create a higher skill ceiling that if a user sticks to the program can elevate their powers. A great example? See what an expert investment banker can do with Microsoft Excel.
While easing newcomers in with guided onboarding experiences, great games respect veteran skill by offering a high skill ceiling. This arc of increasing mastery keeps engagement high for all players over time.
Enable Users to Reach Flow State: The holy grail of game design is inducing the psychological state of "flow" - intense, focused immersion. To do this requires users to:
Always know what to do next
Know how to do it: Template galleries are a great way at helping new users who lack the confidence or understanding. Last week we covered Sprig, a tool aimed at making anyone a user researcher. To best enable this Sprig launched their Template Gallery, eliminating the friction associated with figuring out the right questions to ask.
Have freedom from distractions: Essentially the principle of Hick’s Law (the lesser the choices, the lesser the cognitive load) Robinhood does a great job at this with a minimalist design. By reducing the number of elements visible on any one screen, it means the elements visible carry far more weight, and reduces the information a user has to sort through before they can make a decision.
Breaking Down Superhuman’s Game Design
Now that we’ve learnt the basic principles of game design let’s see how they’re applied in Superhuman’s UI.
Clear & Rewarding Goals: Superhuman have an incredibly clear mission statement, get to inbox zero and work to make the reward joyful with screens featuring beautiful imagery (this also goes to developing a sense of emotion within their product). This has the explicit purpose of making you want to come back tomorrow to feel that sense of pride, joy & sheer emotion again.
“(If you achieve inbox zero we’ll celebrate with you) showing you stunning & gorgeous imagery; serene and peaceful, ones that create a sense of longing, images that amaze & create a sense of awe” Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman
Powerful Controls: As we discussed earlier great games are approachable for new players but have a high skill ceiling. Superhuman is relentlessly focused on this:
They aim to make every interaction sub-100ms making controls feel sharp and snappy,
provide you with powerful keyboard shortcuts making you feel like an Excel wizard and,
allow you to do advanced controls through their Command Bar by just typing rather than trying to navigate dozens of little icons and drop down menus to find the right button.
Their time autocompleter perfectly exemplifies this - it’s intuitive but surprisingly powerful and sprinkles in little moments of joy when you least expect it, letting you indulge in playful exploration, something exceedingly rare in a piece of B2B software.
Type in 10 10 10 10 and it will figure out the right date to remind you of an email or simply ask it to schedule a reply for 10am in Tokyo and it will do all the work for you vs you trying to do the manual conversions yourself.
Enabling Flow State - Removing Distractions: Superhuman’s UI is designed very carefully to free you of any distractions. Dive into the product and you’ll only ever see one conversation at a time, no sidebar showing you unread emails, unsent drafts and countless other distractions.
All you’ll see is the email you need to reply to and some contact info of the sender to provide greater context. Once you’ve finished instead of throwing you back into the inbox to scan 40+ unread emails and decide which is the highest priority Superhuman will automatically give you another one enabling you to stay in flow state and reducing the amount of mental energy you need to exert on needless decisions.
Enabling Flow State - Users Must Easily Understand All Controls: The final way Superhuman enables users to enter flow state is through their Command Bar. Whilst every action on Superhuman has been mapped to a shortcut it’s unrealistic to expect a new user to be able to remember them all.
To best enable enable new users to get the full powers of keyboard shortcuts users would be prompted to use the Command Bar to search for their desired action and would then see the shortcut to the right for next time.
That’s it for today folks, hope you enjoyed! If you’d like to be one of the 3 free consultation calls just book using this link and provide your website URL and some of your business’ goals.
Super interesting analysis, thanks!