Rahul Vohra: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's fascinating. We talked about a lot of these principles. They have goals and rewards, emotion, we touched on toys and fun and flow, but this is really one that I don't think we prepared for coming in this conversation. I have certainly experienced, in other areas in my life where being forced to study emotion and having a greater vocabulary around emotion can help you in interactions with humans of any flavor in any setting to help you better articulate how you're feeling. It's very cool to see you bring that to software. As we work toward the end here, one big question I had is if you're listening to this podcast and you're not a product designer, product manager, or the CEO of an early-stage product-focused company, how do you apply them outside of just a product role? Could they be interesting to people in other areas of company building? I think so. This set of principles across goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow is about experience design. If you think about the onboarding experience of Superhuman, there's not really much software in that experience, but we did look at the whole thing through these lenses. If you didn't even work in technology, let's say perhaps you were a realtor selling houses or getting folks to rent an apartment—as not many of us here in San Francisco area happen to own a condo just down the road. I think about the experience of prospective tenants coming to look at my condo through these lenses of game design. What is their goal? What emotion do we want them to feel? How can I hit every single sense of their emotions as they come in? It sounds weird but does it smell good? Does it look good? Does it feel good? Literally, do the things that you touch feel good. To double click on one of those, let's take the sensation of smell. I've been renting out places for a long time. This is a trick that I've been using since I was in my early 20s. When I read my first few sales books, I would put a vanilla scent in the kitchen to evoke memories of baked goods. Perhaps when you were a child, your folks would bring back a little baked treat. I will put a lavender scent or a similar scent in the lounge to evoke perhaps being in a meadow or in some other really relaxing place. The point is that you can take all of these little tools that we have as game designers and apply them to any experience that you're trying to design. All right, Rahul, you've talked about a lot of very nuanced and incredibly well-thought-out elements of the product here. Toward the end of the show, we always like to give guests an opportunity to talk about where people can go and check out the work of the person who's been interviewed. What do you want to say to listeners?…

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