How To Apply Game Design to Business Software / Rahul Vohra, Superhuman (Design Driven NYC)

My job here is simple. Introduce an amazingly talented founder who's building an incredible product that has taken the ecosystem by storm. And so I will get out of your way as quickly as possible. But I'm honored to introduce Rahul Vora, who's the founder and CEO of Superhuman, which is the fastest email experience in the world. Users can get through their inbox twice as fast and many see Inbox zero for the first time in years. Hopefully that's a good pitch. But previously Rahul had started Rapportive, which is a Gmail plugin that scaled to millions of users and was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn. And today he's going to share a story of how game design theory helped shape the startups that he's founded over the past couple of years. So, with our gratitude, thank you. And I will turn the stage over to you and show is yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Of course, this wouldn't be a zoom meeting unless I asked. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

Excellent. Okay, with that, I'm going to share my screen. You should be able to see my screen. Now, can you see the Superhuman logo?

We see the Superhuman logo.

Okay, fantastic. Well, let's get this show on the road. So, as Dan said, I'm the founder and CEO of Superhuman, where we're building the fastest email experience in the world. Our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before, reply to their important emails sooner, and see Inbox zero for the first time in years. Now, Superhuman is productivity software, but I'm really a gamer at heart and I'm here to share just how effective it can be to apply game design to business software. You see, today our business software feels like work. We have to check our email, submit expense reports, enter data in our CRM. But what if we could make software less like work and more like play? Well, with game design? We can, and I will shortly share what game design is, but we. But first, let me say what it isn't. Game design is not gamification. It isn't simply taking your product and adding points, levels, trophies or badges. And this is important because 10 years ago, gamification was a big deal, but it didn't work. And to understand why, we have to understand human motivation. In the 1970s, researchers from Stanford recruited children aged 3 to 4 years old. Now, all these kids were generally interested in drawing. Some kids were told they would get a reward, a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon. Some kids were not told about any rewards. So they didn't even Expect one or know of one. And each child was invited into a separate room to draw for six minutes. And then afterwards, they would either get the reward or not. And over the next few days, the children were observed to see how much they would continue to draw by themselves. Let's see what happened. The children with no reward spent 17% of their time drawing. But the children who expected a reward, well, they only spent 8% of their time drawing. The reward had halved their motivation. So what's happening here? Well, researchers differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, we do things because they are inherently interesting and satisfying. With extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards and achieve external goals. And that's the problem with rewards, they massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's also why gamification does not work. When gamification does seem to work, it is because the underlying experience was already a game. So we come back to the question, how do we design a game? And this is a question I have been obsessed with for my entire life. As a kid, I learned how to code just so I could make games. Before I was a founder, I worked as a game designer. And as a founder, I've gone deep into the principles of game design. And as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, we need to draw upon the art and the science of things like psychology, mathematics, storytelling and interaction design. That said, here are five factors to consider. And for each factor, I'll show you how we use it at Superhuman and, and more importantly, how you can use it on your own products. So first up, goals. Now, games need goals. In fact, I would go so far as to say that goals are a defining feature of games. But we can't just have any goals. We need good goals. And for a game, good goals are concrete, achievable and rewarding. Let's take a look. So in Superhuman, we set a very concrete goal gets to Inbox zero. Good goals must also be achievable. This is one of of the main reasons why we onboard our users for each new user. For those that don't know, we do a live concierge onboarding. This is a 30 minute one to one video call with one of our wonderful onboarding specialists. In these calls, we teach faster workflows to get to Inbox zero. We teach powerful shortcuts so you never have to touch the mouse. And if you're very far away, we wipe the slate clean so that you're within a stone's throw of Inbox Zero, thus making the goal more achievable. And finally, the goal should be rewarding. When you hit Inbox Zero, you feel triumph over your email, a previously rare and incredibly rewarding feeling. Now, think about most business software. Most business software does not have clear goals. And if there are goals, they are often unachievable and unrewarding. This is our first principle of game design. Create goals that are concrete, achievable and rewarding. Now, the best games create strong emotions. Because strong emotions are the very foundation of our memory, we must therefore be able to analyze emotion. And to do that, we need a strong vocabulary. There are many models of human emotions. Some of us may be familiar with this one. The most famous is Plutchick's wheel. Opposite emotions are across from each other. For example, joy is the opposite of grief. And you can blend adjacent emotions to create more complex feelings. For example, when you combine joy and anticipation, you get optimism. When you combine joy and trust, you get love. But as game designers, we actually need a much richer vocabulary than academia so far provides. The emotions we are aiming for are much, much more nuanced. This is the most useful model that I have found. This is by the Junto Institute for Entrepreneurial Learning. It contains the subtleties that we, as game designers, need to think about. At Superhuman, we care deeply about joy. We design for enthusiasm and excitement. Our users come to us super excited. We design for optimism and hopefulness. Our users want Superhuman to improve their lives. We design for pride and triumph. For when you hit Inbox zero, especially if it's the first time in years, you rightly feel like you accomplished something special. And when you do hit Inbox zero, we show you stunning and gorgeous imagery. We do this to widen our emotional repertoire beyond joy into love and surprise. And we pick images that are peaceful and tranquil that creates a sense of longing and sentimentality that even amaze and inspire a sense of awe. Now, you can also use the wheel to find emotions to remove. Users often come to us with very negative feelings about their email. Let's take a look. They can feel helpless, anxious, annoyed, guilty, even powerless. And together, these bring us to our second principle of game design. Design for nuanced emotions. Precisely which emotions do you want? Which do you want to avoid? You can use the wheel as your guide. Controls can be one of the main reason why a game succeeds. Remember the Wiimote? The Wii sold more than 100 million units, and every controller since has incorporated motion. But games require much more robust controls than we make for business software. Imagine you're playing a game like Street Fighter. It would be incredibly frustrating if some inputs were dropped and your character flopped around and then died. And yet that is how business software works today. Let's say I want to email my co founder comrade in Gmail. The shortcut to compose an email is C. So I type C and then comrade. If I do this fast in Gmail, I end up with two drafts and I'm sending an email to Rad. In Superhuman, we had to build our own keyboard handler to ensure that we never lose keystrokes. And in case you think I'm picking on Gmail, this kind of error is status quo for business software. Give it a go, take your favorite business tool, drive it really hard, and you'll start seeing these bugs and these errors all over the place. So this brings us to principle number three. Create rapid and robust controls. Now, one of my favorites toys. Are toys the same as games? They do seem different. You see, we play with toys, but we play games. And the language is important. A ball is a toy, but football is a game. And as it turns out, the best games are built with toys. Why? Because then they are fun on multiple levels. The toy and the game itself. Let's take a look at an example. In Superhuman, a favorite toy is the time autocompleter, which you use to snooze emails. You can type whatever you want, it can be complete gibberish, and it does its best to understand you. For example, 2D becomes 2 days, 3H becomes 3 hours. 1MO becomes 1 month. The time autocompleted is fun because it indulges playful exploration. What can it do? Where does it break? How does it work? It's not long in onboardings before people start doing things like this. I wonder what happens if I keep on typing 10. Well, it turns out that's October 10th at 10:10pm what happens if I put the PM in the middle? Well, it turns out that still works well. How about a sequence of twos? Well, that's February 2nd at 2pm and then you start trying more complex inputs. For example, how about in a fortnight and a day? And it's not long before you find pleasant surprises. For example, time zone math happens without you ever having to think about it. 8am in Tokyo is 8pm Eastern. And then most people are delighted to find out that if you really want you, you can snooze emails until never. Now this brings us to our fourth principle of game design, which is to make fun toys and combine them into games. Consider the features of your own products? Do they indulge playful exploration? Are they fun even without a goal? And do they create moments of pleasant surprise? If so, congratulations, because you have a toy and you're on the way to building a great game. Now, the last and the most complex one, arguably the most important. The previous four factors are critical to game design, but perhaps the least understood is flow. And this is so important that I will both define it as well as describe how to create it. Fortunately, this has been intensely researched in academia. Flow is the intense and focused concentration on the present. It is so absorbing that we don't think about the future or worry about the past. It is so demanding that we don't care what others think about us. It is so easy that we always know what to do next. It is so powerful that it literally alters our subjective experience of time. Time can either flash by in an instant or stretch out forever. And it is so rewarding that the activity becomes intrinsically motivating, which, as we know from before, is the most powerful and effective form of motivation. We've all experienced this in the past, but how do we create it? How do we design for it? Well, it turns out that there are five key conditions. Number one, we must always know what to do next. Number two, we must always know how to do. Number three, we must be free from distractions. Number four, we must get clear and immediate feedback. And number five, this is the hardest of all. We must feel a balance between challenge and skill. And this relationship between challenge and skill can be summarized with this graph known as the Experience Fluctuation Model. If the activity is too hard, we feel anxious. If the activity is too easy, however, we feel relaxed or bored. So this is all very theoretical. Let's take a look at some examples. How do we create flow in Superhuman? Number one, knowing what to do next. You can make product decisions that make this dramatically easier for your users. Once again, look at Gmail. Let's see what happens when I archive this email. I end up back on the inbox. I now have to decide what to do next. And I have to do this every single time. This destroys flow in Superhuman. Let's see what happens when we archive the same email. I immediately land on the next one. I don't have to take any decisions at all. This simple change promotes flow. Number two, Knowing how to do it early on, we saw that users would forget our keyboard shortcuts. They knew what they wanted to do, but they didn't know how to do it. We built Superhuman Command. Just hit command K and Type in what you want to do. Not only will it do it for you, it will teach you the shortcut for next time. Number three, freedom from distractions. Super important and superhuman. If you look at the screenshot, you'll notice that you can't see the inbox at the same time as a conversation. And so very deliberately, you can't see what's next or indeed any new email that arrives. And for any product, you can design your interface like this to reduce distraction and so to create flow into the home stretch. Here, clear and immediate feedback. When you archive a conversation, we immediately show you the next one. And from an engineering perspective, we've invested hugely in doing so. In doing so as immediately as possible, we've now got to the point, or when we started out, rather, we were able to do this in 100 milliseconds or less. And we now have got to the point. With a new renderer, it's about three times as fast. And we can do this in 32 milliseconds or less. This isn't speed for the sake of speed. This is speed for the sake of flow. And this is the most bizarre one. This is high perceived challenge and high perceived skill. So let's get back to that experience fluctuation model. We're going to dive deep into it. For most people, Gmail is this left slice. Some people feel bored or apathetic. Their skill level is low to medium, but their email doesn't really matter. Some people feel worried, though. Their skill level is low to medium, but the email does matter. Many people feel anxiety. Their skill level is low to medium, but their email is super important and they are failing at it. This is actually how most users come to us now. Superhuman massively increases the skill level for almost everybody. But what if your email wasn't that challenging or you were already skilled in the first place? If we didn't do anything else, you still would not be in flow. Well, then, and this is the crazy part, we deliberately increase the challenge level. We do so, and I'm going to tie this all the way back to the beginning by providing a challenging goal. Don't just hit Inbox zero. Hit inbox zero without ever touching your mouse. This balances high perceived challenge with high perceived skills and so results in flow. So flow is so important, it gives us three principles. Number one, users should always know what to do and how to do it. Give clear feedback immediately and with no distraction, and balance high perceived skill with high perceived challenge. And counterintuitively, this may mean making the goals of your product harder to achieve. These are our seven principles of game design. If you follow these, your users will be intrinsically motivated. They will use your product not because they have to, because your product is inherently satisfying. With these seven principles, I think you can make products that are delightful, amazing, magical even, and which fundamentally play like games. Now I know we have plenty of time for questions. I just want to throw this up on the screen in case folks wanted to get in touch. You can find me at rahuluperhuman.com or my DMs are open on Twitter. Just send me a message. Rahul Avora thank you so much for listening.

Rahul. Thank you. That was awesome. So excited to have a couple minutes for Q and A here and brave of you to share your email address publicly. I guess you're going to dog food the product and keep inbox at zero. But a couple of questions for me to kick things off. Number one, I'm curious. You use game design principles to design business software. Are you yourself a gamer?

100% in many different ways. That was the reason I got into learning how to code was to learn how to make my own games. I'm still a very active gamer, mostly console gaming, although I'm super excited for the upcoming release of Baldur's Gate 3, which has just been delayed by a week unfortunately. I also run a really fun D&D 5th Edition Tabletop Roleplaying Game and I'm the DM for that and so this allows me to stay sharp as a game designer even outside of the context of Superhuman.

Very cool. And you answered my next question which was what are you playing these days? I guess you're waiting for Baldur's Gate. So how are you passing the time between now and then?

I'm working on the D and D campaign so I don't have an active video game. I did get a little bit into Disco Elysium, which is another very narrative driven, sort of D and D esque game, but didn't quite catch me. So I'm excited for the Baldur's Gate.

Very cool. Next question. So you're working currently on designing easy to use pleasant business software for email. If it weren't email, what's like the next thing that you want to go tackle?

Oh boy. By no means done with email. There's a lot yet to get done. You know, I think that the thing that I find interesting is email. If you ask people what email is that they might say it's collaboration, they might say it's communication. But really there's so much in and around email. Email is scheduling. Email is task management. Email is file sharing. Of course. Email is collaboration, communication and productivity. Email on the consumer side is shopping. It's staying in touch with friends and family. For some people there is so much yet to be done that we're just beginning to scratch the surface. And you know, we had a very specific entry point to market which was let's build the fastest email experience in the world because that's the pain point that our users are feeling today. There's a tremendous amount more that we can do in the above areas around.

Around email makes perfect sense. All right, so we're going to hit you with the hard science now. So question from the crowd is your opinion on dopamine versus oxytocin triggering? So I'm not an expert, so I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading here on the Q and A panel. But see, the asker indicates that research may suggest that dopamine triggering can work against long term happiness. Do you have any opinion on that question?

Oh boy. Okay, so struggling to. Sorry, I'm going in and out of focus here. My hand is here. Okay, there we go. Okay, so dopamine versus oxytocin, long term versus short term. I think this comes back to homeostasis, right? If you want the scientific answer for any chemical, if you have an elevated level of that chemical for a prolonged period of time, the response to that chemical goes down. This is seen with almost any hormone that you can think of. And so I think we know what the effects of dopamine are. We know what the effects of oxytocin are. Exposure to either of them at a high level for a long period of time would, from the simple principle of homeostasis, surely reduce the efficacy of, of them. I think they have very, you know, it's really interesting. I haven't ever analyzed, haven't ever analyzed any design I've ever been involved with along these axes. I find the question fascinating. It's sort of what you could potentially do is go back to the emotional wheel that I put up and you know, sort of segment it off into. It would probably be maybe seven or eight different segments and like what is the hormone behind it? Right. There's like this fight or flight response that's going to be adrenaline, there's going to be noradrenaline, there's going to be all, all kinds of other ones would be a really interesting layer to put onto that wheel. But tying it back to the question specifically, look I think long term happiness is much harder than anything we've discussed today. It really comes to finding a sense of purpose and feeling like you have agency towards achieving that sense of purpose. And that goes well beyond designing software like it's a game.

That's awesome. Thank you. So switching gears a little bit, you know, a question from the audience that I'm going to rephrase just a little bit, but it's something that I know a lot of founders in our network think about and talk about a lot. And it's around product prioritization. So I imagine you're getting ideas thrown at you from every direction, from customers, from your investors, from your friends. You're coming up with ideas all the time. You know, what process do you go through to sort of rank order those and prioritize and choose which ones to do next?

Yeah, great question. So for folks who haven't read it, I'd highly, highly recommend checking out my piece on products market fit. This is in first round review. What I can do, Dan, is I can send around the link later and maybe we can share it with the audience. In summary, it is a way of balancing the two forces that will be present at any team. So some teams will be very vision driven. Out of focus again. There we go. And you know, this is often the case when you have a very loud design voice or a very loud CEO, founder perhaps with strong opinions. And it can, if the vision is good, it can be very effective, but they'll lean into vision and away from data. Some teams I've seen are the opposite. They're very data driven and they'll lean into that at the expense of vision. And in my opinion it's really important to balance both. If you lean too much into vision, you end up not systematically expanding the addressable markets for reasons I explained in the article. And if you end, if you lean too much into data, what happens is you end up being overtaken in the market by competition who does your vision but better. And so there's this important balance to be made. So that's on the type of feature one that we often get asked, this is asked very commonly by customers is around the same size of feature. So you know, we don't have unified Inbox right now, we don't have Android right now, we don't support Office 365 or Microsoft 365 right now. And sometimes potential users will get very annoyed. They're like, well you know, you're a startup, you've raised have many millions of dollars. I keep Hearing about you, how do you not have these apparently basic things? And the answer, you know, we're all designers. We know that you have to focus. The way that I found of explaining this best is in any quarter, I imagine our EPD capacity or R and D capacity to be like a jar. And the question is, how do you fill this jar in the best possible way? And if you just put a pile of really big rocks, like let's say I threw an Android and Office support into this jar, well, I've only got two big rocks in this jar now, but there's still plenty of room around those rocks. It would be silly not to also fill those in. And so the best way to fill this jar is with some of the. The big pebbles that, you know, you need to build in order to move the company forwards, but also with lots of small little pebbles around it. And that way you have a balanced product roadmap. So that's more or less how we think about it as superhuman.

That's awesome. Thank you. And maybe a little bit of a related question. You know, I think historically a lot of products that begin consumer subscription and focus on an individual user eventually get pulled into being more of a business product or an enterprise product. And those are very different types of customers. There is software out there that can effectively service all three types of audiences. But I'm just curious, if you're getting that pull, how do you anchor around who your customer is and who is that customer?

Great question. So we're just going through this transition ourselves. Let me see if what I can share that's useful. So it was the plan all along for us. I think there's a difference if it happens without you being aware of it happening or without you desiring it to happen. And when you are aware and when you do desire it, in our case, it is happening and it is desirable because it's what we wanted. So that's one thing. The second thing is it's important to segment on the type of company. And very simply, you can do this by industry or size. So, for example, some of our largest accounts in terms of how many seats we have, will be companies like. I'll just name two. So Uber, we have a lot of seats there. Brex, we have a lot of seats there. We're in the process of having these conversations, but one might imagine it's much easier to do the enterprise sale at a company like Brex, where we already have expense permission and anyone who wants Supema can use it, compared to Uber, where you can Imagine that there'll be much more of a hoops as there should be to step through in terms of security, legal and compliance. And so one of the ways that we're approaching this is segmenting it in terms of size of company. You can also do the same on industry. You know, there'll be companies like, oh, sorry, industries, rather like Fintech or healthcare, where there are significantly higher compliance requirements.

Right, right. Makes sense. And I guess, last question, there may be one or two others that flowing through the chat. But I'm curious, when you build your team, what are the attributes or the qualities that you look for in team members and how do you interview for those?

Oh, boy. Okay, yeah, we have a long answer for this. I'll give you the short one. So for us, this comes down to the company values. Now, company values are a thing that I think most startups get. Not, I wouldn't say wrong, but they don't do a great job at identifying them. And so we use a process outlined in the book the Advantage by Patrick Leoncini. It's by far the best values process that I've come across to identify what our core values are. And we found that we have three core values. Number one, create delight. And we use the game design definition of delight, which is pleasant surprise. Number two, be intentional. We're probably the most intentional company you've ever come across. We've got a framework for everything. And number three, remarkable quality. We all want to make the best work of our lives here at Superhuman and are proud to be doing so as we work day to day. So the thing about core values, and Patrick in his book says it much better than I'm about to, is you must credibly believe that you do them better, specifically the core ones, better than 99% of all other companies. And it sounds like a really high bar. But he does have a really great process in his book for uncovering and identifying those on top of that, because it's just three and you don't really want more than a handful. You also need hiring values. So for us, these are things like grit, positive or proactive, positivity, growth, mindset, to name about three of them, is like four or five. Now, what you then do is you take your core values and your hiring values, you hire a fantastic head of people. So we hired Kristen Haywood, who helped previously scaled Flexport. And then using all kinds of behavioral science that I don't fully understand, you design behavioral interviews to test for these personality attributes. And this is where I'm sort of out of my depth, but I brought in an expert to, you know, once the founding team has identified what the values are, then bring in an expert to help design interviews that actually confidently test for these attributes.

That is awesome. And can you just repeat the name of the book? Oh, Jack just shared in the chat. We're in great shape.

Yep, that's the right one.

Alright, we got the right book. We'll close out with one last quasi provocative question posed in the chat. What do you say to those that believe email is a fundamentally broken paradigm? So should email exist or should it not?

Yeah, great question. I clearly think it should. And there are some reasons why it has withstood the test of time despite people saying this for every year for the last 30, 40 years. And one of the most fundamental things is set aside its power as a point of communication or a point of collaboration. It is the default mode of identity in western organizations. The first thing that you get when you join any company is your email address and that then is the solution to log into anything else. It's typically also the solution that you use to log into your SSO solution if you happen to use single sign on. Not only is it the unit of identity, it's the unit of authentication. If you think about what makes for a good unit of identity, it is the the two tuple or the pair of who you are plus who the organization is. And so if you think about my email address rahuluperhuman.com it is basically the most efficient way of expressing the fact that it is me at my company in a way that isn't owned by me. This is important to companies, it's owned by the company. And if I were to leave the organization, the email address still remains with the company. And so that's why I think if someone were to counter argue they would say but Rahul, you're making an argument for email addresses, not email. Which would be the astute counterpoint to which I would say absolutely. The thing that has longevity here is the email address. Now what email actually is and always will be undergoing dramatic change. There's been just so much innovation in the space of email, not just from Superhuman by it but by a lot of our peers as well. And so what I think will happen is we will see what email is is dramatically change over the course of the next few years. We're already seeing for example that email is tending towards chat. A good 30 to 50% of emails sent to 1 minus at this point. But email addresses are here to stay. And before we wrap, actually, because I see a bunch of pings in the Zoom chat folks asking for access to Superhuman. So we do have a wait list. There's a over 350,000 people on the waitlist. But what I can share for the community here today is if anyone would like access, I would be more than happy to skip you to the front of the line. So just drop me an email if it's of interest to you. Rockleuperhuman.com we're not on Android yet. We're not on Office 365 yet. But if you use Gmail or G Suite and you're on an iOS device and you want access to Superhuman, let me know and I can help make that happen.

That's amazing. Thank you very much for both the generous offer to the Design Driven community and for joining us and sharing all these insights. What a terrific talk.

And I'll just pop my email here for those who missed it.

There you go. Excellent. Well, hey again, on behalf of firstmark, on behalf of the entire Design Driven community, and on behalf of me and Jack, thank you for spending some time with us. That was absolutely fascinating. So you have a virtual round of applause.

Thank you very much. Yeah, it was absolutely fascinating. I had friends texting me the whole time like, this is incredible. So you really struck a nerve and I appreciate you spending some time with us today.