Your users are lazy, vain, and selfish—design accordingly

You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right? They're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds and then the next 30 seconds?

In the first 30 seconds of using a new product, you are lazy, vain, and selfish. You want to get it done super quickly. You want to look good to your colleagues or to your friends. You want to feel successful very quickly by engaging in this product.

You have to think about users on modern internet consumers having three attributes. So they are lazy, they are vain, and they're selfish.

Most neglect it. Well, they get user onboarding is important, but just how important is that is one, and B, the craft of thinking like a user who's lazy, vain, and selfish, and basically, rejecting all your products, but this does not work for this kind of customer.

People are lazy. Look beyond cool too, on how much easier new tool or tech makes someone's life. Convenience always wins.

Users will only adopt what you're doing if that sum total of energy that they have to expend is less than the resulting ease in their life that they get, usually by a factor of at least a couple, right? So it has to make your life a lot better, hopefully a really a lot better, like 10X better than what you spend to use it.

It's all about user value. Users are lazy, right? We're all lazy. We don't really care that much at the end of the day. No one's going to do something really in their life for any other reason other than it makes their life better. Nobody cares that you're friendly or nice or the logo is pretty or whatever. They care about making their life easier.

When you are making a new product, people want to ignore it. People want to not pay attention to it, and if they do have to pay attention to it, if it gets in their face, they want to not try it because we just are all bombarded by so many things.