The co-founder of Siri believes delight is the key to building user experiences that become habits. And Adam Cheyer said designing for delight drives clear commercial impact.
Cheyer was speaking as part of the Royal College of Art’s In Session event series. He was interviewed by Special Projects’ Adrian and Clara Gaggero Westaway, who lead the RCA’s Design Thinking and Innovation in Practice course.
A keen magician, Cheyer explained how both magic and technology rely on making people feel something.
“Both in products and in magic shows, you can have the most impossible miracle happen and be left completely cold and bored,” he said. “Or you can have the most minor miracle happen and be blown away, feeling like your whole world has tilted.
“You can invest billions of dollars into a technology, but if it doesn’t connect and make the user feel, it’s a waste of money,” he added.
The first version of Siri was created in 1993, and took 17 years to move into the mainstream after it was bought by Apple and installed on the iPhone 4S.
Cheyer said Steve Jobs called the Siri team just two weeks after they uploaded it to the App Store. Initially they turned down his offer to buy the company, but Jobs called them every day for 30 days. “He managed to convince us we could change the world more with Apple, than without,” Cheyer said.
With Jobs’ backing, Cheyer and the team worked hard to make Siri more than a utility, one that could set a timer, or tell you what the weather was going to be.
That began by imagining who Siri was. A man or a woman? An AI or a human? What was their relationship with Apple? Were they an employee?
“All of this needed to be designed to have a consistent backstory,” he said. “And once we had that, we went through the whole product and sprinkled in what we call delight nuggets.”
He gives the example of asking Siri what the weather was like. “The standard response is, ‘It’s going to be rainy.’ A delight nugget would say, ‘And don’t forget your galoshes.’”
“It goes one step further, and puts a little smile on your face, in an unexpected way,” Cheyer said. “I would argue those delight nuggets we sprinkled into the product were a huge, huge part of why Siri became so popular.”
The challenge with any new product, Cheyer explained, is to get people to try it in the first place, and then change their habits to use it regularly.
“You have to design to have a positive first experience,” he said. “And then if you can go further, if you can surprise and delight, now they may anticipate and look forward to their second time. And if you do this enough times, it starts to become a habit.”
In this way, he insists, delight and magic can create real, tangible impact. “Getting it right can change the world, can change businesses,” he said.
Cheyer pointed out that in the six months after it launched, the iPhone 4S, Apple’s value soared.
“The stock price doubled and it became the most valuable company in the history of the world,” he said. “Would that have happened without a little magic?”
Cheyer, who is now VP of AI Experience at Airbnb, also explained how he borrowed principles from the magic world when he was doing demos for Siri.
First he would explain its functionality, to encourage people to, “try it on in their mind.”
“You get them nodding, and then there’s a stimulus moment, a ‘Whoa what was that?’ moment, that gets their nerves jangling and their neurons firing,” he said.
Once he’d talked people through what Siri could do, the phone in the room would start to ring loudly on the desk, making his audience jump. He would answer it on speaker phone and Siri’s voice would say, “Adam Cheyer, there’s an important message that arrived for you.”
“The ringing of the phone, that made everyone jump out of their seat, was the stimulus moment,” he said. “It’s visceral.”
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