Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…And so we had to address this problem. I mean, from a functional perspective, this is a problem. I mean, from a memory, from a performance, from a space. I mean, we don't want users to have like 500 open tabs without even realizing, by the way, that they have 500 open tabs. So we had to work on that. And how did we do that? The way we did that is actually we interviewed a lot of users, trying to ask them, hey, what if you navigate through your open tabs and let me know how you can find an open tabs? That was, for me, a very important phase because that's how you realize that there is a relationship between people and their tabs. And I really say relationship because for some people, Their tabs are really, really important things. I mean, for them, there's absolutely no choice for Chrome to close tabs on their behalf. Like it's a really important thing. So we had to understand that relationship first. And then we asked some people to navigate us through how they can find a specific tab in their tab grids. And a lot of people got like a bit frustrated or like they found that a bit hard or Some of them found that there is a need to apologize, not for the content, of course, of the tab they had, but said something like, hey, I mean, sorry, I usually don't have that many tabs open. And that's not the point. The point is to see if you get frustrated from the experience itself or not. So that phase by itself, trying to understand not only the functional part, but also that emotional part, like the frustration part, the shame part sometimes, was really key in order to build a feature that can align with these values and these motivators or these emotional parts. So what we built actually was a feature that exists today on iOS, which is called inactive tabs. So inactive tabs is that ability where you can... Actually, this happened automatically where all tabs longer than 21 days that was not touched actually or opened for more than 21 days are placed in this folder called inactive tabs. So the result is that you're getting like a cleaner... tab grid and people are feeling less stressed about the amount of tabs that they have, but also they keep that trust of Chrome because they know that we did not close their tabs. Their tabs are actually there in that inactive tab group. So that was one of the features we built. It was supposed to be functional only. I mean, we could just maybe compress the thumbnail or just do a performance way, but also that's an example of deep delight where at the same time you're solving for a functional need, and at the same time, including the emotional dimension into it. That's a super cool example. That's actually the reason I switched up. I started using Arc. I don't know if you've used Arc before, which is built on Chromium. It's its own startup, the browser company. Josh Miller was on the podcast. They actually delete your tabs after some number of hours, like days. And once you get used to that, it's actually great. I'm like, okay, please go away. And then you can save them if you want. You can pin them. I haven't used Chrome in probably long enough where I remember just the tabs deactivate, like they just have to reload when you go back to their old. It's cool that now they move to a different folder to kind of get them out of the way and clean up your whole thing. Very cool. Okay. What's the Google Meet story? So I told you when I joined Google Meet, it was maybe one month before COVID hit Europe. Like the worst period you can join Google Meet because, I mean, the usage just gets skyrocketed. Like we all found ourselves moving from having meetings in rooms and clinics to 100% remote. So... The very first couple of months, and it was about three to four months, I had to understand the impact or the emotional impact of this new behavior. The fact that people are staying home and having these back to back. What's the emotional impact of this new experience? And of course, what we did was to interview a lot of people. And with the help of user researcher, we collected a lot of information. And when we try to synthesize these informations, we actually realize that there are three main patterns. Like people are saying, I'm feeling bored. People are saying there is a low interaction. And there was even a new term that was born during COVID time, which is called the Zoom fatigue. You probably heard about that.…

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