In 2019, I had the opportunity to give my talk "Human First, Product Second" for the first time at Write / Speak / Code. Later, in 2020, I was able to present it as a workshop. The core of that talk and workshop explored the importance of building products that go beyond just hitting a north star metric and instead consider more of our own humanity. While we can't build products that include every single person and use case, we need to have the empathy to understand how humans engage and interact with each other in best case scenarios, and how to avoid building products that actively harm people. With the power that AI has, this is more important now than ever. I was very early in my AI journey back then, and I'm revisiting this theme here in the Product Mind Lab this year as I believe "humanness" and "connection" will become key elements in the adoption of AI products.
My first interest in AI was in AI for good use cases. In 2017, I wrote an article about the potential of chatbots being used in hospital waiting rooms to bring more empathy into the sterile and stressful environment. At its heart, I was addressing how the typical hospital environment only exacerbates stress and anxiety. These spaces aren't designed for anyone, patient or employee, to show up as their best, most empathetic self. Part of why the experience is so difficult for patients is the lack of control, with very little designed to give them even a manufactured sense of agency. If there was an experience that made it feel like someone who wasn't too exhausted to show they cared was "listening" to their concerns, collecting key information in a caring way, and sharing whatever updates possible, it would create better outcomes, even if that experience was manufactured by AI.
In retrospect, the article was overly optimistic given our US healthcare system's focus on saving money rather than caring for health. But in a more ideal world, it could be a viable solution. The focus here is that in the right setting and context, AI designed around how humans connect and interact with other humans melts away the technology and makes it feel part of a seamless, well-designed experience. You could say this is how you integrate Design Thinking into AI, rather than shoving AI into any product in whatever the format-du-jour is.
The 2020 COVID lockdowns revealed how much people consciously and subconsciously want and need human connection. While that period showed us technology cannot completely replace that connection, it also demonstrated that people gravitate toward technology that helps facilitate it. And the standards for what we perceive as "feeling human" change all the time. At one point, people were amazed at Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, and now both companies are rushing to release new versions of these products that interact with us in more human ways with expanded capabilities.
The expectations of how "human" AI feels are being raised, and many products, even B2B solutions, will need interactions that feel more "connected" and seamless. Claude from Anthropic has gotten a lot of praise for its "humanness." First, people feel Claude is better at writing in a way that sounds more like people they would know at work, encounter on the internet, or people in their personal lives. Getting to that level of "humanness" in output is incredibly challenging and takes a lot of thought, intention, and technical smarts.
Even Claude's UX choices reflect this human-centered approach, from design and behaviors to interactions, like how they show a single paragraph at a time, deleting the paragraph character by character and rewriting it, as if you're watching a lightning-fast coworker editing text in a Google Doc. I could go on for a while about how well-designed Claude Artifacts is: not only does it allow you to save and download Claude's creations, but importantly, it lets you see Claude's output side-by-side with your train of thought in the prompt window. Someone clearly recognized that as people refine the output, they regularly need the context of what they've already asked Claude. I think of this as an in-browser version of viewing notes on one screen while editing a document on another monitor. I have to thank my friend Saadiq Rodgers-King because he inspired this part of this post from a conversation we had about Claude in his LinkedIn comments. This is just one example of a product that has really thought through how to create connection and the most natural way for people to interact based on what they're doing.
Another company that is creating the feel of “humanness” in a very obvious way is Sesame. Recently, they released their Conversational Speech Model, that sounded so life-like because of the pauses, breathes, filler words, people were surprised they couldn’t tell the voices were AI. You can test it out yourself on Sesame’s website. Details like having the voice model similar imperfections to the way humans speak is an important and thoughtful detail.
In future recordings and articles of the Product Mind Lab, I'll explore this topic more deeply with various product, design, and technical experts, while also sharing my own perspectives. Here's to exploring more about the "humanness" in product.
Stay curious.
P.S.
Fractional Product Leader: I’m a fractional product leader and consultant. If your business is building its first AI features, I have an AI audit offering to show businesses where their best (and worst) are opportunities to implement AI. You can reach out here.
Build the Right Product Faster: I recently launched Building Successful Product with AI, a workshop for product teams to learn how to leverage AI in their processes to 10x themselves and focus on the highest leverage work. It’s only available for companies right now, and I’m teaching the first one in April. If you want to accelerate your team while teaching them not to give away their thinking, reach out here.
Human First, Product Second: If you’re interested in hearing more about the talk and workshop I gave by this name that I mentioned today, let’s chat.
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