meet people where they are

People moved to chat-based interfaces and now you think your software should become a chat-based interface. What a jump! The insight to derive from that move is simply that people prefer to be where their mental models feel at home, and people’s mental models flex a lot, which LLMs are great at servicing, it just so happens LLMs were more easily packaged for end-users as chatbots.

Your software needs to be so flexible that plugging it to a chat-based interface is a trivial toggle, but the goal is that flexibility, not the interface.

People don’t want to add more friction to their daily lives. We’re consuming overstimulation and our attention spans have plunged past the fish into the deep. Any attention we have left is getting optimized and every time we discover something can be ignored, we ignore it.

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We keep gravitating toward chats not because it’s the best interface, but because it’s the quickest way to convert brain dumps into action in the system.

As we repeat an action, it becomes muscle memory. Now I find it easier to search for apps via the search bar on my phone than to find icons in the screen. Before this, I had already stopped reading the app names and anchored in the icon logos and shapes. Apple moved the search bar to the bottom recently for this reason, not just out of the kindness of their usability-first hearts.

Someone who takes notes every day in a long Notion page is a content creator, find a way to turn that existing habit into a product that wows them. That’s how I built this blog.

Someone who works out and jots their sets in Apple Notes needs analytics, find a way to plug into their note-taking habit to graph the valuable, motivating data for them. A colleague is building this.

If you want to build, do it where there’s people, not in the desert. Meet people where they are, hook into their existing workflows to reduce friction.

Your software needs to be so flexible that plugging it to a chat-based interface is a trivial toggle, but the goal is that flexibility, not the interface.

📌

We keep gravitating toward chats not because it’s the best interface, but because it’s the quickest way to convert brain dumps into action in the system.

Someone who takes notes every day in a long Notion page is a content creator, find a way to turn that existing habit into a product that wows them. That’s how I built this blog.

If you want to build, do it where there’s people, not in the desert. Meet people where they are, hook into their existing workflows to reduce friction.