Teaching Products to Respect Evolution.

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I have a client that onboards about 100,000 really dumb users every month — the kind of people that don’t know where the home button is on their phone. It presents some pretty crazy challenges.

This has happened to me once before, at Yoyo Wallet. There, we had a lot of success using coach marks to gradually teach a user how to get around the app and use all the features. The problem we were trying to solve was that people either didn’t know or didn’t understand the full feature set. The solution was to avoid hitting them with a ton of information up front, and instead gradually walk them through the features, in a contextual way.

For example on first app open, guide the user to link a card. After their first payment, teach them about the Yoyo Points system. After they’ve earned their first reward, show them how their voucher works…

Yoyo was only the first time I hit up against this problem. It comes up again and again, especially in productivity tools — which have to deliver power-user functionality with zero bloat and minimal UI. All this has got me thinking that coach marks are a crutch, not a solution.

So, what does a permanent solution look like?

What I’d love to spend time on, if only we had the resource, is an exploration of what product might look like if it was organic. That is to say product which evolves — or atrophies — with usage. Just like in nature. Imagine if features appeared, grew, evolved and died based on how you used it. That could make for an ultra focussed UI, perfectly tailored to how the user is using the product now, and can adapt as their requirements do.

So, how do you even start thinking about a UI like that?

If product built organically, then it is an organism. And organisms have DNA. So, what is a product’s DNA — the irreducible parts it can be broken down into? And how repeatable are these? The closest anyone has gotten to this is card-based interfaces or, maybe, Slack Buttons. These have reduced products down into key interactions, abstracted from the product itself and placed inside a 3rd party feed along with cards / buttons from other apps / conversations.

Building organic product takes the same exercise of reduction, the same effort at UI standardization, and the same modular architecture — but it takes it to a very different conclusion.

If I’m loosing you — try and imagine the idea behind card-based UI (modularization) having a baby with responsive layouts (i.e. adaptive UI). The first is your DNA (your modular parts), the second is the evolutionary framework — the set of simple rules by which the product may evolve:

1) More Usage = More Prominence.

The more a feature gets used, the higher it climbs up the visual hierarchy. For example it moves from the hamburger menu to the tab bar.

2) Less Usage = Atrophy / Death.

Features that don’t get used, die. For example opening the camera app on iOS gives you the option between taking a photo, square photo, panoramic, video etc. If the square option doesn’t get used (i.e. if you’re over 35 and don’t Instagram), it atrophies slowly before eventually dying completely.

3) Usage → Evolution.

The most used features evolve. For example, Uber used to only let you add one card. This forced some people to constantly be removing one card and adding another (business → personal account). For such people, the ‘add a card’ feature could have evolved to support multiple cards, and even included a switch so that you can select one or the other when booking a fare. Of course, this feature now exists, but it exists for everyone.

Building an evolutionary framework around these three axioms, and modularizing features so that they can respond to them based on usage is my bare-bones guess at how you could go about building organic product.

Imagine building something where there is no single end product to look at. Just an infinite number of permutations, adapted and adapting to the individual user day by day. Tackling something like that would be a lot of fun.

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