The Most Valuable Interaction Design and Adobe’s Burden

Hey, Everyone.

Writing these newsletters is a funny endeavor. On one side, I am writing to at least 50 people who read the letter in it's entirety. Yet, I get no reactions from them as there are no Like buttons, and any "email-worthy-response" only comes to them days after letting the content seep through their mind. I tell them if they like a Letter, they can simply reply "Really Enjoyed this Letter" and it won't be bothering my Inbox at all. In fact, I need these responses otherwise I often like publishing into the void.

It's funny how Newsletters are demanding a brand-new conditioning for our email etiquette. Let's get on with today's letter:

🎙The Most Valuable User Experience and Adobe's Burden

​The letter I sent last week feels like a plaque I should hang up in my office. It summarizes the ongoing epistemology running through all 12 letters so far and lays the foundations to my theory on Product Design, or the term I prefer, Interaction Design. Do check out that letter [linked below and here] to get a bird-eye view of Productize Philosophy. It was a milestone letter in our ongoing discourse and I ended it on the following note:

A Medium is what stores and projects information into the Space and Time of a User. As an interaction designer, your job is to design these mediums that helps a user leverage the technology underneath; creating value in the process.

In today’s letter, I want to talk about the most valuable experiences for a user.

🐱‍🏍Adobe’s Burden

One of the companies I think an Interaction Designer should deeply study is Adobe. They make probably the most complex pieces of consumer softwares and are legends for spawning a whole new generation of creators. One way to think about the difference between designing softwares like Photoshop from something like Uber, is that the design itself tends to have an influence on the output for the user. No matter how one designs Uber, the user output remains the same: Booking a Cab. Whereas every design decision in a software like Photoshop tends to have an influence on the user's creative flow and hence, the output.

This was best illustrated in 2012 when Adobe had to introduce a cloud-first version of every software they made. This is what we now know as the Creative Cloud suite which will also have a touch-companion for iPads and Smartphones while maintaining a cloud-sync across all devices. This was a big departure from the Classic versions and demanded a bottom-up redesign for their entire suite, one that took advantage of the Cloud and could be manipulated by Touch. This posed a big decision: Should they displace the Classic version?

In any other case, one wouldn't even think about it. Of course, the new version replaces the old. But this was a big NO in Adobe's case. You see a creator relates to an [app like Photoshop] as an instrument. After getting the core-mechanics of the instrument, the user discovers every feature he will need, memorize a sense of where everything is, practice many flows that combines the features for all sorts of outputs, learn shortcuts to get really efficient with this creative flow and so on. These softwares are like instruments a user molds his creativity around. And so Adobe realized:

“Creators are so attuned to their Instrument - “the Interaction Design of the Software” - that ditching the Classic version would have disrupted the creative flows of their entire existing user base.”

Therefore, Adobe offers both the Classic and Creative Cloud versions for each of their original softwares and maintains a common feature stack across both suites to this very day. As a designer, you must deeply study Adobe and the pick up whatever you can find on the subject of Creativity. [I have shared a few links below.]

🎯 The Most Valuable User Experiences

‍The way a user wraps around a product is the place of interest for interaction designers. It is the layer of interaction, and perhaps, Adobe has designed some of the most complex layers in the digital medium. Now, if you had to optimize the user's interaction for one thing, what would it be?

For Adobe, if their creators can instinctively work with the app in a kind of meditative state, the designers at Adobe can rest in a sense of job-well-done. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has formalized a concept for the quintessence creative experience: The Flow State. In his own words,

“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”

Now, I and Mihaly would argue that the essence of Flow States applies more universally than only creative apps. Consider Netflix. Assuming it helps me find an excellent movie, the onus is on me to have a surround sound system and a big enough, accurate display to be completely immersed into the movie. “Total Immersion” is an exemplar of Flow States wherein you’re in a transcendent state of communication with the media. I take as much offence as being interrupted while watching a movie, as I should be while composing this essay.

I have created Twitter Threads for high fidelity setups for writing, reading and music listening. These setups are logically and economically the next immediate setup that won’t make you feel the “need” to upgrade further.

The famous Product mind, Brian Norgard, likes to describe the North Star for great products as a No Mind Experience. It is a pithy way of saying that products that succeed produce the least resistance to the user. [Here, a designer must not conflate friction and resistance. Friction is not bad, and useful friction helps shape the ebb and flow of an experience. It is destructive resistance that must be eliminated.]

Products must eliminate the useless complexity with utmost ease like effortlessly getting you a cab in peak-hour traffic. This is one end of the ultimate experience spectrum. The other side is leveraging the useful complexity like taming a chaos of ideas for novel connection in a creative flow.

It is said that the greatest artists play their instrument in a non-interfered flow. I live for such moments. Philosopher and the intellectual model to my life, Zat Rana, reminds us to Live Life like a Work of Art and gives the following description for Flow States:​

"Flow sits right at the edge of both self and selflessness, order and chaos. Where these dichotomies meet, there is an attention in consciousness that manages to momentarily hold them both in place, together, as to transcend our experience into a state of enjoyment that can only be felt as the unfiltered present moment.
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The thing about flow is that it augments both emotion and thought. It pares life down to the core unit of consciousness: attention. Whatever emotion or thought you are feeling, you are going to feel it in a richer way if you are in a state of flow."

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🎨👘🎭🔬

Understanding Creativity from my Favorite Creators

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1️⃣

"If you accept the religious God, then God is love and truth, and life is a kind of test. If you don’t believe in any God, then life is either meaningful suffering or a game to be won. But there is also a third option: What they call God is simply creativity, and life is art." This quote from Zat should tell you why I turn to him to understand Creativity.

​You Should Treat Life as a Work of Art​
​The Pillars of a Creative Life​
​Contextual Flow *
- Zat Rana

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2️⃣

Creativity and the Artistic is superficially falsely described in the Pop culture. Tiago offers a simple-yet-brilliant explanation for Creativity.
​The True Nature Of Creativity
- Tiago Forte

3️⃣

"Art is a true account of the activity of mind."
- Donald Barthelme

Donald's definition has proved to be the most practical and useful definition to understand Art for me. I found it in this essay: Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art​
- Maria Popova

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4️⃣

In a brilliant feat, David Perell creates a general theory on Creativity based on Picasso's Bull:

​Expression is Compression​
- David Perell

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5⃣

People consistently approach me about being a Creator online, and usually have a very-dogmatic mindset for it. In a recent Clubhouse conversation, Naval Ravikant and (digital-creator-ecommerce platform) Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavignia, break a lot of silent myths and say everything I could ever wish to tell them. Check out the [Twitter Thread] capturing it all.

🥋 Designing for Creativity in my Product (Project PCPI)

I've always found AI Recommendations to be taking a crucial place for where Human Creative Intelligence should be. While AI Algorithms can recommend something you would like, people will find you something you would love. While AI Feeds, People nurture. Through Newsletters, I learn a lot about the creators who my curiosities align with and in doing so, I can now let them supply to me their favorite content that I would most probably love. Hence, my thesis is that instead of building AI Algorithms, we should be building tools to get more people to share their Recommendations. Just like Instagram brings out a photographer in everyone, I, with my product Project PCPI, intend to bring out the curator in everyone.

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​Do reply, and as always any thoughts, criticisms and feedback, is most valued.
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Talk Soon,
Abhishek Agarwal
​Blog | Twitter​

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