The secret to great software | Aravind Srinivas and Lex Fridman
Summary
TLDRThe transcript discusses the inspiration from Larry Page's approach to product development, emphasizing the importance of search and hiring talented PhDs during the internet bust. It highlights the obsession with reducing latency to enhance user experience, as seen in products like Google Chrome and Spotify. The 'user is never wrong' philosophy is underscored, advocating for products that cater to user laziness by predicting intent and providing intuitive interfaces. The narrative also touches on the challenges of balancing feature development for power users without alienating new users, drawing parallels to Google's minimalist design and the importance of suggesting questions to guide user interaction.
Takeaways
- 🚀 **Inspiration from Larry Page**: The speaker was inspired by Larry Page's approach to focus on search and hire talented PhDs during the internet bust, leveraging the market to acquire great talent at a lower cost.
- 🧠 **Emphasis on Core Infrastructure**: Larry Page's strategy to build a strong core infrastructure with a focus on research and reducing latency was highlighted as a key to success.
- 📊 **Latency Matters**: The obsession with reducing latency in products like Google Chrome and the speaker's own app, Perplexity, is emphasized as crucial for a seamless user experience.
- 🌐 **Testing on Suboptimal Conditions**: Larry Page's practice of testing Chrome on old hardware to ensure it performs well under all conditions is mentioned as a valuable approach.
- 🔍 **User-Centric Design**: The 'user is never wrong' philosophy is discussed, advocating for product design that accommodates user errors and provides high-quality experiences regardless of user input quality.
- 💡 **Prompt Engineering**: The importance of being a good 'prompt engineer' is highlighted, focusing on predicting user intent and providing relevant responses even from poorly constructed queries.
- 🛠️ **Design for Laziness**: The idea that a better product allows users to be 'lazy' by minimizing the effort required to use it effectively is explored.
- 🤔 **Catering to Curiosity**: The challenge of translating human curiosity into well-articulated questions is discussed, and how产品设计 should assist users in this process.
- 📱 **Mobile App Design Considerations**: The speed of user interface elements like the keyboard appearing in mobile apps is noted as an important detail in user experience design.
- 🔄 **Balancing Feature Growth and Usability**: The dilemma of adding features for power users versus maintaining simplicity for new users is touched upon, with references to how different products handle this trade-off.
Q & A
What was Larry Page's contrarian insight regarding product development?
-Instead of focusing on building a traditional business or marketing team, Larry Page realized the importance of search and decided to hire as many PhDs as possible to focus on building core infrastructure and deeply grounded research.
Why was it advantageous for Google to hire PhDs during the internet bust?
-During the internet bust, many PhDs who had worked at other internet companies were available at a lower market rate, allowing Google to acquire great talent at a reduced cost.
How did Larry Page's focus on latency influence product development?
-Larry Page was obsessed with reducing latency, which became a core focus in product development. This obsession led to a significant improvement in user experience, making products like Chrome and Google Search fast and efficient even on older devices and poor internet connections.
What is the 'user is never wrong' philosophy and how does it impact product design?
-The 'user is never wrong' philosophy suggests that the product should always provide high-quality answers regardless of the user's input, even if it contains typos or is poorly constructed. This approach forces product designers to focus on understanding user intent and improving the product to cater to all users, including those who may not be adept at formulating clear queries.
How does the 'user is never wrong' philosophy relate to prompt engineering?
-Prompt engineering should aim to create products that understand user intent even when the user does not ask for something explicitly. This philosophy encourages designing products that anticipate user needs and provide the desired information or functionality without requiring the user to ask for it.
What is the significance of latency in software product success?
-Latency is a critical factor in the success of a software product as it directly affects user experience. Low latency can make a product feel responsive and addictive, while high latency can lead to user frustration and a negative experience.
How does the speaker apply Larry Page's insights to their own product, Perplexity?
-The speaker applies Larry Page's insights by ensuring that Perplexity works well even on poor internet connections, such as flight Wi-Fi, and by focusing on reducing latency in all aspects of the product, including the speed of the search bar and keypad appearance.
What is the role of 'people also ask' or suggested questions in product design?
-Suggested questions or 'people also ask' features help minimize the effort required to ask a question and predict user intent. They assist users in formulating queries and can guide them towards interesting or relevant questions, which is particularly helpful for users who may not be skilled at asking good questions.
Why is it important for products to allow users to be 'lazy'?
-Allowing users to be 'lazy' means designing products that are intuitive and require minimal effort to use. This approach can lead to a better user experience, as it accommodates a wide range of users, including those who may not want to invest time in learning complex features.
How does the design of Perplexity aim to minimize user effort?
-Perplexity is designed to minimize user effort by predicting user intent, providing suggested questions, and ensuring that the product is fast and efficient even on poor internet connections. The design also focuses on small details like having the cursor ready in the search bar and auto-scrolling to the bottom of the answer.
What challenges does product design face when balancing features for new and existing users?
-Product design faces the challenge of balancing features that cater to power users without overwhelming new users. As products grow, there is a need to add features that enhance the experience for existing users, but this can make the product more complex and less accessible for newcomers.
Outlines
🔍 The Vision of Larry Page and Google's Early Focus on Search
The speaker discusses how Larry Page's unique approach to product development influenced their own. Instead of following the conventional path of building a business and marketing team, Page chose to focus on search technology, hiring numerous PhDs during a time when many were available at lower costs due to the internet bust. This strategy led to a strong emphasis on core infrastructure and research, particularly on reducing latency, which was not a common focus at the time. The speaker shares anecdotes about Page's attention to detail, such as testing Chrome on old hardware to ensure performance, and applies similar principles to their own app, ensuring it works well even on poor Wi-Fi connections. The importance of latency in user experience is highlighted, with examples from successful products like Spotify. The speaker also mentions the philosophy 'the user is never wrong,' which has guided their approach to product development, focusing on user intent and providing high-quality answers regardless of user input quality.
💡 Designing for User Laziness and the Power of Suggestion
The speaker emphasizes the importance of designing products that cater to user laziness, allowing for quick and easy use. They discuss the challenge of translating human curiosity into well-articulated questions and how their product aims to minimize the effort required to ask questions, drawing inspiration from Google's 'people also ask' and auto-suggestion features. The speaker also talks about the delicate balance between simplicity and feature richness in product design, acknowledging the trade-offs between catering to new users and maintaining power users. They mention the importance of predicting user intent and providing a clean, minimal interface, while also considering the anxiety that can come with overly simple designs. The discussion includes the challenge of growing a user base while retaining existing users and the need to balance feature additions for different user groups.
🚀 Balancing Feature Growth for New and Existing Users
In this paragraph, the speaker delves into the complexities of product design and growth, particularly the challenge of adding features that appeal to both new and existing users. They mention the example of a Facebook data scientist who emphasized the importance of features that cater to new users for the platform's growth. The speaker acknowledges the ongoing debate about product design and the difficulty of striking the right balance between adding features for power users and maintaining a user-friendly experience for newcomers. The paragraph concludes with a reflection on the inherent challenges in product development and growth, suggesting that there is no one-size-fits-all solution and that each product must find its own path to success.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Contrarian Insight
💡Arbitrage
💡Latency
💡User Experience (UX)
💡Prompt Engineering
💡User is Never Wrong
💡Autocomplete
💡Product Design
💡Growth Hacking
💡Clutter
Highlights
Larry Page's contrarian insight to focus on search and hire PhDs during the internet bust for talent at a lower cost.
The importance of hiring great talent like Jeff Dean to build core infrastructure and conduct deep research.
Larry's obsession with latency, testing Chrome on old hardware to ensure performance even under poor conditions.
The philosophy that the user is never wrong, which drives product development to be user-centric.
The impact of latency on user experience and how reducing it can lead to an addictive product.
The attention to detail in product design, such as cursor placement in the search bar, to enhance user experience.
The concept of designing products to work well even with user errors, typos, or speech transcription mistakes.
The idea that a better product should allow users to be 'lazier' by anticipating their needs.
The challenge of helping users articulate their curiosity into well-constructed queries.
The use of 'people also ask' and auto-suggestions to minimize the effort required to ask a question.
The design decision to show or hide shortcuts in the user interface based on user preferences.
The balance between minimalism in design and providing enough guidance for new users.
The trade-off between adding features for power users and maintaining simplicity for new users.
The importance of product design in growth, focusing on features that benefit new users over existing ones.
The story of Google's early design, which was minimalistic with just a logo and a search bar.
The challenge of product design in balancing simplicity with the need to showcase features.
The debate on whether forcing users to think and articulate their queries is beneficial or not.
Transcripts
Larry Pages inspired me in many other
ways too like
um when the products started getting
users uh I think instead of focusing on
going and building a business team
marketing team the traditional how
internet businesses worked at the time
he had the contrarian insight to say hey
search is actually going to be important
so I'm going to go and hire as many phds
as possible
and there was this Arbitrage that
internet bust was happening at the time
and so a lot of phds who went and worked
at other internet companies were
available at at at not a great market
rate so uh you could spend less get
great talent like Jeff Dean uh and and
like you know really focus on building
core infrastructure and like like deeply
grounded research and the obsession
about latency that was you take it for
granted today but I don't think that was
obvious I even read that um at the time
of launch of chrome uh Larry would test
Chrome intentionally on very old
versions of Windows on very old
laptops and and complain that the
latency is bad obviously you know the
engineers could say yeah you're testing
on some crappy laptop that's why it's
happening but Larry would say hey look
it has to work on a crappy laptop so
that on a good laptop it would work even
with the worst internet so that's sort
of an Insight I I I apply it like
whenever I'm on a flight I always test
perplexity on the flight Wi-Fi mhm
because flight Wi-Fi usually
sucks and I want to make sure the app is
fast even on that and I Benchmark it
against chat gbt or uh gemini or any of
the other apps and try to make sure that
like the latency is pretty good it's
funny I do think it's a gigantic part of
a success of a software product is the
latency yeah that story is part of of a
lot of the great product like Spotify
that's the story of Spotify in the early
days figure out how to
stream music yeah with very low latency
exactly that's uh it's an engineering
challenge but when it it's done right
like obsessively reducing latency you
actually have there's like a face shift
in the user experience where you're like
holy this becomes addicting and the
amount of times you're frustrated goes
quickly to zero and every detail matters
like on the search bar you could make
the user go to the search bar and click
to start typing a query or you could
already have the cursor ready and so
that they can just start typing every
minutu detail
matters and auto scroll to the bottom of
the answer instead of them forcing them
to scroll or like in the mobile app when
you're clicking uh when you're when
you're touching the search bar the the
speed at which the keypad appears we we
focus on all these details we track all
these latencies and that that's a
discipline that came to us because we
really admired Google and the final
philosophy I take from Larry I want to
highlight here is there's this
philosophy called the user is never
wrong it's a very powerful profound
thing it's very simple but profound if
you like truly believe in it like you
can blame the user for not prompt
engineering right my mom is not very
good at um English she uses
perplexity and she just comes and tells
me the answer is not
relevant I look at her query and I'm
like first instinct is like come on you
didn't you didn't type a proper sentence
here and she's like then I realized okay
like is it her fault like the product
should understand her intent despite
that MH and
um this is a story that Larry says where
like you know they were they just tried
to sell Google to
excite and they did a demo to the exite
CEO where they would fire exite and
Google together and same type in the
same query like University and then in
Google you would rank Stanford Michigan
and stuff exite would just have like
random arbitary
universities and the ex Co would look at
it and it's like that's because you
didn't you know if you typed in this
query it would have worked on exite too
but that's like a simple philosophy
thing like you you just flip that and
say whatever the user types you're
always supposed to give high quality
answers then you build the product for
that you you go you you do all the magic
behind the scenes so that even if the
user was lazy even if there were typos
even if the speech transcription was
wrong they still got the answer and they
allow the product and that CH forces you
to do a lot of things that are corly
focused on the user and also this is
where I believe the whole prompt
engineering like trying to be a good
prompt engineer is not going to like be
a long-term thing I think you want to
make products work where user doesn't
even ask for something but you you know
that they want it and you give it to
them without them even even asking for
it yeah one of the things that perplex
is clearly really good at is figuring
out what I meant from a poorly
constructed query yeah and I don't even
need you to type in a query you can just
type in a bunch of words it should be
okay like that's the extent to which you
got to design the product cuz people are
lazy and a better product should be one
that allows you to be more lazy not not
not
less sure there is some
like like the other side of the argument
is to say you know if if you ask people
to type in clearer sentences it forces
them to think and and and that's a good
thing too but at the end like uh
products need to be having some magic to
them and the magic comes from letting
you be more lazy yeah right it's a it's
a trade-off
but one of the things you could ask
people to do in terms of work is the
clicking choosing
the related the next related step in
their Journey that was a very one of the
most insightful experiments we did after
we launched we we had our designer like
you know co-founders we talking and then
we said hey like the biggest blocker to
us is the biggest enemy to us is not
Google it is the fact that people are
not naturally good at asking questions
mhm like why why is everyone not able to
do podcast like you there is a skill to
asking good
questions and uh everyone's curious
though curiosity is unbounded in this
world every person in the world is
curious but not all of them are blessed
to translate that Curiosity into a well
articulated question there's a lot of
human thought that goes into refining
your curiosity into a question and then
there's a lot of skill into like making
the making sure the question is well
prompted enough for these AIS well I
would say the sequence of questions is
as you've highlighted really important
right so help people ask the question
the first one and and suggest them
interesting questions to ask again this
is an idea inspired from Google like in
Google you you get people also ask or
like suggested questions Auto suggest
bar all that basically minimize the time
to asking a question as much as you can
and truly predict the user
intent it's such a tricky challenge
because to me as we're discussing the
Rel at ated
questions might be primary so like you
might move them up earlier you know what
I mean and that's such a difficult
design decision yeah and then there's
like little design decisions like for me
I'm a keyboard guy so the control eye to
open a new thread which is what I use
yeah it speeds me up a lot but the
decision to
show the short cut mhm in the main
perplexity interface on the desktop yeah
is pretty guts that's a very uh it's
probably you know as you get bigger and
bigger there'll be a debate yeah I like
it but then there's like different
groups of humans exactly I mean some
people I uh I talked to karpati about
this and uses our product he hates the
sidekick the the side panel he just
wants to be Auto hidden all the time and
I think that's good feedback too because
there's like like like the Mind hates
clutter like you when you go into
someone's house you want it to be you
always love it when it's like well
maintain and clean and minimal like
there's this whole photo Steve Jobs uh
you know like in this house where it's
just like a lamp and him sitting on the
floor I always had that Vision when
designing perplexity to be as minimal as
possible Google was also the original
Google was designed like that uh that's
just literally the logo and the search
bar and nothing else I mean there's pros
and cons to that I would say in the
early days of using a product there's a
kind of anxiety when it's too simple
because you feel like you don't know the
the full set of features you don't know
what to do right it's almost seems too
simple like is it just as simple as this
so there's a comfort initially to the
sidebar for example correct uh but again
you know kathi I'm probably me aspiring
to be a power user of things so I do
want to remove the side panel and
everything else and just keep it simple
yeah that's that's the hard part like
when you when you're growing when you're
trying to grow the user base but also
retain your existing users making sure
you're not H how do you balance the
tradeoffs um there's an interesting case
study of this nodes app and uh they just
kept on building features for their
power users and then what ended up
happening is the new users just couldn't
understand the product at all and
there's a whole talk by a Facebook early
Facebook data science person uh who who
is in charge of their growth that said
The more features they shipped for the
new user than existing user they felt
like that was more critical to their
growth and there are like so you can
just debate all day about this and and
this is why like product design like
growth is not easy
تصفح المزيد من مقاطع الفيديو ذات الصلة
Conférence Salon SRH 2024 - Quelles sont les perspectives de l’IA dans la conduite du changement ?
Parkinson's Law Can Supercharge Your UI/UX Design | Class 15 | Urdu & Hindi
The Art of Creating Great Digital User Experiences
Generative Interfaces Beyond Chat // Linus Lee // LLMs in Production Conference
Seven Stages of Action
L'AI e la creatività sono la chiave per creare prodotti di successo?
5.0 / 5 (0 votes)