Rahul Vohra: recommendation

Transcript context

…What is the story of the inbox zero image? I would imagine some of the motivation behind that feature is the same. How did you guys come up with the idea and put it in the product? This comes back to our emotion pillar of game design and the principle of designing for nuanced emotions. Inbox zero, we fairly quickly learned—I would say it took us about nine months to reach this realization—is one of the most emotionally resonant moments in someone's interaction with their inbox. This is actually a good example of where my intuition was wrong. I did not know this as a founder going in. As a founder starting the company, I so rarely hit inbox zero. I will see thousands of emails every single day. In any given minute, I'm often receiving five or six emails. Before we'd invented split inbox which took years to get to, it was an impossibility for me to actually hit inbox zero, so I simply didn't know. But in interacting with our earliest customers, we quickly realized that inbox zero was one of the most emotionally resonant moments, and it was a point that we could reinforce with emotional design. If you're designing for emotion, you have to figure out what kind of emotions you're going for. There are many models of human emotion. The most famous is Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. I would've magically flash open images in people's minds, they would recognize it but essentially, it has different emotions that are across to each other. For example, joy is the opposite of grief. You can blend adjacent emotions to create more complex feelings and it gets really cool. When you combine joy and anticipation, you get optimism. When you combine joy and trust, you actually get love. At Superhuman, we use a much richer vocabulary. We actually use the emotion wheel by The Junto Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership because this emotion wheel has all of the nuance that a game designer needs in order to actually practice emotional design. At Superhuman, we care deeply about the emotion of joy and joy has many sub-facets. We design for things like 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, because when you hit inbox zero, especially if it's the first time in years, you rightly feel like you accomplished something special. When you do hit inbox zero, that's when we decided to show you the stunning and gorgeous imagery. We do this specifically to widen the emotional repertoire beyond joy, into love and surprise. There are sub-emotions in love and surprise that we deliberately lean upon with our choice of inbox zero imagery. We pick images that are peaceful and tranquil that's in the love end of the spectrum. We create images rather that create a sense of longing and sentimality that's also in the love end of the spectrum. Folks will remember the arctic fox, the squirrel that just runs across the screen, or this one where you have almost Natural Geographic-esque images of the balloons of Myanmar. We also pushed into surprise, images that amaze and inspire a sense of awe. t just runs across the screen, or this one where you have almost Natural Geographic-esque images of the balloons of Myanmar. We also pushed into surprise, images that amaze and inspire a sense of awe. A lot of our cityscapes are like this. Very high contrast, very high dynamic range, and designed to give you that sense of flying—almost of having superpowers—over this entire cityscape.…

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