Designing Remote Controls for Real Life
Breaking Down Expa’s Design Principles
This is the first in a series of posts where I will be breaking down work that I really admire and trying to extract the principles that make it work so well. I am not an Expa employee, nor do I claim to have any insider knowledge. This is merely what I got from taking some time to look deeply at their work. Please enjoy and recommend it if you got something out of it.
A ‘startup studio’. That’s how Expa’s founder Garrett Camp describes his company. Expa gathers some of the smartest minds in tech and uses that wealth of knowledge to birth new companies. Their success rate so far is impressive.
In all of those cases, you are talking about companies that are hugely disruptive or are well on their way to becoming hugely disruptive. At first blush, Expa’s companies seem very different from one another. What could cars, restaurants, travel, concierges, and virtual spaces have in common? The answer is very little on the surface. However, when you dig a little deeper into what actually makes each experience tick you find a few very concrete design principles that Expa uses to help them continue to push out great experiences. These principles all stem from a central concept that Garrett Camp spoke about in a 2013 interview:
“…a one button thing that does something [in the real world]”
Expa sees their apps as buttons on the real-life remote that is your smartphone. Tapping on an Expa app makes things happen around you, tangible things that impact your life and make it a little bit better. It is certainly an ambitious philosophy and it leads to the creation of some powerful principles that are at the heart of all of Expa’s apps.
Remotes have buttons with a single function, and like those buttons, every app that Expa has made focuses on a single function. That single function is defined by the app’s main verb — a single word that provides instant clarity about where this app fits into a user’s life. When it comes to Uber or Reserve there is no confusion about what their verb is.
That clarity is so important because, without it, word of mouth is much harder. If I have to spend five minutes telling you how/why to use an app you are probably going to forget all about it. But if I can tell you about an app in ten seconds, it won’t take a lot of mental effort to decide if that app will fit into your life and improve it (making a recommendation far more likely to turn into a download). Of course, defining a main verb does a lot more than make a word of mouth easier.
Focusing on a main verb leads to focused interfaces
Defining a verb leads to focused, clear interfaces. It is pretty hard to just make an interface ‘Clean’ or ‘Simple’, as these are abstract ideas that can be highly subjective and audience dependent (this interface is considered fairly intuitive for an X-29 pilot but not for most people). However, defining a verb makes it far easier to create consistently clean interfaces because the intent of the app is specifically known. You can practically hear the lead designer asking, “How does this screen help me do [insert main verb here]?” when you look at screens from any of Expa’s apps.
Focusing on a main verb leads to designs that are easy to test.
Half (or more) of a good design process is testing and validating assumptions and design decisions. Picking a verb makes testing super simple. Did your design help users do the main verb? Were the users less confused about how to do the main verb? If not, your design did not succeed.
But this is a little abstract. Let’s see what these stats look like for each of the apps we are focusing in on.
Time to arrival
If Uber’s main verb is ‘Go,’ then ‘time to arrival’ is the stat that makes it a reality. If the car takes too long to arrive, people will think their ‘remote for real-life’ is out of batteries or broken; This ends in the user losing faith in the service as a whole. Jason Calacanis, an early Uber investor, said it well in a recent interview: “Uber (currently valued at over 50 billion dollars) still lives and dies by the time it takes for your car to arrive.”
Reserve, on the other hand, is supposed to make it extremely simple to reserve a meal and pay for it. Therefore, Reserve’s biggest stat is:
Time to reservation
If the time to reservation is too high the user will, again, lose faith in the service. Every second costs you a few users, that’s the reality of today’s audiences.
Obviously there are thousands of stats that both of these companies track every day. The point is that you need to look no further than the main verb to find the testable stat that will make or break the experience.
Focusing on a main verb encourages barrier removal
Some apps treat removing repetitive prompts as a “if we have time” exercise and don’t think it is a big deal to have multiple payment confirmations or forms that force a user to re-enter data with each purchase or request. When you live or die by a specific main verb you naturally tend towards removing any barriers to someone performing the main verb. Let’s take a look at a few examples of how Expa does this:
Seems obvious right? It isn’t, most apps don’t have status updates that a user can look at and feel confident that the app is working correctly. Uber providing trip ETAs and the request status in Reserve are both examples of crystal clear communication. No extra words, no confusing language, and they are both presented in a super readable sans-serif font (FF Clan I believe).
Building trust and reducing anxiety both happen through clear status updates
Something those on the bleeding edge of tech often forget is that most people are still scarred by technology. I saw this fear all the time when I was growing up in the Midwest. I’ve seen people holding their phones at arm's length and tapping hesitantly with one finger like one wrong tap will result in the phone biting their hand or other people refusing to connect to wi-fi less the government steal their secrets, you name it. Technology is the scary, but useful, unknown for many people.
Because of that fear that so many users experience, it is extremely important to reassure a user by making it super clear that the app is working. Being able to watch that minute counter tick down as that little car moves towards you or seeing that reservation status update is comforting because a user knows they didn’t do anything wrong and the app is doing what it is supposed to.
User seeing your payments as fair
Clear communication doesn’t just apply to requests in progress, it also applies to explaining what you just paid for.
Notice how detailed the receipt is. A short receipt, with no detail or confusing language, feels like you are being ripped off or tricked. Clear communication on receipts makes a user trust you a little more each time they make a purchase because it appears that you (as a company) have nothing to hide. You build trust with every transaction a user understands and feels is fair.
Expa’s apps are all about user feedback and, unsurprisingly, that is the third and final pillar. Uber and Reserve both provide reviews after every interaction, as well as offering email accounts and social media accounts that provide a 24/7 hotline for delivering feedback. So why go to all this trouble?
It provides a heartbeat
The last thing you want is to find out your service went down for three hours, five hours after it happened. That's where constant user feedback helps. When a bunch of similar reports come in, the team can quickly react to and fix it, rather than issue apologies three days later. This principle keeps that flow of feedback constant.
Make more informed decisions
When making any decision you usually want as much relevant data as possible. If you heavily prioritize feedback in your design, you can get a greater percentage of users to provide that valuable feedback, thus (I believe) letting you know if something is a majority opinion or not. Expa prioritizes user feedback so heavily in their designs that sometimes they require it by not letting you progress before providing it.
It makes the experience high-end
Of course, Expa’s regular choice of simple color schemes and elegantly thin sans-serif fonts deserves more than a little credit here too, but the feedback is what seals the deal on the trademark luxury or high-end feel in all of Expa’s apps. Being asked to give feedback makes a user see the app as learning and adapting to your needs. This is about a bespoke feeling. And this is further supported by fast responses to negative feedback. There is a recent study that showed that a restaurant’s fast response to a problem actually promoted more user loyalty than just providing a great experience to begin with. Uber and Reserve both turn disgruntled users into big fans every day. They both end up feeling like your personal, high-end concierge (and Operator is literally this, but that is for another post once it is out of beta).
Remotes need more than just pretty buttons…
That’s really what it comes down to. When looking at Expa’s design and why they work so well, the trend becomes pretty clear. They design the whole system, not just aesthetics of the screens. Following Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines, putting together a distinct color scheme, and using a clean font are the first steps. Knowing what buttons to have on each screen and what information to communicate is a whole art in its own right. Going even beyond that and designing each user interaction — from emails to ordering and even customer service tweets is what really makes the difference. Beautiful, comprehensive systems clearly create a strong competitive advantage. When your company’s email feels as clear and elegant as its app’s main screen, your technology begins to feel less like a blunt instrument and more like magic. Expa seems to get a little closer to creating digital magic with every app they release and I’d claim it is due, in no small part, to their solid design principles.
I can’t wait to see what button they design next.
