Making Users Awesome
There’s a great book by Kathy Sierra: Badass: Making Users Awesome. Aimed at product managers, it makes the compelling point that nobody wants your tool; they want the outcomes the tool enables. To create loyal, even raving, fans of your product, you should therefore build an entire ecosystem around helping people achieve these outcomes.
The book was written well before the recent generative AI wave, and so it focuses on pieces like creating tutorials around common use cases, and, generally, asking yourself how to optimize the tool so users can get to the outcomes they want.
But with AI, I can easily think of a novel way to make users awesome: by providing a natural language interface to the tool’s more advanced, obscure, or hard-to-get-right features. It doesn’t even have to do everything autonomously. It could be as simple as, “Tell me what you want to do, and I’ll look over your shoulder and guide you along,” so that the user even learns something.
I can immediately think of a few examples:
Loading your vacation pictures into Lightroom or Photoshop, you decide they don’t convey the relaxed summertime feeling you experienced. You ask the AI to work with you on enhancing it, and the AI walks you through some colour curve adjustments.
You open an Excel sheet with your department’s sales figures for the year. You want to achieve a certain visualization for a report, but aren’t convinced by the standard options. You ask the AI what could be done and it suggests some groupings, aggregations, and charts that could get you there.
In general, any software with lots of knobs to turn and tweak would be a great candidate here. There’s often a mismatch between reading the documentation, which outlines each feature in isolation, and how you’d actually use that feature.
As a concrete example, here’s Adobe’s official documentation on what happens if you set a layer’s blend mode to Overlay
Multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the base color. Patterns or colors overlay the existing pixels while preserving the highlights and shadows of the base color. The base color is not replaced, but mixed with the blend color to reflect the lightness or darkness of the original color.
🤷♂️🤔❓
Now here’s a cool trick in Photoshop to instantly make the colours of your photo “pop” more:
Load your photo
Duplicate the only layer (which holds your photo)
Set its blend mode to “Overlay”
Adjust that layer’s opacity to control the strength of the effect
You learn these tricks by watching tons of tutorials on YouTube, or, these days, you could ask the AI. And if there’s a bespoke one built right into the tool, all the better.
I’m sure if you’re using industry-specific specialized tools, you can think of great examples where an intelligent AI assistant would give “normal” users superpowers.
