Animation should explain the product, not just decorate it

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 23:49

   nudge the user to do to do something should we take a look at another one yeah okay we got sentient os your mac sentient an on-device llm understands your entire life then proactively offers to get your work done through computer use okay that's interesting and then i guess we have an image here of a laptop that's open whoa okay okay and it closes when you scroll hold on go go back for a second oh so all right so there's a bunch of stuff going into the middle and then when you scroll down a little and it says while you sleep your mac understands your entire life okay and i think notice something here i'm really struggling to like perfectly match the scroll one thing i i never see a you know deck of corn company ever do any kind of scroll tracking yes why don't they do any kind of scroll tracking well because it does not convert

2. 24:48

   and it's frustrating um another thing that i see ai agents doing doing a lot right i mean just notice like okay if i i missed it right again go to like the top fortune 500 company sites that have millions and millions of page views they are not scroll jacking yeah what's frustrating about it is you're used to the precision of how you move through a site when you're scrolling and when you hit a site and it's different precision you know it keeps scrolling after you've stopped touching the mouse or the trackpad it messes things up and it feels unnatural um and so please everybody please stop scroll jacking it's very simple just keep the normal scroll because there's some cool stuff that's happening here right like like okay we started out with laptop screen open a bunch of things are going into it right the lid closes and i think it's trying to tell you

3. 25:41

   like all this stuff happens while you sleep the lid is closed and then you wake up to your finished work and so wakes up and here's all the things that it's done and then it takes you through that so the visual and the experience what i like about this one is it's actually reinforcing the concepts that it's trying to tell you about when it talks about going when you sleep the lid closes the computer is asleep and then it's like oh it wakes up it does all the work while you sleep so when you wake up and then boom the laptop comes back out we have all the work is done and it's showing it to us that's i think the best version of an animation is not animation for animation's sake but animation that actually reinforces the point that you're trying to make and communicate something in a way that just being static

4. 26:22

   would not have been able to do. Totally. I mean, it's definitely helping me understand what this product does. But I would also, I always think when you're trying to be too creative or something, that's great on like a product page or a video, not your landing page. Your landing page, the number one thing you want to try and get me to do is click this button, download for Mac OS. Also, just speaking about that button for a second, this kind of glow, another bit of a vibe, coding, smell.

5. 26:54

   Again, hey, it's definitely getting my attention. But one thing that I've noticed is AI agents, they love to overdo it on this kind of gradient, on this massive drop shadow. So, and again, look, it got my attention, but it's just one thing to be wary of if that's something that you're trying to not do. Yeah. And then what do we have further down the page here? Let's see. I think what's interesting here is, again, this is that main CTA, right?

6. 27:29

   I scroll through the whole thing and you really want me to click this button or perhaps even do this homebrew installation, but it's so small. like i'm at like 100 and i can barely see it right uh and like this has this kind of hover effect i guess this brings me to the github i can barely read that yeah it's really tough to read those right like free there's a reason that free is giant on pricing pages yeah download for free yeah exactly right right and i swear All right.

7. 28:00

   it's, it's, you know, perhaps it's because of the angle, but it doesn't really matter. I cannot see the word free right now. If you have something important to communicate, it shouldn't matter the angle that the user is looking at it. It should be painfully obvious. Yes, exactly. All right. I mean, I guess maybe, you know, one of the other pieces of feedback for a product like this that runs locally on your machine, privacy and trust is something that's very important. What do they do with the data. I guess they have an FAQ here to try to answer some of this, but this is actually an interesting problem in the new world of AI apps and LLMs is they need so much data and so much context to be really valuable. And especially a product like this, that's going to run locally on your machine and have access presumably to everything that's on your computer. And so there's

8. 28:46

   a new bar that needs to be established for trust and privacy and security for all of these types of products. My take is that I actually think the products that really lean into that and go above and beyond to make users feel super comfortable around what is the data we're going to have access to? How are we going to use it? What are our retention policies? Is it secure or not? All these things and being very proactive about that are the ones that I think are going to have more success of getting users to download and try it and spread the word and tell their friends.

9. 29:17

   Totally agree. As someone who applied to YC with a text message analyzer that was open source and read your i messages all locally on the computer i completely agree and so what were the things when you're working on that product that you thought about that you felt like you had to do in order to get people to trust your product and give it access to all of their text messages hero on the landing page was open source completely on device right communicating that the internet doesn't touch it in any single way and that's what we learned that people really really cared about right yeah and they do it here you know in on device llm yeah but it's funny like like is the word and really even necessary like it's it's interesting to me they're like bolding these words another sign of ai writing actually is you can look this up on wikipedia is when random

10. 30:05

    words are are bolded right like but just communicating those kind of that most important thing which is that it's uh on device yeah another thing that kind of makes me laugh is this font let's see what the font is space uh grotesque is is always the the font that is uh oh instrument serif is another one instrument serif claude code loves instrument serif which is funny this kind of reminds me of the m dash right it's like you can still use the m dash in your writing but unfortunately people are going to look at it and go oh he used ai right instrument serif space grotesque it's interesting how these things are trends that sometimes are hard to spot in the moment i feel like we're on it and you know we can spot it in the moment here but it's like you see a kitchen that was designed in the 80s or something like that and you're like man this

11. 30:58

    looks like an outdated kitchen but in the 80s it probably looked like a modern kitchen and that's what some of this feels like it's something that feels like of the moment now but five ten years We're going to look back at this. We're going to be like, oh, yeah, that's a hallmark mid 2020s site design that will feel outdated at that point. And so I don't know. I would encourage people just resist the urge to do the default that the agents are spitting out when they're designing or the default fonts or use something that is more unique to you and communicates what you want to communicate rather than just using the thing that everybody else is using.

12. 31:30

    And that's the way to create more timeless design, I think. Yeah. And establishing that brand book early on. And that's one thing that I regret that we didn't do earlier for our own company was establishing a brand book, deciding on what is the brand, what is your font, really your design system.