meet people where they are

The insight from people moving to chat-based interfaces is not that your software should become a chat-based interface. Is that people prefer to be in a place where the workflows flex to their needs, and it just so happens LLMs were more easily packaged for end-users as chatbots.

Your software doesn’t need to become a chat-based interface, it needs to be so flexible that plugging it to a chat-based interface is a trivial toggle.

People don’t want to add more friction to their daily lives. We’re consuming overstimulation and our attention spans have diminished. We keep gravitating toward chats not becase it’s the best interface, but becase it’s the quickest way to have what our brains dump become a complex action in the system.

The more we repeat an action, the more it becomes muscle memory. Now I find it easier to search for icons via the search bar on my phone than to arrange them in the screen. 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, not add to them.