Podcasts about desktop neo

"Hey Alexa, I messed up." Immediately, flowers are purchased and sent to your wife's office, along with a heartfelt card. Ten different messages were solicited on Mechanical Turk and the best was selected by votes on the same service. Using her Amazon purchase history, her favorite brand of chocolate was determined and a bar was sent to your home, along with her preferred wine. The Foursquare most-romantic restaurants are consulted, and a reservation is made via OpenTable at the one with the highest Yelp ratings. Google automatically determines the best route and calls you and your wife individual Ubers to meet up at the restaurant — but just one to take you home. Viv Facebook M SMS-Based question answering services Mechanical Turk Amazon MayDay The World's Fastest Phone (made by Lamborghini) "The best interface is no interface" Another (better) take Adobe Comp Siri without voice Desktop Neo on voice Siri's insanely specific syntax for commands Google Inbox Academic article on Trust in Automation Spark email Wolfram Alpha climate change example

Сегодня прикидываем, как уйти в IT и не облажаться, эмулируем Windows 98 на Mac и затариваемся играми на распродаже. Ностальгируем по Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath и Dune 2000, хвалим божественные наушники BeoPlay H8 и кормим польские компостеры-убийцы.

Desktop Neo, rethinking the desktop interface and Dribbble Playbook.Follow up We beat Tobias on Product Hunt ​

This we discuss various implementations of Stack Views, UI Testing and Unwind Segues. An Apple Watch Easter Egg is debunked as well as the Stolen app. Picks: Desktop Neo, A simple tip to reduce App Store rejections and Testing in iOS. Episode 75 Show Notes: UIStackViews Sam Davies Introducing Stack Views Series (Swift) XCode 6: How To Debug The View Hierarchy In Your Storyboard Mysteries of Auto Layout, Part 1 TZStackView OAStackView You need to read this review Canada Mac Prices Oil price falls below $28 a barrel - less than cost of an actual barrel Calabash Appium Robotium Expresso Nimble Snapshots - Ash Furrow Eidolon code walkthrough unwind segues vs delegation in storyboards Apple Watch Easter Egg Stolen, which turned your Twitter profile into a trading card, is pulled from the App Store Tim Mitra - RoundaboutFM podcast Episode 75 Picks: Desktop Neo A simple tip to reduce App Store rejections Testing in iOS Series

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work together. And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so. Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to see very dramatically. 00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that I’m practicing something that’s fairly different. 00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit, which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio. 00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way. I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view. Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way to make some of the ideas actually happen. Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential exists in Maspace. And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of like exploring platforms, but then also exploring smaller, more contained experiences that attempt to deliver sort of flow state to people. I think I’ll be sharing some of them soon, is what I’ll say. There’s two particularly I’m excited about. The first one is sort of looking at screenshots as a metaphor, sort of inspired by. I saw this guy tweet once like screenshots and then you save and then obviously Omar’s work on screen notate. 00:05:15 - Speaker 2: Universal solvent is usually the way we put that now. 00:05:18 - Speaker 1: A screenshot sort of experience is something I’ve been working on with a collaborator called Tyler Egert, and he’s currently at this startup called Reple. And then a separate project is sort of like a take on a to do list that sort of imagines to do lists in the context of your social media feed. But that’s a much longer conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that soon. 00:05:40 - Speaker 2: We’ll be excited to see those. Well, yeah, I’ll link the projects we’re mentioning here other than the ones that aren’t out yet, of course, in the show notes. So yeah, Mercury OS, which is kind of a rethink everything in the sort of the operating system interface, and then MakeSpace, I can see the thread there, I can see how that’s related. Makespace is an app for lack of better word for kind of spatial video chat experience if I’m understanding that correct. But you can see how that’s an offshoot or a different way to cut the kind of the operating system space, but maybe a little bit more focused specifically around the video meeting domain. Does that sound about right? 00:06:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think the original prototype that Asa hacked together was just spatial browsing. I think video was the second thing we added. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it kind of started as a vision for a spatial browser. And when we brought Wei Wei into the project, she had all these amazing ideas about like bidirectional linking and then we had ideas about like how to use web apps, like how this might enable people to disassemble and reassemble web apps. And like use them as modules and how you could essentially author your own ideal interface environments. And then sort of the faces going into that experience is sort of like COVID was raging here. It was having a grand old time and we just felt like, why not coexist next to, we think about breaking boundaries between app silos. What about the silo between what I do on my computer and people. So yeah, that’s a little bit about how that project came together. 00:07:14 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good way to tee up the topic that we’re kind of theming around today, which is rethinking the OS, and I wrote an article recently kind of talking about some core interactions and I listed off some of these what I would call concept projects. You tell me if you think it’s fair to group these together, but I put Mercury Desktop Neo is one that our colleague. Leonard, the Muse designer did while he was in university. There’s another one called artifacts, which is very interesting, goes very deep, and all of these have maybe the quality of sort of really rethinking from the ground up. It’s not just how do we remake one part of this, but if we really had a blank slate, how would we, how, how would we want. to be knowing what we know now in terms of new software, new paradigms with, yeah, whether it’s social media or video capabilities or really large screens or touch screens. A lot has changed since the core interactions that make up certainly the desktop operating systems, even mobile in a way is now well established compared to all that’s come up. 00:08:19 - Speaker 1: I remember I seen Desktop Neo and then this other project artifacts and around the time that I was writing the story around Mercury, and I remember thinking like, oh fuck, am I allowed to swear? 00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Oh, it just means that when I edit the XML for the episode, I have to flip the explicit switch from yes to no. Although it is very good that the podcast RSS feed format lets you flag specific episodes. I had to first do this for Josh Miller from the browser company. He was an enthusiastic swearer, and I felt like editing that out would be taking away some of the. The character. So please proceed. 00:08:55 - Speaker 1: You, you can feel free to add a bleep somewhere. I think that’s always fun and dramatic and it feels like you’re in a sitcom. Anyway, so, yeah, I remember seeing Desktop Neo and artifacts, and I was like, fuck. People are gonna be like, you ripped them off, because the things that I recognized was this desire to extend the desktop horizontally. To have the component of like your windows should be able to flow horizontally and off this arbitrary bounding box. And I think like Mercury is definitely not the first project to sort of envision that. And I really think that all of these speculative projects point towards that future of people wanting, for lack of a better word, more space, and also, I think it’s something that I would be curious to see. Happening in some way. I mean, one could argue that with iOS 14 widgets, I know that it seems like quite an incremental or even catch up, so to speak, but if you look into the future and you imagine like widgets and also app clips, and now things can live in your home screen that are more than just icons, and then your home screen having the ability to obviously swipe between pages, some interesting connections there that I would be curious to see where that leads. 00:10:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Mark, what’s your take on rethinking the OS, these concept projects, and then more to the point maybe where they point, which is, do we need or is there value in a fairly dramatic rethink of the fundamental interactions versus, you know, what we have is tried and true. 00:10:30 - Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s certainly always worth trying. There’s so much upside if you get it right, if you land on something interesting. So I’m glad to see all the experiments, and I do think that the fundamentals underpinning all of our work are changing, so we’re getting bigger screens, we’re getting touch screens, we’re getting new. Graphics pipelines that are much more GPUs and parallellyzed, and I think a huge one is we’re getting very different economic models around the operating systems and the platforms and all of those have, and I think will continue to drive changes. So iOS was about touch and the new economic model mostly. And things like these new desktop explorations, I would say are more powerful, bigger screens and touch moving into the desktop platform and things like that, as well as having enough processing power and media that things become much more rich, interactive, visual in a way that they weren’t really even 10 years ago. So, I think it’s worth pursuing. 00:11:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s one of the things I think a lot about with what do computing for productive uses look like in the relatively near future is we now have this huge screens, the multimedia stuff, you know, video is just absolutely everywhere, for example, but we also have the diversity of input. This is one thing I like a lot about the. iPad stylus, touch with the fingers, trackpad, keyboard, you can throw voice in the mix there, and then if you go to, OK, everyone’s waiting for that drafting table sized or maybe just IMAX sized iPad that seems likely to come in the not too distant future or something like it. And then you can imagine something that feels a lot more like a room-sized thing where maybe you have multiple screens, which is already the case that we all kind of have our phones sitting there in the desktop and maybe you’ve also got the tablet. You got the voice interfaces, you’ve got the different kinds of inputs, and you put all that together and I don’t know what it adds up to necessarily, but it does seem to imply some fundamentally different relationship with your computing devices, even just how you relate to them in physical space, your posture as you use them. 00:12:28 - Speaker 3: And speaking of the human element here, we’ve done a kind of systems analysis of why might you different operating systems to emerge. There’s also the human side, which is when you put these new OS’s in front of people, you get a very positive reaction. They say things like, yes, this is how I want to feel as a user of my computer. It’s a very visceral reaction. And so I think there is a, there’s a gap between how computers currently work and how people want to feel when they’re using their tools. And that I think is still a big space to explore. 00:12:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when I started with Mercury, it started as a purely like surface level ergonomics project. It was so funny. It started as a design system of like, let’s make things look better. And then I’m like, wait, no, like that’s not actually why I don’t like my computer. Things look OK, generally, and I’m like, OK, well, maybe let’s make things move better. And then I’m like, hm I don’t know that the choreography is necessarily a problem that much. And then there was a phase where I realized that the ways that we are conditioned to think about interaction design. When I first started learning about it, it was like you use sketch, and then you, which is basically illustrator, and you have art boards, and then you link art boards together and then you basically make a choose your own adventure presentation thing. And that’s interaction design. And I realized like the real ergonomics part that I felt like was missing was the in between. Each moment of transition should feel like a moment of power, should feel like you can sort of change your mind or keep going, but the way that we’ve been conditioned to design sort of digital products don’t really. I don’t really feel like it affords that way of thinking about how interfaces work, unless you use something like origami or court composer or code. And so it was at that moment that I’m like, maybe this ergonomic problem goes a little deeper, and that’s when I started to think on more of like a system level. I think before that, I didn’t feel like I had permission to, you know? During my internship at Apple, it was actually a friend of mine, Marissa. We were just having a conversation about Siri one night and she just started asking like, do you think this is really like what voice interfaces should be like? Do you think there should be all these different modes? Do you think that having a little brick in your phone that holds all the power is the right way for computers to sort of expand into and. I had just never thought about things like that before. I was just trying to make screens that moved, that looked and felt ergonomic. I wasn’t thinking about the actual base layer, why? And so after that, it sort of felt like suddenly a whole new world of just asking questions and digging myself into a rabbit hole was just possible. And the process behind thinking of Mercury was very similar. It was basically that, but in a design process. And I think what you’re saying about people being drawn to These very tactile experiences, I think, in the process of researching for Mercury, I read a lot of like white paper style things. And I was just incredibly bored or not stimulated by them because I’m like, yeah, you kind of have these drawings that look like memes of diagrams that look like they go in a patent. I care about this because I happen to like designing computers, but you put it in front of anyone else, and they’re like, why should I care? And so it became apparent that If I wanted to create a vision that people cared about, that I would have to focus a lot on the craftsmanship, the visual design, and also the storytelling delivery. 00:15:45 - Speaker 3: It’s funny you mentioned that Adam and I were just talking about this this morning. You basically can’t explainm to people with text. It just doesn’t work as an empirical matter. What really works is video and animation. And I think this is resonant with what you were saying, where you need the right medium to convey your emotional message. 00:16:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned about the concept of a tool for thought after moving to the bay. It’s one of those things where I just like kind of don’t get it, where kind of everything is a tool for thought. Um, but I kind of understand why there is this specific community that’s very obsessed over thinking about thinking tools, essentially. And I think giving something a phrase gives it power sort of reference points. And so I think absolutely like, I think when I first found news, I can’t remember the copywriting, but I can remember seeing the gesture on the iPad and seeing things zoom in and out and seeing writing being just all over it and just thinking like, yeah, that’s how it should work. And I think it’s successful in that it makes things seem very obvious in hindsight, and I think that’s sort of a quality that I really aspire to achieve when I design. News is interesting because you can tell a lot of OS or platform level thinking goes into it and it’s an app. And same with sort of makespace where even though internally we think about it as like a social collaborative operating system, it’s an app. And then my instinct is that there’s going to be a lot more in the coming years slash months, and I would be curious to see like, you know how Android has like launchers, that, but for my desktop experience. Though I’m unclear how that might happen. But something very compelling someone said to me was like, Google search is basically an OS now. And when I think about operating systems, it’s less like Unix and like how you actually what this is, and engineers are probably going to send me death threats, but like I really don’t care. Why should I care about that? As a person who likes computers and likes to play with computers, I just want to worry about how it feels and looks, and that’s really how customers were users. I don’t like that word either, but customers would think about it or people. So double edged sword, probably. 00:17:51 - Speaker 3: I think this is also kind of inevitable because operating systems are, by definition very general and complex. It’s about being able to host other programs, and it’s the nature of complex things that they inevitably arise from simple things. I forget the person this is named after, but that’s a lie if we can put it in the show notes. So that’s why we see most of the platforms evolve from something simpler, either from an app, so I would put the Web browser in this category, it started as an app on, you know, Windows and Mac and so on, but now it’s basically a whole other platform. Or you see basically a small kernel of fixed apps evolve into a platform. This is the iOS story. There wasn’t an app store, remember, it was just, there was the calculator and the male app and Safari, and that was, you know, kind of it. If you want something else too bad. But eventually they generalized it into a real platform, a real OS that can run user supplied apps. 00:18:36 - Speaker 2: If you want that back even further, I usually think the iPod is the start of the iOS story. So it really was a completely dedicated device for playing music and had a very, very simple, but in fact innovative interface, the little wheel was recognizable. It was fit for the purpose of on the go, music listening. Very simple screen, but all designed to really solve that problem extremely well in a way that maybe MP3 players at the time didn’t. And then yeah, that evolved upwards into more and more complex platforms to the point that today I think it’s one of the world’s most sophisticated places to build applications. 00:19:12 - Speaker 3: And this to me is a really interesting and important research question in. Operating systems, what’s the path that you take in the path dependent sense to get to the place you want to be? Like you need to have a vision, you need some provocations for, OK, I think we want this style of operating system, but it’s very much a social, economic path dependent question on how you actually get there. It’s extraordinarily expensive to develop an operating system these days. So you can’t just suppose the final step. 00:19:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now it also has to live up to everyone’s expectations of not only what it can do, but the ecosystem that it brings. And I think, you know, I have zero idea how any of this will happen, slash if it’s ever going to happen, but I would love to live in a world one day where instead of having like 500 note taking apps, I can just piece together and buy a la carte elements of different experiences that I like. Obviously there’s an entire conversation around like how capitalism works and what’s profitable and blah blah blah, but, you know, one can dream. Mainly I’m just tired of I’m tired of opening all my Adobe apps, and they’re basically like a canvas that you draw things on and then different ways to make things adhere to or not adhere to the grid and treating things as faster versus vector blah blah blah. Like to me, uh, it just seems like mentally I just envisioned it as a canvas that I can bring in different tools as needed and that should be how my workflow is, which one day like, it would be amazing if something like Makespace would turn into that sort of platform. Given its inherently spatial nature. 00:20:50 - Speaker 3: The Canvas thing is interesting. We’ve seen that emerge as a key content type, I would argue over the past few years. By Canvas, I mean it’s free form, it’s mixed media, uh, you have some flexibility, so Figma, Makerspace, makespace, Muse, a lot of these apps have developed this and they’re all kind of circling around a similar idea. It’s like this thing where you can put whatever you want, however you want. And that hasn’t quite been baked into an operating system proper yet, although it’s funny, it kind of harkens back to the old school classic desktops, which we almost forget about, but that’s like the OG canvas. 00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that we’ve talked about a lot internally is how used to our people to this canvas metaphor when they don’t spend their days clicking around in FigMA or using Adobe Suite. 00:21:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s sort of the opposite of the particularly the phone innovation of you have one app at a time, it’s full screen, and that’s all you can do. And actually that’s an improvement for certain cases on the desktop complex windows that overlap with buttons on them, and you can minimize things and they have these menus and there’s focus and there’s all this confusing stuff to keep track of, but at the same time. Time for a more powerful environment where you do have multiple documents open, you need to move things around between them. You have different kinds of media, different kinds of things that you need to look alongside each other, move stuff between things, copy paste, and so on, the mobile one app at a time is the wrong metaphor. And so yeah, in a way, these tools where the primary document is a canvas that you can put things on in a very free form way that does. and back to the GUI operating system, uh, metaphor that came out of Xerox PARC, but there you had something where you have one document, which is sort of your desktop, maybe you have 4 if you have virtual workspaces, and then the windows that you arrange, they’re very kind of temporary, right? They’re just what’s in memory, there’s no persistence, there’s no sense of a board and certainly I can’t share it. I guess there’s screen share, but. So in a way, there is something to that metaphor. I think what you find when you reinvent or rethink something is that the best qualities of a previous or of an older idea come through, but you also leave behind a lot of the things that maybe you don’t want or you can improve upon it in a dramatic way, but you can only do that, I think by having a little bit of a break. It would be hard to imagine, for example, Linux, Windows and Mac. Evolving into Figma or evolving into makespace or uses. I don’t think that could happen. They have too much baggage in history. 00:23:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the primary change that I’ve experienced in my year in the valley is, you know, last year I was all like, it’s not too late to we start delete everything, you know, everything sucks. We need to start from scratch, just everyone to stop, like, no more software. Um, whereas now I’m a lot less. I mean, I still live for speculative proposals or provocations. I love when people ask questions and when people rebel a little bit, but I think working on the sort of future stuff like it’s Tends to be a very lonely process, and you don’t get that satisfaction of like opening night when like audiences actually get to experience the work and walk away with a little bit of their lives may be changed. Sound like such a theater kid right now, but I swear that part has not died. Silicon Valley can’t kill me. Um, but I think I’m learning more as a creator to hold both truths at once, to have a series of clear North stars that I think. would really help people that I’m curious about exploring and also finding practical concrete ways to head there. So I’m not just like randomly in a lab somewhere, which is like that’s fine too, but I don’t think I’m there yet. 00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that duality is really important. You got to dream big, but also be willing to find ways to bring that into practice. I feel like you have the one extreme, which is, you might call it ivory tower head in the clouds, dreamer thing, and it’s much easier to think the big thoughts and the inspiring ideas because you’re free of the baggage of, I don’t know, reality or the status quo or what have you. But I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying and I think I’ve seen people who are Maybe tend towards that dreamer side, be even frustrated or even become bitter because they think I have all these great ideas. I figured it all out, but those ideas, if they don’t see them come to fruition somehow, it ultimately feels sort of unsatisfying. But the flip side of that, of course, which is people who are really in the day to day and the practical and being very pragmatic and incremental, which I think certainly the tech world has a very strong iterative, you know, just make your MVP and build on that. thing which I think is very good for getting going and discovering a problem and so on, but sometimes you do that that means you’re losing the ability to think big thoughts, dream big dreams, go further, move past what’s here today. And so there’s some, I feel there is some way to resolve that duality, although in a way, I think as an industry and certainly for me as an individual, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how you get the best of both worlds and hopefully the worst of neither. 00:26:04 - Speaker 1: I kind of just do things through the lens of culture to get anything to actually take off or have impact. Essentially, you need to change culture in a certain way or to have an idea influence culture. And I think there’s a place for it, you know, speculative or utopian dystopian ideas, and certainly, you know, those ideas are exciting and can excite a lot of people as like sort of aspirational pressure. Which is a term I stole from Asa, where you make something and then if enough people care about it, then that creates momentum towards that one day. And then the sort of more incremental thing is a slower way to more immediately start bending culture. I don’t think everyone should care about computers as deeply as like, maybe I do, or obviously you guys do, cause people have their own stuff going on, divorces, and I think that’s it. I think that’s the only thing that happens to people. But Um, so like, like we don’t have time. Like, don’t make me fucking worry about that. But at the same time, because computers are basically worlds that we live in now, people should feel empowered to think about it or question it if they want to. It’s sort of like, I guess politics in a way. It affects you whether you like it or not. And I think more people feel empowered to have an opinion on politics versus on like the operating system. And I think I would love to help make that conversation more accessible in some way. 00:27:24 - Speaker 3: You might not be interested in operating systems, but operating systems are interested in you. 00:27:30 - Speaker 1: The old saying, oh my goodness, is that it really, that’s that’s the same. 00:27:34 - Speaker 3: Well, it’s a classic thing with politics, right, 00:27:37 - Speaker 2: um, yeah, right, you can ignore that I don’t want to think about that, but in the end it does affect your life and that’s why it’s important for us all to be concerned citizens. Now happily, part of the magic of capitalism or just the world we live in generally is that there’s specialization. And so it’s OK that there’s people like 3 of us who for some unknown reason seem to be. obsessed with computers and we’re devoting our careers to trying to make them better as we, um, as we see, take that word to mean, whereas there’s others who are obsessed with other things and they can work on those things and hopefully we can all together make a better world for all of us. But that said, I think it is a really great point. I’m often struck when I speak to friends who are not from the tech world, and I can talk about. I don’t know, a design decision that Facebook is making, for example, and for them, it’s more like just a force of nature. There’s no the concept that there’s people behind it who are actively making a decision to do one thing versus another thing versus that it’s far away, yeah, unchangeable thing, doesn’t even enter their minds. And I understand why technology is hard to understand if you’re not in the field. Even if you’re in the field, frankly, it’s pretty hard to understand to keep up with everything, but as you said, empowered to have an opinion at the very least seems worthwhile. 00:28:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember as I was trying to think about Mercury or operating systems, I think certain people I worked with were mentors would be like, why is it something you care about? Like, are you gonna ship this thing? Like, are you gonna go propose it to like Craig Federation? Like, why? Like it’s not gonna ship. What’s the point? And I disagree still, I think. If we just stop caring about anything that we can’t change, you might as well just stop caring, period. Certainly these days it’s quite easy to just associate your life away. I mean I’ve I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I think something that was very interesting to me when I first arrived here, I think one of the first things. I did was my friend took me to Dynamicland. but my friend informed me of who Brett Victor was slash I, I knew who Warrior Dream was, but not who Brett Victor was, you know, and then about Dynamic land and that it existed. So I went and like the first thing that I thought was like, oh my God, people should be using this to make theater. This is interactive theater. Like, why isn’t this in my black box? Where are the artists, you know? And that’s something that from what I understand, maybe community outreach is not necessarily like a focus of theirs in this present moment, but I think if you’re serious about getting people excited and therefore affecting change on a cultural level, I think it starts with getting culture makers excited and. It takes me longer to do write-ups than to design things because it’s so important to me that people who had no idea of why they should care about an operating system can read the story I wrote and then walk away feeling like, yeah, I care now too. And I received lots of emails from people who are also had certain neurodiverse tendencies or just like friends in theater who I didn’t think I had permission. Like, I, I didn’t know that. Like, now I’m a lot more angry at my devices, and I’m like, you’re welcome. And I love that. I want to be remembered for making lots of people really angry. In a good way. 00:30:56 - Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people in my life often point out how I seem to be more dissatisfied with the digital technologies that we interact with every day than anyone else they know, and that sort of maybe seems like a strange, a surprising juxtaposition when I work in the field and claim to enjoy computers and the internet and software and all those sorts of things, but my patience for things that, you know, are trying to hijack my attention. Or faces that are too slow, or things that just treat me in ways that I think are not the way that these devices which are designed to serve us and help us and make us better, often do sadly these days, but it’s connected part of my passion for it is precisely because I think we can do better. Yeah. So when you talk about Brett Victor, his work is just the pinnacle of inspiring, but as far as I know, he is not doing things to really Bring his work to practical. He’s not trying to produce spin out startups or take one of his code bases and make it open source so someone can build on it. He’s trying to show what might be possible to get us to aspire to something higher to to get us excited. And I know many people who point directly to his work as something that got them maybe specifically interested in design or specifically interested in productivity tools design or specifically interested in. And user programming or some other aspect of this kind of computing for thinking and productivity and creativity. And so you could say that that, you know, you could do it just that way and Jason, I see your work is seeing a lot of that. You do these pieces where it’s not just the design you’ve made, of course, but it’s also like you said, the write up where your intention is to help people understand why. And get excited and follow the story and you probably would be OK to stop there. Now you don’t have much say over maybe you lack the satisfaction of getting to deliver something all the way through to a customer and see it put a smile on their face. But one way to do it is kind of say, well, I’ve done my part, which is to inspire and step away, assuming that you can make that into a livelihood and let others kind of productionize, you might say. But it sounds like you don’t find that satisfying enough, or you want to take it past just that inspiration stage. 00:33:13 - Speaker 1: Um, I think if I lived in my ideal world, I would never worry about shipping anything ever. I kind of view that sort of more as art though, versus design in a way. Like it feels more like a personal provocation expression, like a need to do something driven internally and design is a lot more. I interpret it as a service, and you could argue that doing aspirational conceptual work is kind of a service, but I think of it more as art versus design. And so I think if I was able to, and if I had that pedigree and following and just sweet, sweet cash. Live in capitalism, can’t pretend to live out of it, you know, whatever. I would do it. To be honest, I don’t know how long I will spend in the tech industry because I think at some point, I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell, and for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business just for me personally. 00:34:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, part of the motivation for bringing things into the real world is to understand if you got it right, because here’s the deal with reality. It’s so complex, you can’t actually understand it. These design heuristics are about coming up with a better guess and then incrementally perhaps arriving at the solution and really the only way to know is to try it. So that’s one of the reasons why I like the balance we struck with ink and switch and Muse. You have this combination of academic thinking, far out planning and vision. But then you also force that to confront reality and see what comes up, and often it’s surprising, and it’s a little bit of a bummer when your visions are contradicted by the cold hard truth, but that’s important data if you ultimately want to move the needle in the real world. 00:34:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love exploring all the interesting gestures that you guys have in use, and there’s a certain point where I’m like, if I wanted to take this out of a layer, do I just hold on to it and then move and it turns out you actually just do that, which I loved. I love when things just naturally feel like. Connected to my intent in some weird magical way. Just ergonomically, I love it. And I think on the note of like designing productivity software, I think something that I wish I had done with Mercury or just in general, is thinking about all the ways that new paradigms are fun and playful. Like, I’m sure notion and Air Table are exciting advances towards tool for thought or whatever. But like, I don’t really associate spreadsheets and databases with fun. It’s like intriguing, but it’s not fun. And the thing you mentioned with iPod click wheel was it’s just fun. It was inherently fun. There’s no like real reason why that is more efficient than buttons or like a deep pad, but it was fun and because it was fun, people cared about it and it was also great for fidgeting, which I love. I think. Part of the reasons why I get so distracted in social media nowadays is my computer. I can’t really fidget. I can like move my mouse around and or I can like sort of just like fidge on my screen just by like moving things up now. But the interface itself is not really designed to let you fidget. Anyways, so iPod was so fun, and I want to see more tools for fun. Or tools for thoughts that happen to be playful and fun and really unapologetic about it. Like I could care less about bi-directional linking, like I have no fucking clue what that even means if it’s not fun and visually palatable. 00:36:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. And to my mind, the real poster child for this is emojis, and emojis, they seem goofy and insignificant, but they’re actually a huge deal. They’re a huge deal for Slack and to me, they’re a huge deal in notion. I was having trouble. It’s like, isn’t this kind of just like Google Docs, but you know, better and it’s like, well, yeah, but I can pick the emoji for each of my docs, oh, you know, and it just it gives you much more energy and it also allows you to communicate. more effectively, I would argue so. Yes, I think that’s a big thread. 00:37:15 - Speaker 2: The fun, the playfulness, the maybe joy, I think is one of the biggest things to come out of the mobile touchscreen iOS world. And of course, consumer applications sort of were the first to get that, but I absolutely think yeah, even the term productivity tools I use that just because, well, it’s the kind of the industry name. But I think when you look at, I’ve used the example before of Slack, and why I think Slack was successful is they make talking to your teammates fun. And it wasn’t really that much fun with hip chat and Campfire and IRC somewhat the Slack somehow tipped over between, I don’t know, animated gifts and unfurl cards and emojis and a couple of other things and just maybe the sleekness of the overall experience, good mobile app and stuff like that. They just made it the thing you wanted to do. And I think there is a version of that for almost any, yeah, what’s a spreadsheet for the TikTok generation, right? 00:38:11 - Speaker 1: So a cursed phrase. Oh my God, no. Oh my goodness. 00:38:17 - Speaker 2: But sort of embracing that, hopefully not the bad, you know, I think there’s a lot of downsides to the kind of engagement oriented social media stuff that is dominating a lot of, let’s say mainstream design thinking, but there is a version of that which does come down to the fun, the playfulness, the emotiveness, the just general joy you get when you think I want to use this. to do the thing you’re going to do more of it. And that’s, that was absolutely our thinking with Muse. We’re a little more understated. We’re less of the emojis everywhere and animated gifts everywhere thing, but we do try to make it fun and interesting and fast and a little bit playful to interact with your ideas. And so I think thinking of our overall mission to help people. Be more thoughtful when I talk to people about sort of deep thinking who maybe they know, maybe, for example, there’s an important decision in their life, they should really think through deeply, but it’s really hard. Deep thinking is hard. But if you had a tool that made it fun and you thought, well, this was a chance to use that thing, and I know it’s fun to use that thing, so therefore, you’re likely to do the activity, then maybe just a few more for more folks will want to do that. 00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I feel like play and fidgeting are just my tools for thought. I can’t think if I’m strapped to a chair somewhere. And some of my most exciting sort of revelations just always come from doing improv, which I deeply miss. But it seems like the world is kind of just on improv right now, in a way that’s really hard to say yes to. Anyway. 00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a little more specific nerdy tangent is like part of the reason why I think spring dampening works so well is because when you give something physics, Spring dampening here you’re talking about when you have a transition of some kind that instead of being a linear movement, it sort of speeds up at the beginning and then slows down as the transition is coming to a close, yeah. 00:40:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, except I don’t even like to think of it as a transition. I kind of think of it as just reaction, um, because like if something is like If, if something is responsive to physics, you like bounce something a certain way, then theoretically you could also bounce it from the other way and you can start to play with it. And it doesn’t actually have to serve a concrete purpose. It’s just by nature of being responsive to physics, it makes it more playful because it kind of grounds it in the real world somehow. Whereas like, the reason why I don’t think of this transition is sort of Because it’s not like a set timing that you’re like, this transition will last for 1 2nd, it means if it’s the middle of doing something and you want it to stop, you Very difficult to describe. But that’s the more nerdy take on it is that because when you think about motion, not animation, but motion design and how things respond and react to your touch, they enforce, they create the physical world of your application. And when there is that sense of physics, there is a sense of play because then people can start experimenting with like plotting things together or breaking them apart or things like that. And to me, that’s fun. Although I feel like I hesitate to promote this. 00:41:26 - Speaker 3: It’s like very trendy right now, so you’re just like throwing it everywhere and I feel like not everything has to bounce be bouncy, but anyway, well, I think you’ve come to a very interesting distinction here because transition and animation, it almost implies that there is this point where as a user, you’ve indicated what wants to happen, the machine will now take over and for the next 200 milliseconds will direct the activities and until then you can’t do anything else. And at the end, OK, the transition is complete. Now you can go resume clicking on things, whereas physics is more like every millisecond, you’re doing something and the machine is responding to what you’re doing and you’re never giving up control. And to me, the animation for the point of showing something isn’t as interesting as making it responsive to what you’re always doing, right, 00:41:58 - Speaker 3: the physics. 00:41:59 - Speaker 1: My pet peeve is when. Everyone designs motion for interfaces on the aftereffects and just have these like really specific 3 point motion curves and I’m like, literally no one’s gonna like that after the first round. They think, oh, this is fun and smooth. And the second time they’re gonna swipe something and it’s gonna have this perfectly choreographed transition and you’re like, oh, I don’t feel like that’s because I did something. I feel like I just triggered a 1 or 0. And that’s actually like, I think like for touch, like bounce and spring dampening works because your fingers are soft, so there is the inherent element of the input device has bounced. Whereas like, I don’t, for example, for mouse cursor interactions, since it’s very much like your mouse is either down or it’s not, it might be less appropriate. Yeah. But on the most surface level, it’s fun and that was my first impression, you know, I wasn’t like, oh, this responds to my input and therefore, it’s a prosthetic to like, no, this is super fun swipe to unlock. So therefore, I shall sell out my soul to tech forever. 00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Maybe what you said there ties together a couple of themes we’ve touched on here, which is the mouse versus touch and how the system should respond in terms of like how things feel within the physics of the virtual world you’re interacting with. I think there is this tendency, Mark usually calls it transliteration, which is if you take an application or a type of application that’s sort of for the desktop and you put it on to say a tablet or. vice versa, to basically bring across some of those same basic interactions. But in fact, the mouse or the trackpad is a much more precise tool than the finger. And there’s pros and cons to that. Sometimes the precision is actually really annoying. It’s too precise, it’s too fussy, and then other times it’s what you want, but in any case, the system responding to that. And so I think, for example, one of the places that the Windows. The surface platform falls down a little bit is that it essentially treats those as the same thing. When you touch the screen, it’s essentially just kind of moving your mouse cursor there and clicking. And you know, that’s a very sort of obvious thing. They’re both ways to point, so why not do the same thing? And to be fair, they were pretty early, so they were still just exploring this, but a more thoughtful or a more considered way to go about it is to think of each of these input devices and as we have more and more of them and the diversity of them, as we talked about before, and making each one serve its different purpose, and that also means that the physics of the system should react and feel different. And obviously, it will take us a long time to build all that out potentially, but I think it’s really worth doing to make the kind of creative environment, at least that I want to have. 00:44:31 - Speaker 1: When I think about things like head tracking or eye tracking or even voice recognition, those are the moments that I’m curious to look at. You know, not necessarily like, hey Alexa do blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s like very clear start and end, and you have a single thing you want to do, but more like as you’re in the process of doing something, maybe there are small ways that your body naturally responds to something that informs some part of the UI or how, I don’t know. That starts a whole other conversation about muscle memory, modular interfaces, pros and cons, but it is a specific curiosity of mine, especially as I think we start moving away from. We’ve been accumulating more and more devices and now I think we’re naturally headed to a world where your points of contact and essentially the, the power of the computer is more distributed. It could be all over your home, it could be everywhere you go because of headphones that you’re wearing or certain headsets. And I think when that world arrives, I’m interested in seeing the ways that interfaces change to sort of see if interfaces kind of move towards the direction of like multimodal input, if at all. 00:45:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. This is another example of where the fundamentals are changing because until basically very recently, voice recognition wasn’t viable, wasn’t fast enough, it wasn’t cheap enough, it wasn’t accurate enough, and it’s just now, I think, crossing the threshold and probably similarly with eye tracking, but I know for a while they’ve had specialized hardware that you can use at labs but it was expensive and uncomfortable. That’s also, I think they can do it with commodity cameras now. So interesting times for sure. 00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and something that I hope to see more in new tools for thought or productivity tools is just, as I mentioned, more embrace of just fun, physics, and also things just being more sexy in general. I think making something desirable is Oh God, I was reading this tweet the other day of some like thought leader going like, if you have to pick between like what you’re wearing in the morning, that you’re not doing real work, I’m like, shut the fuck up. Like, literally take your Patagonia vest and I don’t know, jump off the go but that’s too harsh. Just like, no, like, that’s so important to people like that. That’s what makes people human. Like we just naturally or instinctively, we just find certain things desirable, and that’s OK. And that should absolutely be a part of the consideration and focus for when we design new sort of environments and interactions that we hope people will care about. And right now, Adam, I think you mentioned that it’s very hip and trendy to work on things like, you know, perhaps Instagram. Although probably not anymore, but like maybe TikTok, spreadsheets less. And I think part of it is just the inherent fun factor. And the other part of it is like, you don’t really associate culture with spreadsheets, but you absolutely associate culture with social media. And so I really think that if you can create software with the intention of creating a cultural movement or a cultural shift, that will really perhaps help you in some way. I say you as like a disembodied you, not like you, um. It’s like if I were, I don’t know, a meme generator, I would just have that diagram of Steve Jobs with the liberal arts and technology crossroads in his background, but yeah. 00:47:45 - Speaker 2: Now I love that tools are about the communities and the culture that come along with them. We don’t use them in a vacuum. We don’t get excited to use them, and we don’t continue to use them and we don’t certainly in a collaborative work environment which we almost all find ourselves in, yeah, sharing. You could argue that for For example, a collaboration tool like GitHub or one like Figma, those bring along with them certain culture. And that’s part of why you, let’s say get into the tool and part of what keeps you there and part of what shapes your work and part of what makes it fun, and part of what inspires you or upsets you, maybe depending. But the point is, it’s not this dry, sterile, just kind of solving a problem and moving on. Uh there is culture with it. 00:48:30 - Speaker 1: I love that. And there’s that continued discourse between culture and impact and what you’re making. And something I hope to see more is like, you know, as we create these new environments to live in and live with. That we become more aware of certain implications or results of use and misuse, and that we take responsibility for those results. That if our tool for, I don’t know, if I were to create a collaborative tool for thought and it was used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on women and minorities, I would personally take a long hard look on like the things that enable that, the culture that I have created around my tool and recognize that like. I’m a human, I’m a creator. It is OK to bring your own perspective into things because you’ve made it, and that’s just something that is on my mind a lot these days, and there really is no way to ensure that your tool is not being misused to harm people, I don’t think. 00:49:27 - Speaker 2: Design ethics has become much more of a topic or perhaps technology ethics very broadly and more here you see this in social media news and news tools and things like that that are more about spreading ideas on a wide scale, but one could imagine that coming to more sort of productivity tools style space and then maybe you want to think ahead and think, OK, so the folks that were working on social media 15 years ago didn’t really picture the ways that their work could be used for harm. And of course, you can never stop something. There’s always the potential to use something for harm, but there are ways to design it that maybe encourage more positive uses and strongly discourage more negative uses. And I think there’s a tendency for tech world people who skew young, who skew optimistic to just think of the positive cases and not think of the negative cases and therefore not hedge against potential risk and think about the responsibility of the power that they’re wielding. 00:50:27 - Speaker 1: Something I hear a lot is like you’re so negative, but I think at the root of everything, I think I’m very optimistic about what people can be as a species, as cultures, and what technology could help with. I’m very optimistic about technology and people in general, but because of that optimism, sometimes it is expressed as anger or negativity, but I really admire those who kind of just believe. Uh, fuck, I’m just gonna head into some, I’m gonna not say sappy shit on your on your podcast. I’m gonna save it for my memoir or my stand or my Netflix special. My Netflix special is coming out in about 15 years. It will be called My Career, and that is the joke. Um, I, I predict massive success from over two audience members, but um. Yeah, oops, nice. 00:51:22 - Speaker 2: I actually just watched uh David Attenborough’s uh sort of career memoir. So yeah, all, all you got to do is have um 60 years of really impressive career like that guy, and then you two can have an inspiring Netflix special. 00:51:38 - Speaker 1: 60 years is a long time. Um, I don’t know. It, I’m curious for you both is thinking about computers and tools for thought and operating systems and essentially world building. When was the first time in your life that you noticed that instinct or curiosity? 00:51:59 - Speaker 3: For me, computer programming in particular came relatively late. I didn’t really get into it until college, which is late for a lot of people that are, for example, currently in the industry, but I’d always had an interest in building things more generally, you know, model planes and rockets and Other things like that. So I think I just more struck on the right medium eventually versus a general interest. 00:52:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, for me, I certainly was fascinated by computers from my first encounter, but I think it probably connects to exactly what you said, which is the world building. So the interest in computers and the interest in games kind of came together and I pretty quickly got on from playing games to making my own games, and making games is fundamentally an act of world building and the really appeal to the systematic part of my mind. And I think it definitely influenced a lot of my views on the world, which includes calling back to right where we started, which is that the world around us is mostly constructed, the society we live in, the governments, even the physical structures, they’re constructed by humans and we can choose to make them different. very hard to change those things, but they’re not, well, I would say not set in stone, but some things actually are set in stone. But actually, even those are changeable. You just need a good jackhammer, right? And thinking of it as both this combination of, if you think systematically about the emergent effects of the world you’re building, whether that’s a game or something in the real world, something economic or social. And then similarly, as we have these increasing virtual worlds, even beyond games, but productivity tools. And collaboration spaces and online forums for a meeting to converse with our fellow citizens about the society we all live in. These are all things that we construct and we have the ability to think systematically about how the design choices that go into them, the outputs in the form of the world that we live in, and the way that that causes people to be prosperous and happy or not. And so to me, yeah, right from the start, I think that shaped how I see everything about the world. 00:54:06 - Speaker 1: When was that start for you? 00:54:10 - Speaker 2: I think maybe about 8 years old. 00:54:12 - Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness. To paraphrase one of my friends and collaborators on Makespace Maily, she often speaks of her different disciplines. I mean, she’s an interaction designer and also a DJ and also she’s interested in the culinary arts, and she just thinks about like those different practices as kind of canvases of art, and then You connect the canvases through your life to eventually create a path of your own. That’s purely paraphrasing and probably fucked it up. My fascination also began with video games. Tomb Raider was the first movie I ever saw, very interesting choice for a 5 year old. But after that, I was just obsessed with this idea that you could inhabit someone’s life and body and adventure, and inhabit a space that might feel safer in some ways. Obviously a very utopian view on computation. And then I started graphic designing and PowerPoint. I don’t think I used a real design tool until college. 00:55:12 - Speaker 3: It’s the power of general purpose tools. 00:55:15 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s to your earlier point that everything is a tool for thought and so in this case, everything can be a way to design, right? I do designs and text files with AskiR where needed, so. 00:55:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah. What’s exciting about talking to folks like you is it reminds me of, and it opens my eyes to all the things that I’m so deeply curious about exploring and learning about. And it’s really inspiring in the sense that It feels like if you’re digging for diamonds and the more you dig, there’s more interesting shiny things and you just want to keep going until you end up burying yourself and then you end up living in Oakland forever alone. But that’s a different fanfiction. 00:55:56 - Speaker 2: That metaphor did not end the way I was expecting it to. 00:55:59 - Speaker 1: I don’t know. I feel like if you dig a tunnel deep enough, it’s eventually going to end up in Oakland. I feel like, I don’t know why everyone’s like, I’m in Oakland. Like how did you get there? But yeah, something I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. It’s sort of, as I’ve been more acquainted with the culture of human computer interaction, including important cultural figures and milestones and perhaps dreams that once were. I’ve moved through several stages of like, let’s say grief. Of like denial and then sort of acceptance or Hm, that’s poorly phrase. As I’ve I’ve accumulated more knowledge into this specific cultural dome. I hear from a lot of people that their North Star is they want to achieve Engelbart’s vision of computation, or they want to, you know, make Brett Victor proud or something, something Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, something something Xanadu, you know. And I’m curious to hear if that sounds familiar and in what ways do you relate or not relate to those modes of thought. 00:57:04 - Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly familiar. Mark, I’m curious to hear what your journey was on this, but there was a kind of Let’s call a research rabbit hole or just path to go down of discovering the works of these visionary folks that you just described and seeing the big ideas that they had and so long ago that it’s just really eye opening when you compare to on one hand that we’ve achieved so much and technology has come such a long way, particularly when you look at say just the raw horsepower, computational power of computers, but then you look and you feel like maybe we haven’t quite achieved. As much as it seems like we should in terms of what computers actually do for us, and all of those folks that you mentioned and others in that world are absolutely a source of inspiration and ideas in work that I’ve been doing in the last, I don’t know, now 5 or 6 years of my career. At the same time, I do think you can over, not sure what the word is, fetishize that, which is this kind of romanticized past or You know, first of all, that these folks as visionaries, they didn’t fully manage to make their ideas come true, and I think that is a gap and that is one reason why I’m so interested in the topic we talked about earlier, which is not just how to have the big inspiring ideas, but how to bring them to reality. And then the second part of it I think is that there is a version of the kind of the Aristotle problem, right, which is you don’t move on with new ideas because you’re so busy kind of treating the ancients as having the ultimate wisdom and you just need to unlock, you’re searching for the philosopher’s stone, and you know you can find it in the books, the coded books written by the ancients, and if you just look long enough rather than thinking, well, These folks were really impressive and amazing humans that did amazing work, but at the same time, I can do that kind of work too. And maybe there’s new ideas and fresh directions for us to explore. It’s not about somehow achieving some ideal that was set forth previously, but more that we can fold those ideas in, and also learn from what worked and didn’t work with them and then make new ideas for an inspiring future. 00:59:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a lot of similar thoughts. For me, certainly the desiderata that were lai

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked. Everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should. It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, and my colleague Leonard Zaburski. Hi. And Leonard, you are a longtime member of the Muse team, you are the design powerhouse behind all the lovely things that people I think are familiar with, but it’s your first time on the podcast here, so maybe you could just quickly tell us about your background, what was your journey that brought you to Muse. 00:01:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I started about 2 years ago with MS and I actually came from studying interface design in Potsdam near Berlin here and just had done some freelancing, basically found out that wasn’t really for me and was looking for something else. So I saw that I can switch design memo you posted about news. And yeah, we kind of started working together and sort of just worked on going from a prototype into a real product. 00:01:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, maybe Mark originally found you through two works you published. One is Desktop Neo, which is sort of a rethinking of desktop operating systems for kind of more modern productivity, which obviously is quite on point for us. Then you have another done one called the Cloudfall, which I think is a bit more about consumer data, how apps could potentially in a hypothetical world kind of give users more control over their data and privacy while also giving you a lot of the benefits of the aggregation. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. 00:02:01 - Speaker 1: The other side of the origin story is whenever I’m working on a hard problem, I like to search for the prior art on it to see what other people have done and to learn from that. And so back in the early days of Muse, when we were thinking about the core design problems, I went into DuckDuckGo and typed like direct manipulation touch interface, and one of the very best things I saw was the work Mener had done like, oh man, we got to email this guy and see if we can get him to come work with us and one thing led to another. 00:02:27 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I think it was actually really good timing. You had just read the Ink & Switch piece on the Muse Studio for ideas at that point, still very much a research prototype, we were still thinking about even whether to try to commercialize it, so it was maybe hot on your mind, so the timing was very good. 00:02:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was actually really surprised after I published both of those essays, like how much feedback you can get and how well it actually works to basically publish something where you’re working on exactly the thing you’re interested in, which maybe, you know, isn’t something that a lot of people are interested in, but sort of the more niche it is, the more feedback you get from the people that also care about the same sort of stuff. And so it actually works out really well to find sort of the people you want to work with. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. Find your tribe by that weird thing that only you and 20 other people in the world care about, and if you publish that and put it on the internet, you can all kind of find each other. So our topic today is pricing, and this is a big one for a lot of reasons. So Muse just launched new pricing, we kind of call it pricing V2 internally, and just really briefly, you know, I’ll link the new pricing page and we’re gonna write a memo on it, that sort of thing, but basically we’re going from having one price, which was $100 a year, to two tiers of membership, a pro plan that remains $100 but then kind of a starter plan that’s $40 and then you can also pay for those on a monthly basis, so you can potentially get started for $4 a month. And we’ll talk a little bit more about our journey there, but I think for me one of the most important framings on this is that pricing is incredibly important. It’s really important to your business. The stakes are very high, right, the right price and you can make a successful business, the wrong price either too low or too high, and you can basically fail. And furthermore, in my experience on this, because I’ve been involved in a number of teams setting prices for products, there’s no real playbook. I feel like almost any other type of product development, business work, particularly in the startup space. Marketing, sales, engineering, design, there are playbooks and best practices and lots of material that you can find. There’s a few books and things on how to price your sass product or how to price your hourly rates as a consultant, but I found them pretty unsatisfying and it feels like a really just kind of. And frontier and no one really knows how to do it, but it’s critically important to your business and it’s really important to your customers, obviously. So I think that makes it a pretty rich topic and why I’m also really pleased we did manage to get the second iteration of pricing out because I’ve been on many teams that have done it and it’s hard, it’s hard because the stakes are high. 00:05:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the context for Muse is that we were in a relatively unexplored part of the pricing IDMAs. So if we go back to pricing V1, this is back in the early days of MUS, we had this aspiration to create a professional grade software product for. The iPad and in order to do that, it would require a lot of development work and therefore we need to fund the business reasonably and so if you kind of do the math on this stuff, we realize that you realistically need a professional price for the business to work out and for us to be able to produce and maintain the software where professional prices caught on the order of $100 a year or $10 a month. 00:05:45 - Speaker 2: And I did some search on the priority there, it’s remarkably consistent, whether you look at something like Microsoft Office back when it was sold in a box, you know, it was $300 and you’d kind of need to buy a major new version about every 3 years, whether you go forward to today with SAS subscriptions, Photoshop, that sort of thing. Some things are higher, some things are lower, but that’s quite commonly, no matter how they package, it ends up being around that amount, again, for professional software, which is typically on the desktop or on the web. 00:06:14 - Speaker 1: Right, and that’s where the first big challenge came for us. There’s very well established precedent for pricing professional and especially enterprise products in the SAS model. This is where your company uses ocean or whatever, and every seat in this app cost, I don’t know what notion is, but they’re almost all $10 + or minus $5 a month. I would bet notion is too. And the software is distributed in the usual fast model. Now, for product reasons, we really want this to be an iPad native app and a pricing challenge there is that of course you need to sell that through the app store then and pricing the app store for professional product. has historically been almost nonexistent. There are almost no products sold to the app store with a professional price. It’s much more dominated by consumer pricing, which might be free, it might be ad-based, or it might be consumption based, like a free to play game or a dating app or something. So a big question for us, a big risk for the business was can we actually deliver a professionally priced product for the iPad through the App Store. So we decided very early on to confront that question because it was a big risk and basically to try and see if it worked. And so that led us to pricing V1 which briefly was, there was one option, it was a one year membership for $99 or $99.99. 00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and for the record, I’m not a big fan of the 99 cent trailing thingies. I know why psychologically that. Yeah, $399 seems like less than $4 but that’s not a choice because we sell through the app store, that’s imposed upon us by their system, so we end up with $99.99 dollars, but I tend to, you know, just refer to it as $100 when I am speaking informally. 00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So we had this one membership option for one year for $100 and we wanted to see to what extent that would land with the market. 00:08:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I remember when we first turned on sort of the paid product, which was very, I don’t know, nerve-wracking, exciting, but also nerve wracking, both because one we knew we were taking kind of a bold position to charge sort of a desktop product price for an iPad app. Of course I believe the iPad can and should have great software. It’s an incredible piece of hardware and it seems a shame to me that there aren’t more really good professional tools for it. And so that’s part of our kind of whole hypothesis with this business. But yeah, we went to turn on the pricing, which was a little more than a year ago because we just had our first renewals come up and, you know, it really was this kind of bold experiment. We didn’t even have a monthly option, for example, and that was partially for simplicity, but it was partially to really see, OK, like if we really do this litmus test, does someone believe either the software today or more plausibly kind of the concept of what they think it could do for them is something they would pay this price for. And I remember turning it on and I thought that was very plausible that we would just get 0 people making a purchase, and pretty quickly we got our first few. I think our first few were kind of friends and family or investors or something like that just showing their support, which I appreciate and, you know, making sure our payment flow works and everything, but it wasn’t long after we turned it on that we got our first purchase from someone we didn’t even know who they were, they had never contacted support, you know, they just made a purchase and I ended up, you know, writing to some of those early people and basically kind of Not too pointedly, but kind of saying like, why did you buy this? Just to see if what they conceived, you know, what they thought they were buying or what was in their mind matched what we thought we were offering, but that was very promising. So even though early on, we’re basically still in the beta phase and we had a few users anyways, or pretty small number of active users. The fact that some of them wanted to purchase, and they wanted to purchase at this kind of unforgiving price, that didn’t even have the monthly option or whatever, that was a validation, that, yeah, we can do something in this range. 00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember sort of prepping the team on what we should expect and look for, which was we’re really trying to get a non-zero number of non-affiliated customers to buy. So it’s like excluding friends and family and investors, people who show up and believe in the software enough to pay in $100 and I say some small number because regardless of what price you charge, like if we charged 99 cents. A lot of people would say it’s too expensive. You’re always going to have a bunch of people saying that. What you really need when you’re early on is, is there some non-zero evidence this has traction and then as you go on, you need to worry more about conversion rates and so on and so forth, and we’re starting to do more of that, but it was really, can we get some initial believers and I think we did. 00:10:39 - Speaker 2: And as a product person or just speaking to kind of the product management discipline generally, will you pay or actual proof that they will pay is one of the main ways you kind of seek validation for your product market fit hypothesis, because just liking something or being enthusiastic about it or thinking it’s cool or even using it, these are all good, but enthusiasm alone. There is an indicator, but it’s not enough. There’s something really, the rubber meets the road, or it really puts a point on it to say, OK, yeah, you like this, but enough to part with your hard earned cash for it, and that’s really an important moment in those early days, it’s less about, can you make enough money and just will people pay at all, because that’s an indicator that you’ve created something of value. 00:11:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that was also a huge motivation for the whole team to go from people saying, OK, this is nice, and you know, we did use the tests and people liked it, but it’s a different level of people actually start paying for the app, you know, then you’re actually working on a product and not on a research prototyping thing anymore. 00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Oh, I agree, yeah, I totally felt like a moment of growing up, maturing, things getting real, and also on the support side right now when someone writes in and we have like a little kind of plugin in our system where we can see if they’re a paying customer or not, and if they are, you know, of course we tend to give them priority support, particularly if they have a problem, and it wasn’t right away, but I remember the first day we had essentially an angry customer where something wasn’t working the way they wanted and Yeah, they were upset because they had parted with money for this and again, it’s just a very different dynamic when you’re in this business transaction. They might like your podcast or your cool vibe or your nice design article or whatever, but at the end, now they’re using your product to solve a real problem they have. In their personal life or their professional life or whatever, and if it’s not doing what they expected or what they want it to do, they might get upset and then you have an obligation to them and it’s just very different from, check out my cool research prototype or even my MVP that I’m letting you use for free. So yeah, once we got that initial data of people would pay and they would pay this professional price, that was a good learning, but then from there, having been active for a year now and especially after we launched, there was kind of the steady trickle of beta users converting, but the launch was where, you know, the graph kind of started to change shape. In a really nice way and we started to see, OK, there really is a business here, but in the meantime, you know, we knew this was just our first stab at pricing. We knew it was never going to be the end state and so we over the course of this year, and particularly post launch when the numbers became, you can start to see patterns when the numbers are bigger. I think we learned quite a few things and that’s what kind of motivated our let’s do a pricing V2 roll in the things we’ve learned because I think price is just like product you have to iterate on it to improve it. It’s hard to do for those previous mentioned reasons, the stakes. High, it’s emotional. People hate price changes if you have to do that, but I also think it’s critically important because the price being comfortable or accessible, having to be a fit for what people want is crucial, and you just won’t get there without iteration and experimentation. 00:13:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we did notice some patterns with this V1 pricing. There were, first of all, a friend of people who were happy to pay it, so that was good, stayed 0.0, and there were not surprisingly, a lot of people who were unwilling to pay the $100 a year price. Now we expected most of that, of course. So you gotta drill in a little bit. In particular, there’s a lot of comments that essentially implied that they would never pay anything for this type of software, which is fine, you know, it’s your life and your money, but that’s not something that we were gonna be able to help them with. In the near term. But there were some more interesting cases. One group of cases is people who valued the software a lot, but have less ability to pay for various reasons. So students actually were a big group of this. A lot of students use and like Muse, but they’re in a different situation for most of the professionals who might otherwise use Muse. Another one was people who were in different countries and for reasons of the local economy or the currency, the price as it was translated originally by Apple might not have been suitable. And then I think there were also some people who were not happy about or unwilling to do a subscription, which we should talk more about. Then there were people who I think are open to the idea of using a product like Muse, but they were looking for a few more features. I think the most common things there would be sync slash collaboration and just some more core features around richer data types and so on. So I think that roughly summarizes what we learned with the one. 00:15:07 - Speaker 2: And that point around folks for whom the price wasn’t accessible, students, maybe folks globally, that leads into, I think to me, one of the underlying principles here is we’re making the software because we want as many people as possible to use what we’re creating, right? We fancy ourselves artists or artisans or something like that. We’re making this to help people and I feel incredibly good and happy when I see people using what we’ve created to do interesting work. But at the same time, we also have to make a sustainable business. I like this, I think I’ve heard people say that, you know, money and cash flow for a business is kind of like oxygen for a person. You don’t live to breathe, but you definitely need oxygen if you want to keep living. That’s not the purpose of life, but it is a necessary sort of mechanism. So for us, we’re sort of looking for that happy balance where as many people as possible can use this software and get value from it, but also make a sustainable business, and that’ll lead into, yeah, some of these other topics we might talk about, but how we could, and what we hope the V2 pricing has done is to try to make it accessible to more people, not everyone, for sure, and I’m sure there will be a V3 and V4 down the road, but to me that was both one of the biggest things we learned and one of the big goals with the next iteration. 00:16:24 - Speaker 3: So when we actually ended up with pricing is a set of changes and maybe the most obvious one of those is the introduction of a cheaper plan, what we are calling the starter membership. So before we are yet, this single membership, $99 it gets you the full thing. And now, the startup membership is less than half of that, and it has the same set of features, but it basically puts a limit on the number of cards you can have and the size boards can have. And then the other thing we are doing is adding monthly pricing to those membership options. So before, you would have to pay the yearly price upfront. And it turns out that a lot of people actually just want to pay monthly, and so we just support that. 00:17:08 - Speaker 2: And I will say that I think part of my motivation in having only the yearly before was you were a little bit sort of supporting our Kickstarter. Or sort of helping fund development for something that you believed could be good and then now because we have a more mature product that you think it’s pretty well proven to solve a set of problems for a certain kind of person that you might want to subscribe for a couple of months and then that proves its value to you and you want to get the discount on the yearly plan, or maybe you just, you only have a need for a project for a couple of months and you just want to pay for the time when you’re getting value and not when you’re not. And that fits better with, we’re less in this mode of aspirational, and onto we have a real product, it works really well, lots of people use it, lots of people get value from it, and I wanna open that up more. 00:17:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this concept of gradually getting people more and more involved in use is really key to our new pricing, yeah. Before we kind of had this free trial option and we specifically said M as a free trial. And now we are kind of reframing that as, as the base version of MUS and specifically saying, OK, it’s not a trial anymore. You can actually use this for months, basically, or even for years. And we have seen a lot of our users do that. And then, you know, many months after using the free version, they discover, OK, uses actually works for them now and they become a member. And maybe, you know, they become like a startup member at first and then a year later they can become a pro member. And that is sort of, I think what we really need to support with news and the prising. 00:18:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, before we asked you to make this pretty big leap of faith commitment, now we have a way to ease into things, and as it proves its value, you can use it more and pay for what you need, or if it’s not proving its value, you hopefully haven’t lost too much. Notably the new base, what we’re not calling the free tier, that’s no different than the trial we had before. It’s still unlimited time, 100 cards, but I think when we first did that, I don’t know if we thought that maybe it was more limited, or maybe we knew it was pretty generous, but we kind of wanted to frame it as a trial to really say, you know, this is software you need to pay for, and I think we’ve gotten that message across and so now we’re softening a little. We’ve basically been framing them all along, but this is just kind of explaining it in a way that makes that a little more clear. Depending on who you talk to, software subscriptions are seen as either the absolute savior of the software industry and just a great deal for both businesses that get to support their ongoing development and customers who can pay for just what they need when they need it and not have a big upfront cost for software that they may or may not. Use long term, or there’s many people who have a deep dislike that it feels like renting your software, you’re going to get tricked into paying when you don’t really need it, that you’re going to get locked out of your data somehow, that it’s just a really uncomfortable or unpleasant way to fund software development. And then we have an additional wrinkle here with doing all this in the iOS App Store world, which inherits so much of the iPhone consumer ads supported data monetization world of things where the big apps on a phone are Facebook and TikTok, not productivity tools that you pay for, and so the iPad ends up sort of inheriting that, so. That’s a huge topic there, but I guess before we get into philosophy there, it’s worth talking about what we actually did on this pricing B2, which is what I like to call alumni mode. I don’t know that we actually call it that in the software at all. I’m not sure that phrasing appears anywhere. 00:20:39 - Speaker 1: I think that’s actually interesting because they basically didn’t need to think about it for the first year. 00:20:44 - Speaker 2: It’s true. 00:20:45 - Speaker 1: There’s actually been a whole series of these things. 00:20:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s many elements of the subscription model to talk about, but when it comes to that being locked out of your data and feeling like you’re being held hostage, and it’s a very reasonable thing to feel because so much of modern business models in general have to do with sort of data. Control data swamps, but particularly for something like productivity tools where you want to access your work, you know, you want to be able to go and pull up the source documents for a master thesis you worked on 3 years ago or 5 years ago, regardless of whether you’ve been paying for the software all that time. So the way we wanted to address that specific thing, because it is really the case, we’re not trying to monetize your data and ownership and control and access to your data, we’re trying to monetize great software, a great tool that feels good and provides you really a supercharging your thinking experience, and you’re paying for that value while you’re getting it, and when you don’t need it anymore, you don’t pay and your data is not something you need to worry about. So kind of our solution to that was What I’m usually calling alumni mode, which is basically that once you cancel or don’t let your subscription renew, then all your data is still there, you can still access it, you can navigate, you can search, you can move stuff around, you can even still scribble with the pencil, but you just can’t add new stuff. And so I hope we’ll see how it plays out, but I hope this is something where someone could, if they wanted, subscribe, become a member to Muse for a few months or a year, or however long they need it. And then if they’re not getting value from it currently, they let that expire, and then they can still access all their data, they don’t need to worry about it being locked up, and if at a later time they want to resubscribe because they have a new project, they can do that. And we’ll see how that works out in practice, but at least my hope is that will help address that getting locked out of your data, that that’s the purpose of the subscription fear, I think very reasonable fear that people have. 00:22:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this brings us to the philosophy of subscription pricing for software. It’s a huge topic. One thing I’d say is that I do believe most software is fundamentally subscription, whether you want to be or not or whether you call it that or not, that’s what’s really going on under the hood. Now there are different periods that are possible. Adam, you mentioned it used to be that you might buy Word and use it for 3 or 4 years, and then you would buy the next version. So effectively you have a subscription period of 3 years, or you can have more like the modern situation where you have month-based pricing. So I think there are actually a few things that are happening when people are concerned about subscription pricing. One is call it the annualized total cost of ownership and however it’s charged, they don’t want to pay, say $100 a year for a software tool. And again, that’s fine. I think a lot of cases it’s not viable and that software is not going to get made and so it is what it is. I think there’s another piece of it, which is a sense of agency and control. And in the case of buying boxed software or buying something like a car, you have much more agency over when the period ends and what you do with the thing as it’s approaching the end of the period. Like you can choose to ride out the car and keep using it, running to the ground, or you can sell it. And, you know, Ford can’t come and like yank the car out from under you because they changed their mind about cars, right? So it’s a sense. Of you have more agency over your stuff, and I think that’s a large part of what people are objecting to with traditional subscriptions. First, the price and paying monthly per se. So insofar as that is the case, I think this model where you have a credit card charge monthly, but you have essentially indefinite control over your own data through a alumni mode and B exporting to very standard flat files that have been around for decades, perhaps that threads the needle. 00:24:20 - Speaker 2: And maybe another point related to software subscriptions is acknowledging how much it is the case that software is a living thing that needs care and feeding, and even if you’re not improving it, which hopefully our team’s hard at work trying to improve our app, make it even far better in a 12 month period than it was at the start, but even if you take that out, there’s just an ongoing maintenance thing, right? And I have old side projects and whatever that I don’t know, a game that I put in the app store and you know at some point we didn’t have time to maintain it and it just fell out because you got to keep up to date with the APIs and you got to like make it match the modern world and you could complain, OK, is this just some kind of treadmill of Microsoft or Apple or whoever the platform provider is that’s making you do the latest API because they want to get you on their latest operating system version and there’s probably some of that, but honestly, I think it’s just the internet. And software and technology is this really dynamic place and every year we have huge leaps forward in everything like screens getting more vivid to internet connections getting faster. You can do more, software gets better, computers get better and get more capable, and that’s great, but it means that all of this is. Kind of a living ecosystem and everything is connected together, and there’s lots of older programs that I love, but they aren’t maintained and as a result, they stop, even if they don’t completely stop working, they just stop being relevant to the modern world, right? And that’s a shame. You need that maintenance if you want the software to sort of stay relevant. 00:25:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that’s sort of the underlying reason for why most software is fundamentally a subscription, and I mean you can look at it the other way. What would it even mean to buy a one time software product of Muse’s nature in the iOS store? I think realistically. Buying a license for like 1 to 3 years depending on the whims of Apple and so forth, right? There’s no reasonable expectation that that software could work forever. And if you were thinking, you know, the software works forever and you get indefinite upgrades, that seems unreasonable to me. So I think the subscription makes more sense. 00:26:18 - Speaker 2: I think there are a number of, particularly indie apps in the app store. I think of things as one of the better examples of a really well made and kind of professionally priced. I think it’s like a one time purchase, camera, $50.70 dollars for the iPad and you then it’s $30 for the phone, and I forget what it is for the desktop, but they do major new versions. And those major new versions are paid upgrades and they do those major new versions every few years. So that’s more like the kind of Microsoft Office in the box model and there you feel maybe a little bit more like you paid one time, you’re not going to be surprised by a recurring charge coming on your credit card, which I understand that is very unpleasant feeling. And then also you feel like you have indefinite access to this, but of course, what’s gonna happen is the developer’s gonna move on to the new version, the old version’s gonna become less relevant. I don’t know what they do for long term maintenance, but in the end, yeah, I just feel like software is a living thing, and if you’re continuing to get value from it, paying for that value is sort of best for everyone. 00:27:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and a bit of an aside here, but I do think there is a place for software that is designed very specifically to be packaged and distributed, and this is software for use in what I would describe as austere or even adversarial environments where you don’t want your ability to use the software to be jeopardized by, you know, for example, the payment processor doesn’t like what you’re doing anymore. So if you’re working on an encrypted messaging app, for example, you might want to distribute that in a way, engineer and distribute in a way that has a real chance of working for several years after you do that. But that’s like a huge effort and compromise and you’re not going to be able to achieve the level of productivity and quality that you can with modern living software, but for certain specialized use cases, I do think that makes sense. 00:27:56 - Speaker 2: You know, the software in the Mars rover or in the Mars rover is the first thing that came to mind on that, something that needs to keep operating at a distance, some new version of whatever Linux or iOS or whatever coming out can’t break it. It should be a very kind of static, it should be in a kind of stasis and self-contained. That makes sense there, and there are other examples of that, but most of us were using these devices that are connected to the internet, that are in collaboration with other humans, and protocols are evolving, and file formats are evolving, and there’s new capabilities all the time, and necessarily the software is kind of a living thing. 00:28:32 - Speaker 1: This is even more out there, but I could imagine someone undertaking the project to design a whole ecosystem for software that was designed in this way. There’s been this sort of change recently towards more static linking of programs where if your program has software dependencies, you basically bundle all those things up into your program and distribute that instead of looking for those dependencies at. Run time on whatever machine you’re running on. So you could imagine a system that kind of took that to the next level is where you bundle in maybe the OS, maybe actually hardware, so you design the whole thing from the bottom up to be runable for a very long time. But that’s the whole undertaking and importantly, it’s not the software ecosystem that most of us are operating in. 00:29:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think what Apple has been trying to do by pushing subscriptions in the app store is exactly to enable developers to continue developing the app and being profitable without having to constantly create a new version of the app and basically confusing all the previous users. That works out great when the company actually wants to do that. I do think there’s a problem by basically Apple forcing all apps into this subscription model if they want to be profitable because, you know, it’s not really that viable for us to have a one time purchase in the app store that is priced above, say, $3 or something. And you can’t really invent your own payment model or anything in the app store, you kind of have to choose what Apple has to offer. And so I think a lot of apps end up. Basically using subscriptions without really giving the user of the benefits that should come with it. And then, of course, the user kind of easily gets frustrated and feels like, OK, subscriptions are kind of a scam. And then for us, it becomes really difficult to kind of differentiate from that and, you know, try to frame our pricing in a way that still makes sense for users. 00:30:20 - Speaker 2: The App Store side of it is a whole set of challenges. On one hand, it comes with very turnkey ways to take payment and currency conversions and product packages and promo codes and essentially there’s a lot of software in a box stuff that you get, I don’t say for free but just built in, but it’s also very constraining. I have the sense that it’s optimized for indie developers, you know, like a single person making an app that kind of fits into a particular. Box and the more you need to or wish to do something a little outside that box. So for me, for example, there’s a lot of frustration and things I would like us to be able to do to give a really great experience to people to help start change that perception of subscription software, especially on iOS as being not desirable. For example, I’d love to do a 30 day money back guarantee. You can try it. There’s a button right in the app if you decide. Yep, this isn’t for me after all. You can basically go in there and just click the button and get an instant refund. And to me that’s different from free trials. We don’t even have a free trial on the new subscription because I feel like I’m making the decision or pushing a button to make a purchase for the future and then inevitably I’m going to get surprised and it’s going to charge me when I wasn’t expecting it and it’s, I think it’s just kind of a bad experience where I think an instant refund in some period could be a better experience, but we just can’t do that. That’s not part of the App Store mechanics. So pros and cons on that, but I think part of the challenge again is that it’s working within this whole payment system, an app ecosystem that evolved out of the iPhone, consumer apps had supported data monetization on the back end, or in some cases, you know, here’s 399 1 time purchase for a fun little casual game, that kind of thing. You need something very different in terms of payment infrastructure and in terms of just how you have a relationship with your customers, things like being able to do refunds or partial refunds or whatever. That is something that makes a lot of sense for business software, for productivity tools, and doesn’t yet exist in this ecosystem. Another element of the App Store is for a lot of folks, particularly if they come through a search or something like that, maybe they never even saw them use website, their first exposure to what is this product, what does it do, and Importantly, what is the cost is the App Store, but actually the way that it’s set up now, it’s not that obvious whether sort of what the pricing model is, because the App Store was originally built around or designed around these kind of one time immediate purchases where to even download the app, you had to like press this button that had a price on it. Now it was pretty clear and subscriptions were kind of added in after and you can surface them a little bit with these kind of featuring. Things, but it’s just not that clear what the pricing model is really someone should read our pricing page kind of in tandem with evaluating whether they want to download and try the app, but if they come through the app store, they don’t see that and they don’t really have a sense of what is this cost, what is the model, what can I expect on that. I think that also creates a lot of friction or confusion or just mismatched expectations, because as Mark says, there’s people for whom they’re not interested in or able to buy a professional tool on their iPad, but if they download it, spend a little time trying it, and then find that the business model, payment model doesn’t match what makes sense for them, they might feel kind of frustrated at the time they invested there. But putting aside App Store listing challenges, Leonard, you worked a fair bit on how we communicate the free plan in this new B2 pricing. How would you describe where we landed on that? 00:33:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s especially difficult for use because it’s such a different app from most others, and people really need to try it out to even know what it is about and you like get a sense of whether it might be useful for them. So we really need people to, first of all, try and use and not think too much about the pricing basically upfront because they don’t even know yet what kind of value they might get out of it. And so that’s why we kind of try to really change the communication from, OK, you can use Muse as a free trial and then you kind of have to pay up to the base version of Muse is free and you can use it however long you want. And then when you’re ready, you can become a member if you want to. And so the danger there for us, I think, is that it kind of devalues the product a bit because it is now like a free product and people can use it for free. And before we were kind of trying to build this image of news as a premium product and we You know, we are a professional tool that you pay for and you get the corresponding value out of it. And it’s a very sort of elegant, simple transaction that you make and in that way, I think we all really like that idea of, yeah, use as a paid product and that’s it. But yeah, I think it’s a really good experiment, at least for us to see how far we can push this free plan of use without sort of sacrificing the paid plans. 00:35:17 - Speaker 2: That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that before, but Fremium, that’s what you call sort of the business model where you can use something for a limited time for free, but then there’s some kind of gate you cross where you need to upgrade to paying, and this makes me think a bit about, of course, another product I’ve had quite a bit of experience working on pricing for, which is Hiroku. And in both cases, I think you know Haroki was kind of a category breaker or as an invention of a new category. It sort of predated a lot of the server list and other stuff that exists today. And so yeah, you really have to try it to get it. You can’t just say it’s a better X because it is something kind of truly novel and it’s not for everyone, but if you try it, you can find out if it is for you and then once you know if it is for you. Then that can lead to, you know, thinking about whether it’s something you wish to pay for, and Muse is very much the same thing, you know, if you come in thinking, oh, it’s a sketching app, or an artistic painting app, that’s wrong, and you’ll find that out pretty quickly in trying it, or if you come in thinking that it’s more of a text-oriented note taking app. The point is you have to try it and you’ll know if it resonates for you, but at the same time, people don’t want to invest the time to try something if they Feel like they’re going to be surprised by the price, right? You probably have this experience even window shopping, which is you walk by a store or display or something, you’re like, Oh, I really like that jacket, and then the shopkeepers, hey, you want to try it on, but if you glance at the price tag and see that it’s way out of your price range, you probably don’t even want to put it on because you just don’t even want to tempt yourself with it, which is I think a very reasonable kind of place to come from. So I think we have this challenge in general of we want to get people in, we want to have them try it to find out if it resonates, we want to give them as much time as they want, it’s not time limited, you know, it may take a while for it to really click, maybe you need to try it on one occasion, you know, really get it, come back a little later, you try it again, maybe you have a new project that it makes more sense for to make kind of taking the pressure off, you can try it as much as you need to until it clicks. And then once it clicks, then you can think about, OK, I wanna make this part of my life, part of my work, and I wanna be a paying customer, so I get the benefits of that. Now, what can I do to make that happen? 00:37:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think on a very practical level, then the challenge for us is when do we actually tell people how much it costs and when do we confront them with the price that we need to pay to actually use it fully. And so we discussed this actually quite a bit whether we maybe want to put the price basically on the first screen and tell people so that they aren’t surprised. But I think what we settled on is to, to only tell people, OK, news does cost something, basically, but you can try it out first and then as soon As they kind of went through our first onboarding steps, which is maybe like 5 or 10 minutes of trying the app and kind of getting a sense of what it is and what it might do for you. Then we kind of start pushing them towards opening our sort of pricing dialogue and actually seeing the different options and seeing what new actually costs. 00:38:16 - Speaker 2: It’s a really subtle balance to try to be upfront and set expectations and let people know what to expect, but also not being really pushy about, here’s the price, or you gotta buy this or whatever. We wanna make it clear, but we also wanna give you time in a low pressure environment to just figure out that more important question first of is this for me? Cause it really isn’t for everyone. It is a niche app, it’s a specialty app, it really resonates with certain people, but not with others. And you should find that out first, but you also don’t want to be surprised by the price tag. 00:38:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this idea of users being in the right mindset and having the correct frame of reference is super important, because ultimately, especially for a prosumer project, this is gonna be a very emotional decision. There’s going to be verbalized rationalizations of your underlying emotional decision, but really it’s a, how do I feel about buying this thing ultimately? And that’s very much colored by the mindset you have as you’re going. Through and using the product. So I think it’s good that we try to establish this is a premium product early on and then when you go to make the actual emotional buying decision some months later, that’s been the context that you’ve been marinating in. You know, going back to the Hiroku example, I think this is an area where we struggled with because a lot of people came to use Hiokku and used it for a very long time because it was a place to do free stuff. And then when your business started to take off and you needed to spend $20 a month on dinos. People were having all kinds of weird and highly disproportionate emotional reactions to that because they were in this frame of reference of this is a place for free stuff, even when from a rational perspective would have made total sense to spend a little bit of money to support their business. 00:39:53 - Speaker 2: And one of my big learnings from the Hiroku experience was, first of all, having that smooth ramp, and I’m not even sure, certainly by the time I left that we had nailed that. You could even argue today it’s a little rocky, but something where, yeah, if you’re getting a huge amount of value for something totally for free for some number of years, you get almost an entitlement, and I don’t mean that in an accusatory way, you just get used to, oh, this is what I have for. Free. And so then when you need to pay, it feels jarring or discontinuous, feels almost like a trick or something, whereas if you’ve been asked to pay earlier, then that’s a more natural, oh yeah, of course this is a product I need to pay for. And of course having those smooth steps and matching the value you’re getting to what you’re paying and that’s an Incredibly difficult thing to do. I don’t think there’s any ideal way to do it. I like a couple of books in the show notes on pricing that I basically think are not great, but at least they’re the best things out there about how to price your business, and one of them talks quite a bit about pricing consulting, how to pick an hourly rate if you’re a freelancer, and what it comes down to is hourly rate. Matches very poorly to the value a client is getting, right? You might spend 2 hours and do some amazing work for them that is worth $10,000 and then later you might grind away at a project for 50 hours and end up delivering something that’s not useful to them. But in the end it’s hard to really charge for value with sort of freelance work, so you kind of have to go with hourly and how do you try to match that up and you do the best you can, but I think one of the places that for me, I have some battle scars from the Hiroku pricing experience was this situation where certain people were getting tons of stuff for free, just an insane amount of value. Other people were getting basically charged too much for what they were doing and it was just very lumpy. And some people were in the right place. Many, many people had this mismatch one way or the other, and over the long term, that’s a bad thing. 00:41:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this issue of values is especially challenging for a prosumer product like Muse. If you look at an enterprise product, which again is almost all sass, there’s much more obvious places to differentiate for enterprises, because when you become a capital E enterprises, you have a set of requirements that are quite unique. You want things like role based access control and advanced permissions and audit logs and whatever the weird compliance things are that you need, right? And these are things that match almost 1 to 1 with large enterprises that have large budgets and have complex use cases for the software. And so almost all enterprise staff ends up looking something like that, you have kind of an enterprise tier that has all those things. Whereas in the prosumer world, the whole point is that you’re giving a very advanced tool to anyone and everyone who wants to use it as individuals, so it’s much harder to find places to differentiate on value. The best hypothesis we have so far is basically the extent to which you’re investing and using the tool as measured currently by the number of cards in your corpus. 00:42:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this is in contrast to differentiating based on the features and basically limiting features to people that pay more or that didn’t pay at all. Which makes sense at first, but really gets difficult if you don’t have specific features that are like a 1 to 1 match to a specific group of people, because then it’s really hard to, first of all, try out the full app for users. Like you only have a limited set of features available. If you maybe need that specific feature that isn’t available, the app is basically useless to you and it’s really hard to sort of be convinced that it’s not, but that it’s worth the full price. And then it also just makes the design and development work really difficult. You can’t really design a cohesive interface if only part of the people can access all of it and the other half can only access a few features and maybe you want to shuffle around things between plans. 00:43:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and especially in this world of living software that we’ve just described in the context of subscriptions, you have potentially this wild feature matrix where you have different combinations in there, plus the additional dimension of every version is its own beast. It’s just a complete mess to deal with, so I’m glad we haven’t gone down that path yet. 00:43:58 - Speaker 2: It was part of my experience at Hiroku and some other previous companies as well, which is feature-based pricing seems obvious. It seems like the way to differentiate between your different tiers, but it basically doesn’t work for all the reasons you just said. And so doing something that’s more a proxy for use. Dropbox, it’s gigabytes of storage, maybe for something like a web hosts, it’s something to do with sort of scale and requests. Even there is really a challenge because a lot of times we might have a very valuable internal enterprise app that has a very low volume and pays very little, but you can never find a perfect fit. And yeah, with Muse we settled on this cards, which is a unit that hopefully the user understands. Notion has a similar idea with their blocks. Nowadays, I think they fully sort of fund their personal product through their enterprise product, but at least a year or two back, they had, I think, 1000 blocks limited for sort of the free plan, and then you could pay to upgrade to their roughly $100 a year, kind of more professional product, and yeah, basically the idea. The idea that fewer features with the one exception of those very specific differentiators for say enterprise and that makes the whole thing more cohesive and everyone can use everything and then you’re just a proxy for usage. And I hope at least yeah, kind of our new base, our free tier with 100 cards we’ve found that’s kind of like one project, give or take, or maybe a few small projects and so if you really want, you can kind of use Muse for one project. When you’re done with that project, you archive it out by exporting a bundle to your Dropbox or iCloud or whatever, and then you have space for a new one, and you can, and lots of folks have used, used for a year and a half for as long as we’ve been running the product completely for free. And sometimes some of those people, they do tip over and become a member, maybe because their financial circumstance changed, or they just finally felt like they were getting enough value or they had a big enough project or something like that to justify that, and I think that’s great, that’s the way I’d like it to be. 00:45:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think it’s an interesting challenge then how you communicate the different limits to people, since it’s not always immediately obvious, people will know that they need a certain feature or not, but they don’t necessarily know how much they are going to use the product or what a certain, what what a certain value means. And I think you can also use that to your advantage in some way. If you look at Apple, they differentiate a lot based on storage and people kind of know how much storage they use right now, but then Apple also explains, OK, you can actually get like 10,000 songs on this many gigabytes. 00:46:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn’t that part of the classic, iPod marketing was, yeah, 1000 songs in your pocket, or something like that. 00:46:37 - Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and then they kind of upsell you on higher storage versions, right? And then you can do, OK, maybe I actually want 2000 songs in my pocket and maybe a year from now, I’ll have more songs. So that’s a way to kind of make people pay more. 00:46:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Apple does well with the what I call price discrimination. I guess hardware, computing hardware has always been natural, bigger screen, more computing power, more storage, but it’s funny because of course if you look at Apple products, Apple computers or iPads or whatever as just like raw compute, and in fact folks do this who come from it, from the, I don’t know, build my own PC from OEM parts, gaming rig world, and they look at the Apple prices and they say this is ridiculous when you’re just looking. At the gigahertz and the RAM and the storage, but that’s not really what you’re buying when you buy an Apple product. You’re buying this integrated top to bottom thing with the operating system and the built-in apps and everything’s been thought through carefully, you know, but there’s no line item on your receipt for design, which is a huge part of what you’re paying for. So they differentiate around these kind of computing primitives, even though in many ways that’s not really what people are paying for when they buy an Apple product. 00:47:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this goes back to my idea about how buying is often emotional, at least for individual users. One of my favorite techniques here is the licensing for Sublime, which is the text editor that I use, and I believe the only difference between a license and an unlicensed version is that if it’s unlicensed, it just says in capital letters unlicensed at the top of your screen all the time. Maybe it asks you every once in a while if you want to buy a license. And that really reflects onto you as a user and potential buyer of software. And even though the functionality is totally there, you just don’t want to be that person who’s looking at capital U unlicensed all the time, at least it worked for me. Another example of this is the Windows, like you can download a fully functional window image and run it, but there’s a little watermark in your screen, it’s like, please register. 00:48:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that model, it’s sort of a little bit like the old shareware, nagware model they sometimes call it, but very low key, and it’s just like, look, you’re a professional, you’re using this tool to like do things, pay for your software, please. 00:48:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of a subtle difference between nagwear and reflecting the image that you’re presenting to the software provider of a casual versus a professional user say. 00:48:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when you talk about also Microsoft Windows, you know, now I think most Microsoft products and Adobe have all gone to kind of subscription cloud stuff or whatever, but I think in the old days, the freemium model was piracy. That was kind of this open secret in the industry was that the way that you use Photoshop as a student was not that you could afford $500. For it in a box, but that you would pirate a copy and then obviously once you graduated school or you know were on to a real project or working with a real client or something, OK, now I gotta kind of grow up and get myself a proper copy, and I think that the industry benefited from that for a long time and now Fremium is a more, let’s call it above board version of that same model. 00:49:33 - Speaker 1: OK, so we’ve been having a lot of price theoretic discussions here. Maybe we can turn to what it actually took for us to ship a V2 pricing change in a production product. 00:49:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and I think it comes back to kind of where we started, which is this is emotional for customers and it’s emotional for the team, like we really want to get the right price, that feels good for everyone, that feels fair, but it’s gonna allow us to have a sustainable business that will still be here 5, 10 years down the road, and In these theoretical discussions, and this is something I have a lot of battle scars on from my Haruki days, which is you come up with a pricing scheme and everyone’s got an opinion on it, which is good, but then you can always kind of find a flaw in it or you find a way that it doesn’t make sense or it looks wrong or it feels weird or there’s some edge case, and it’s very, very easy to go around in circles debating theoretically, and this is a place where I think it’s so important to get out and experiment and try stuff. And that can come in the form of, for example, I first experimented with the $100 a year price in one of the early newsletters, I think it was maybe the 3rd or 4th newsletter we put out. We weren’t ready to charge anything, but I just said, hey, you know, we’re thinking about professional price and we’re thinking about this. Level, give me your reaction, give me your honest reaction, and got a lot of responses to that, including some that were upset and didn’t like it, and someone that said, yeah, I love that, and a lot of others that were sort of more of a, hm, yeah, I’d pay that, you know, if you can deliver on these promises. So that’s one way to experiment with something, right, as you put up a landing page or you some way publish it to the world and just see how folks respond. But in this case, we actually took it a step further and did essentially some split testing. So we’ve talked about that on the show here before with kind of onboarding and AB testing, but this is the idea that you take a subset of typically your new users and you show them one thing and you have a control group that sees something else and then you can kind of compare that data over time. And I think that is a way to Not just judge the efficacy of does this get us more customers, how do people react, but also it’s a way to kind of bring to an end these circling discussions where everyone’s super emotional, we can’t price it this way, we can’t price it this way, what about this, what about this, and you just say, well, look, I’m not sure if I agree with this idea of a starter plan, for example, but let’s try it. Let’s do a split test, let’s see who buys it. Let’s see, are they happy about buying it? How do they respond? What do they expect? Does this make sense? And then when you have a whole different kind of discussion, when it’s around real responses and real results from people making a purchase, or even just considering making a purchase of some price point you’ve come up with. 00:52:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think doing those experiments really helped us get a shared goal as a team basically and get behind. OK, let’s work on pricing without having this big discussion and let’s set a goal to ship something and be confident in it. 00:52:35 - Speaker 2: So that’s another good point is that it’s very easy to in trying to make price or set of prices that will fit all the different cases, all the different circumstances your customers might be in, it’s very easy for those options to proliferate. So you’ve got yearly billing and monthly billing, and maybe there’s also a 6 month billing, and then you’ve got these 4 plans and then there’s a student discount that can apply and pretty soon you have this huge matrix of options. And it’s confusing for everyone, certainly it’s confusing for the company, but I know lots of products I go to look at and I just look at their pricing. I’m like, tell me what it costs, I can’t tell there’s too many knobs and levers here, and that comes from a natural place, which is trying to let someone customize, you know, match their needs and their means to what you have to offer, but it very easily can get complex. So. Having something that is simple and comprehensible that gives you the right number of options. And so for us, for example, you could say, well, add the starter plan or add the monthly billing, add the whatever, throw it in there. What’s the harm if no one buys it? But to me the harm of having a thing hanging around that no one really wants is you’re just cluttering up your pricing and making it all more confusing. And so another reason to actually test this stuff is do people buy it? Do they want it? And if they don’t, then, you know, why have it, and you can just kind of quietly shut down the experiment, and no one needs to be faced with that clutter in the future. 00:53:58 - Speaker 1: I’ve also become a big fan of this idea of just get out and do it with pricing. I think pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked, because as we said, everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should. It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize. We had some of this before we undertook this proper. Project we were thinking, oh, you know, maybe we should change the pricing like this or like this, and we realized that, well, one does not simply change the price. It’s actually a big deal. You got to change the product, change the marketing, there’s analytics, there’s testing, there’s support. It’s like it’s a whole thing. So I think there’s a lot to be said for blocking off some time as a team across multiple functions to go in there and do something with the pricing, even if you aren’t sure yet exactly how it’s going to land. I’m really glad that we did that in this case. 00:54:52 - Speaker 2: And on the customer side, it can be emotional as well, just because, yeah, you don’t want something yanked out from under you or price changes are always a little shocking or confusing or shake your trust in the company and In this case, we kind of, I don’t wanna say we made it easier, but we