The need for speed
Keyboard first interaction and the user experience
People that spend money to save time are happier. A study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 looked at the correlation between happiness, money and time. It found that money spent on time-saving services — ordering takeout food, taking a taxi, hiring household help — is more beneficial than money spent on material goods. The findings were consistent regardless of the participant's country or class.
Time is finite and therefore it’s valuable. This applies to everyone. Hence, Scott Galloway’s observation that the most valuable companies either extend your time or enhance your time.
Time-saving apps
At the moment, we’re seeing a trend for apps aimed at time-hungry power users. Apps that promise experiences so fast your head will spin.
- Email client Superhuman bills itself as the “fastest mail client ever made”.
- Ticketing app Linear was “built to be lightning-fast”.
- CRM app Close promises their customers “60% more calls”, “more emails, faster”, and “increased reach rates, faster”.
- Collaboration app Height will allow you to “manage tasks faster than ever”
Without a doubt, Superhuman is the product leading the pack for time-saving hype. There are many reasons for this. Above all, it’s their uncompromising, refined user-experience delivered through ‘keyboard first’ interaction. This app is so uncompromising that it requires a 30-minute setup call to get you up to, ahem, speed.
A ‘keyboard first’ interaction is one where it’s expected that the user will interact with your product using keyboard shortcuts. They’ll avoid point-and-click (using a mouse or trackpad).
If you see Superhuman in action, you’ll see this is not a tool for the masses. To use Superhuman, you’ll have to make an effort. You have to be willing to adapt and ‘learn’ Superhuman. And as I’ve mentioned, in exchange for your effort they’ll give you time. The gift of time has created a very passionate audience. People love it.
In a world where UX designers work hard to save people from having to think too much about what they want to do, Superhuman goes against the grain and to great acclaim. Why? And what does keyboard-first mean to the user experience?
Know your users
What’s most striking about Superhuman (and other time-saving apps I’ve looked at) is how well they know their users.
At Superhuman, they know there are people with strong opinions about email. People that ‘believe in inbox zero’, that do ‘mail before work’ or ‘no mail before midday’. These are ‘keyboard-first’ people. They’re all about efficiency and so is Superhuman.
Jared Spool talks about the division user time into goal-time and tool-time. Goal-time is the time spent on what you care about. Your goal. Tool time is the time spent on what you don’t care about. Learning to use the tools that will help you achieve your goal.
This tells us a lot about how we should think about Superhuman and the products I’ve mentioned. Another way to think about them is by using Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design. On balance, the apps mentioned measure up well against these principles. What’s interesting is how some principles are addressed to a greater degree than others.
Take for example:
- Recognition rather than recall: Minimise the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible…
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert…
These are apps that prioritise flexibility and efficiency of use and deprioritise recognition rather than recall. When it comes to the balance of tool time and goal time, they lean heavily towards goal time. They accommodate the expert. Novices need not apply.
Being user-friendly
With a 30-minute onboarding call and interaction that requires real effort, ‘user-friendly’ is not the adjective that comes to mind when you first see Superhuman. But the reality is user-friendly isn’t defined by the onboarding, the user interface, or an app's interaction.
User-friendly defined by the user, and friendly is relative to them. Incredible products know their users — their wants, their needs. And they respect their users — and their time.
