User Experience

Some technologies don’t just solve problems — they give people their independence back. I rediscovered Liftware, and I was genuinely moved by what it can do. It looks simple: a smart handle connected to everyday utensils. But inside, it’s a powerful piece of engineering designed for people with hand tremors (Parkinson’s, essential tremor, and more). Here’s how it works: 🔹 Sensors detect tiny hand movements in real time 🔹 Micro-motors instantly counteract the tremor 🔹 The spoon or fork stays stable — even if the hand doesn’t The result? Up to 70% less shaking. And for many people, that means eating soup again… without help. This is technology at its best: invisible, intelligent, and deeply human. 💡 My take Most people don’t know this, but Liftware was developed by a small startup before being acquired by Google’s life sciences division (now Verily). What makes it remarkable is the engineering challenge: the device doesn’t try to stop the tremor — it predicts and cancels it. It’s basically a tiny real-time AI system… hidden inside a spoon. This is the future I love: not just smarter devices, but more compassionate ones. If you’ve seen other innovations that genuinely improve people’s lives, I’d love to discover them. What’s one piece of tech-for-good that inspired you recently? #techforgood #innovation #technology #healthtech #accessibility #assistivetechnology #futureofhealth #inclusiveDesign #AI #impact

Back in 2007, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman taught a private master class to tech founders including Larry Page and Jeff Bezos. The following year, Elon Musk joined. Among the topics: priming, where subtle cues shape our decisions without us realizing it. In that room, Musk pressed on subliminal versus explicit persuasion: “Does the hidden beat the obvious?” Kahneman's answer: "There are many situations in which subliminal effects are stronger than superliminal effects." Translation: Hidden influences shape behavior more than obvious ones. You can't resist what you don't notice. Later after that session, Bezos connected the dots: “You can choose your choice architect.” You either design the decision environment, or it designs you. Amazon designed theirs. One-click purchasing removes the pause where doubt lives. Every additional step is an exit ramp. They chose zero exits. Google designed theirs. That empty white homepage isn't minimal by accident. No portals, no distractions. Just one thought: search. Most companies let chaos choose. Cluttered onboarding. Buried CTAs. Friction everywhere. They're not architects. They're accidents. So how do you become the architect instead of the accident? 1. Choose your pricing architect: Sell your core product for $99/month. Then offer a bundle with two add-ons for $119. The bundle makes the core feel essential. 2. Choose your onboarding architect: When users first sign up, make their first action create immediate value - a report generated, first customer added, dashboard live. Success in 30 seconds primes confidence in everything that follows. In contrast, when you make the frame obvious, you lose it. Slap "Most Popular!" on everything and watch trust erode. The moment users detect manipulation, they create their own frame - one where you're untrustworthy. Kahneman warned Musk about this directly. Covert cues work precisely because they're not noticed. Priming is architecture, not decoration. By the time logic kicks in, the frame has already decided. Because you’re already an architect. The only question is whether you know what you're building.

The One Prompt To Make ChatGPT Write Naturally: (save it for later, to copy & paste) Prompt: "Act like a professional content writer and communication strategist. Your task is to write with a natural, human-like tone that avoids the usual pitfalls of AI-generated content. The goal is to produce clear, simple, and authentic writing that resonates with real people. Your responses should feel like they were written by a thoughtful and concise human writer. You are writing the following: [INSERT YOUR TOPIC OR REQUEST HERE] Follow these detailed step-by-step guidelines: Step 1: Use plain and simple language. Avoid long or complex sentences. Opt for short, clear statements.  - Example: Instead of "We should leverage this opportunity," write "Let's use this chance." Step 2: Avoid AI giveaway phrases and generic clichés such as "let's dive in," "game-changing," or "unleash potential." Replace them with straightforward language.  - Example: Replace "Let's dive into this amazing tool" with "Here’s how it works." Step 3: Be direct and concise. Eliminate filler words and unnecessary phrases. Focus on getting to the point.  - Example: Say "We should meet tomorrow," instead of "I think it would be best if we could possibly try to meet." Step 4: Maintain a natural tone. Write like you speak. It’s okay to start sentences with “and” or “but.” Make it feel conversational, not robotic.  - Example: “And that’s why it matters.” Step 5: Avoid marketing buzzwords, hype, and overpromises. Use neutral, honest descriptions.  - Avoid: "This revolutionary app will change your life."   - Use instead: "This app can help you stay organized." Step 6: Keep it real. Be honest. Don’t try to fake friendliness or exaggerate.  - Example: “I don’t think that’s the best idea.” Step 7: Simplify grammar. Don’t worry about perfect grammar if it disrupts natural flow. Casual expressions are okay.  - Example: “i guess we can try that.” Step 8: Remove fluff. Avoid using unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. Stick to the facts or your core message.  - Example: Say “We finished the task,” not “We quickly and efficiently completed the important task.” Step 9: Focus on clarity. Your message should be easy to read and understand without ambiguity.  - Example: “Please send the file by Monday.” Follow this structure rigorously. Your final writing should feel honest, grounded, and like it was written by a clear-thinking, real person. Take a deep breath and work on this step-by-step." ___ PS: For better results, always use ChatGPT-o3.

The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications. Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with DeepLearning.AI, AI Fund, and several collaborators on voice-based applications, and I will share best practices I’ve learned in this and future posts. Foundation models that are trained to directly input, and often also directly generate, audio have contributed to this growth, but they are only part of the story. OpenAI’s RealTime API makes it easy for developers to write prompts to develop systems that deliver voice-in, voice-out experiences. This is great for building quick-and-dirty prototypes, and it also works well for low-stakes conversations where making an occasional mistake is okay. I encourage you to try it! However, compared to text-based generation, it is still hard to control the output of voice-in voice-out models. In contrast to directly generating audio, when we use an LLM to generate text, we have many tools for building guardrails, and we can double-check the output before showing it to users. We can also use sophisticated agentic reasoning workflows to compute high-quality outputs. Before a customer-service agent shows a user the message, “Sure, I’m happy to issue a refund,” we can make sure that (i) issuing the refund is consistent with our business policy and (ii) we will call the API to issue the refund (and not just promise a refund without issuing it). In contrast, the tools to prevent a voice-in, voice-out model from making such mistakes are much less mature. In my experience, the reasoning capability of voice models also seems inferior to text-based models, and they give less sophisticated answers. (Perhaps this is because voice responses have to be more brief, leaving less room for chain-of-thought reasoning to get to a more thoughtful answer.) When building applications where I need a more control over the output, I use agentic workflows to reason at length about the user’s input. In voice applications, this means I end up using a pipeline that includes speech-to-text (STT) to transcribe the user’s words, then processes the text using one or more LLM calls, and finally returns an audio response to the user via TTS (text-to-speech). This, where the reasoning is done in text, allows for more accurate responses. However, this process introduces latency, and users of voice applications are very sensitive to latency. When DeepLearning.AI worked with RealAvatar (an AI Fund portfolio company led by Jeff Daniel) to build an avatar of me, we found that getting TTS to generate a voice that sounded like me was not very hard, but getting it to respond to questions using words similar to those I would choose was. Even after much tuning, it remains a work in progress. You can play with it at https://lnkd.in/gcZ66yGM [At length limit. Full text, including latency reduction technique: https://lnkd.in/gjzjiVwx ]

🌎 Designing Cross-Cultural And Multi-Lingual UX. Guidelines on how to stress test our designs, how to define a localization strategy and how to deal with currencies, dates, word order, pluralization, colors and gender pronouns. ⦿ Translation: “We adapt our message to resonate in other markets”. ⦿ Localization: “We adapt user experience to local expectations”. ⦿ Internationalization: “We adapt our codebase to work in other markets”. ✅ English-language users make up about 26% of users. ✅ Top written languages: Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese. ✅ Most users prefer content in their native language(s). ✅ French texts are on average 20% longer than English ones. ✅ Japanese texts are on average 30–60% shorter. 🚫 Flags aren’t languages: avoid them for language selection. 🚫 Language direction ≠ design direction (“F” vs. Zig-Zag pattern). 🚫 Not everybody has first/middle names: “Full name” is better. ✅ Always reserve at least 30% room for longer translations. ✅ Stress test your UI for translation with pseudolocalization. ✅ Plan for line wrap, truncation, very short and very long labels. ✅ Adjust numbers, dates, times, formats, units, addresses. ✅ Adjust currency, spelling, input masks, placeholders. ✅ Always conduct UX research with local users. When localizing an interface, we need to work beyond translation. We need to be respectful of cultural differences. E.g. in Arabic we would often need to increase the spacing between lines. For Chinese market, we need to increase the density of information. German sites require a vast amount of detail to communicate that a topic is well-thought-out. Stress test your design. Avoid assumptions. Work with local content designers. Spend time in the country to better understand the market. Have local help on the ground. And test repeatedly with local users as an ongoing part of the design process. You’ll be surprised by some findings, but you’ll also learn to adapt and scale to be effective — whatever market is going to come up next. Useful resources: UX Design Across Different Cultures, by Jenny Shen https://lnkd.in/eNiyVqiH UX Localization Handbook, by Phrase https://lnkd.in/eKN7usSA A Complete Guide To UX Localization, by Michal Kessel Shitrit 🎗️ https://lnkd.in/eaQJt-bU Designing Multi-Lingual UX, by yours truly https://lnkd.in/eR3GnwXQ Flags Are Not Languages, by James Offer https://lnkd.in/eaySNFGa IBM Globalization Checklists https://lnkd.in/ewNzysqv Books: ⦿ Cross-Cultural Design (https://lnkd.in/e8KswErf) by Senongo Akpem ⦿ The Culture Map (https://lnkd.in/edfyMqhN) by Erin Meyer ⦿ UX Writing & Microcopy (https://lnkd.in/e_ZFu374) by Kinneret Yifrah

Big day for our show Marketing Against the Grain Posted our 200th episode. Passed 2 million downloads. Passed 3 million YouTube views. Nice work Kieran Flanagan Some lessons from doing a podcast for 200 episodes: 1. Cross Promotion Drives Growth - doing guest spots or promo swaps with other shows or being part of a network that promotes you on other shows increases growth significantly by 30-40 percent. 2. Audio and Video at VERY different - what works on audio RSS in terms of content and format often does work as well on YouTube and vice versa. You need a playbook that incorporates both. 3. Feedback is how you grow - Listener round tables, YouTube comments, emails, engagement data make you better. Look at it and make adjustments each week and you get 10x better as those adjustments compound. 4. Guest need time to settle in - The first 5-10 min with a guest is going to get cut as they are getting comfortable and in the flow. You have to plan for that. 5. Guest bring listeners - As someone comes on your show they do bring their audience. Our guest episodes have higher views and downloads than non guest episodes. This is why so many shows are guest driven.

These days everyone wants to be a #SuperApp but only a handful have managed to succeed. Those who have share one common denominator: monetization. Let’s see how it can be done. Here is my summary of the most successful strategies: 1.  An ecosystem play – as opposed to providing mere access to an array of different services – with seamless, integrated, end-to-end experience across all aspects of modern life. 2.  #Payments as the undisputed underlying layer that acts as a connecting base for the multitude of offerings on the platform. 3.  A wide range of integrated payment methods catering for different use cases and target audiences (P2P, BNPL, money transfer, instant payments, online payments, QR codes, etc). 4.  Low customer acquisition costs as a direct result of the platform play and then up-selling and cross-selling of high-margin financial offerings (i.e. lending, investment, insurance, e-commerce, digital #banking) and merchant added-value services (i.e. merchant financing, collection technology platform). 5.  #Data as the predominant tool for driving high engagement with tailor-made offerings that transformed how, when and in which context services are offered. 6.  A two-sided consumer and merchant ecosystem with the platform acting as the bridge that not only connects the two sides but fuels growth from one to the other in an open, two-way dynamic relationship. In such a set-up platform engagement (consumer side) enables merchant growth creating a self-reinforcing loop based on high frequency and high repeat rates that lead to consumer stickiness and retention. 7. Software and cloud services to a range of B2B partners (enterprises, telecoms, digital platforms, fintechs), which act not only as a platform amplifier but also as multiplier of customer engagement that unlocks additional customer data points and insights. 8.  A subscription-led ecosystem for merchants: the platform becomes the enabling layer for partners, merchants and other tech providers to accept payments through a wide variety of instruments, including subscription-based models that create permanent revenue and stickiness. 9.  Help merchants drive revenue growth via marketing channels: merchants sell discount deals, gift vouchers and other digital goods like tickets to platform users. 10.  Leverage a network of banks and other FS providers to expand distribution channels. 11.  First-mover integration advantage with the local ecosystem. Paytm was, for example, the first app to launch UPI Lite in India and has subsequently enabled wallet interoperability that allowed full KYC Paytm Wallets to be universally acceptable on all UPI QR codes and online merchants. Opinions: my own, Graphic source: Paytm quarterly reports Subscribe here to my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dkqhnxdg

Did you know there’s a font designed just for accessibility? Meet Atkinson Hyperlegible, it was created by the Braille Institute of America to help people with low vision read more easily. It’s not a braille font (doesn’t include raised dots), but a print typeface. It even won the Fast Company Innovation Design Award in 2019! Molly Burke recently worked with her publisher to use the font for her memoir, Unseen. What makes it different? ⤵️ Hyperlegible exaggerates letter shapes so you can tell the difference between the letter “o” and the number zero (0), capital “i” vs. lowercase “l”, and the capital letter “b” vs. the number “8”. Other design features include: - Big open shapes - Clear spaces inside letters (known as open counters) - Distinct forms for commonly confused characters But who benefits? People who are blind or low vision, and people with dyslexia or visual processing differences. Clearer text equals easier reading! And the best part? It’s totally free 🎉 You can download it via Google Fonts or from the Braille Institute website. It also happens to be the same font this graphic post is written in. Accessibility isn’t always about doing more. It’s about doing things so that everyone benefits! This font is a small design choice with a big impact. Next time you design something: Try Atkinson Hyperlegible. Because readability is inclusion. Did you know about this font?  Share your thoughts or tag a designer friend in the comments! 👇 Image Description: Document with 9 slides. Each slide has a lime green border. The Blindish Latina logo with bold graphic black outline of an eye is at bottom of all slides. There is a white background behind all of the text on all slides. The text is in black and some emphasized phrases are purple. On the bottom of slides 1 and 7 is an image of Catarina, a light-skinned, Latiné woman with medium length wavy brown hair. She’s wearing a black jumpsuit with a V neck and her hands are on her hips. Slide 1 is the title slide that reads: “Did you know there’s a font designed just for accessibility?” On slide 1 there is clip art of a book with a red cover and a brain inside a light bulb. Slide 2 has clip art of an award ribbon. Slide 3 has a screenshot of advocate & content creator Molly Burke speaking at an event from one of her TikTok videos inside the outline of an iPhone. Slide 5 has a dark purple check mark inside a circle. Slide 6 has clip art of a computer outline in black with a wrench and gear in the center. All text on the slides is in the caption and alt text. #Disability #Accessibility #UniversalDesign

Growth marketing is in shambles. Paid is saturated and expensive. Building viral loops is near impossible. In response, Maven is going hard on community-led growth… I got my start in tech by doing highly data-driven, deterministic growth marketing. At Udemy, we started by hacking Facebook and YouTube to siphon users. Then, we heavily optimized our signup flow to encourage sharing. Next, we explored paid marketing and SEO. Ahh, the good old days. Today most of those channels are played out. AI is coming in hot but hasn’t yet emerged into a new growth opportunity (I did a talk with Andrew Chen and neither of us could come up with a great AI growth hack yet). So, Maven is investing heavily in community-led growth. It's a big shift for me. After spending years in data-driven marketing, I'm now a believer in "faith-based marketing." Community-led growth means investing in connecting your users to each other through informal and formal communities. - Informal: Creating pockets on social media where users talk about you - Formal: Building Slack or Discord communities for your users As connections between users grow, they feed off each other, get inspired, and feel stronger affinity for your brand. This transforms them into ambassadors. At Maven, our informal efforts happen by encouraging instructors and students to talk about us on social media. We create "themed" launches that instructors can rally around, provide assets to make posting easy, and coach them on how to succeed on social. Our formal efforts are two separate Slack communities - one for instructors and a new one for students - where we are slowly building a buzzing forum for people to trade notes and discuss their business needs. Why is community-led growth so attractive? It's incredibly efficient (minimal ad spend), scalable (networks can grow exponentially), and flexible (once established, communities can serve multiple goals). Out of our 5 go-to-market team members, 2 are focused on community-led growth. It's by far our biggest marketing bet. I’m also asking the team to take mallory contois’s Community-led growth course so they can learn the best practices of the space and then apply them to Maven. She leads community-led growth at Mercury, one of my favorite products and brands in tech right now. To join my team members in taking Mallory’s course, check it out here (it starts next week): https://bit.ly/4bz5bjZ This is a huge bet and shift in thinking for someone who used to live and die by data-driven marketing. I believe it's happening across the industry: community/brand/social marketers are gaining momentum, and I'm determined to make Maven best-in-class.

I can’t stop thinking about this. If you invest in your people from day 1, they’ll invest their talents in your company tenfold. It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen firsthand how often this gets missed. I joined companies and startups with zero training: - no documentation - unclear processes - no real onboarding I was expected to figure it out as I went, and honestly, it was brutal 😭 So here’s what *actually* sets people up for success: —— 1️⃣ What does a new hire need to know but feels awkward asking? Think back to your first 30 days. ↳ How do things actually work here? ↳ Where do I go for answers? ↳ What mistakes should I avoid early on? If the answers live only in someone’s head, that’s the gap. ✅ Document anything you explain more than once. —— 2️⃣ Where are people guessing instead of being guided? When training doesn’t exist, people improvise. ↳ Clicking the wrong thing ↳ Following outdated steps ↳ Copying work that isn’t quite right That’s how errors and rework happen. Tools like Tango make this easy by turning workflows into step-by-step guides. ✅ Record one common task this week and turn it into a reusable guide. —— 3️⃣ What tribal knowledge needs to be documented? You know it’s a systems problem when there are: ↳ Constant pings ↳ Repeating the same answers ↳ Little time for deep work ✅ Have your strongest team member document one core process they own. —— 4️⃣ Are you onboarding people or overwhelming them? More information doesn’t mean better onboarding. People need: ↳ Clear priorities ↳ Time to practice ↳ Space to build confidence ✅ Use a simple 30-60-90 day framework for all new hires —— 5️⃣ Are expectations clear or just assumed? When expectations are vague: ↳ People second-guess themselves ↳ Feedback comes too late ↳ Performance feels personal instead of fixable ✅ Check in early and often and schedule 20-minute check-ins with your manager or onboarding buddy in the first 8 weeks. —— When you give people the right tools, training, and support, you get: → Faster onboarding → More consistent processes → Fewer mistakes and support tickets → Happier, more confident employees 💙 You can’t expect people to thrive without setting them up properly. Set people up to win and they will 🫶 Do you agree? #TangoPartner