What surprised me wasn’t the technical challenge, but the user reactions.
Power users absolutely love it.
They immediately get the concept. They think in workflows, not apps. To them, “summarize this and turn it into an event” feels obvious and natural.
But new users often freeze.
Even though the interface is technically simpler, they ask things like:
“What category is this tool?”
“Where’s the starting point?”
“Is this replacing my email or my notes?”
“Why doesn’t it look like a normal productivity app?”
It made me realize something uncomfortable: the more integrated a tool becomes, the harder it is for people to form a mental model. And without a clear mental model, onboarding becomes a wall.
A few patterns keep repeating:
People rely heavily on familiar UI metaphors (tabs, inboxes, folders).
Removing those reduces complexity for some users but increases cognitive load for others.
New users want “features”; power users want “flows”.
Integration increases value but decreases clarity.
I’m curious if others have run into this: Have you built or used something that people love after trying it, but struggle to understand before trying it?
How did you communicate the value? Did metaphors help? Onboarding flows? Videos? Something else?
Happy to share more from my experiments — I’d love to hear your experiences too.
sloaken•23m ago
What is missing from most documentation is simple Use Case.
You need a video / tutorial that is JUST 'Wheres the starting point'
Then one addressing what you expect most people to do.
Each tutorial should be no more than 5 minutes, ideally 1 minute. (hmm sounds like breaking up your code into manageable parts)
Making it easy to find the tutorials is important.
If one tutorial needs another, then point to it. Do not just say "before you start make sure you understand quantum theory"
You know this is like the 'one man band' where the person is playing a dozen instruments. "I do not understand, you know how to read music, why don't you strap this on and perform?" Er I don't know how to play the xylophone.
Ok let me teach you each instrument.... then we can put it together. Here is the symbol, here is the harmonica, we will just integrate these 2.
Hope this helps.
CharlieDigital•15m ago
Microsoft's strategy was simple: have vertical specific SMEs, sales teams, and solution delivery teams that build solutions that addressed specific use cases for those industries. Life sciences, legal, manufacturing, you name it: Microsoft had a vertical specific team that understood the use cases in those verticals. Their sales teams configured vertical specific demos. They shipped vertical specific templates and configurations for those use cases.
I ended up in life sciences (pharmas, biotechs) by happenstance and we helped customers get SharePoint configured for use cases like operating clinical trials on SharePoint.
The underlying platform is incredibly generic, but having your sales people speak the domain space and pre-configured solutions (or solution delivery partners) made it more palatable.
I think most companies that are building these kind of tools need an "on-ramp" that is industry or use-case specific designed with SMEs or customer observations for those use cases.
brennanpeterson•5m ago
All the calendar, task, website stuff ended up dying away, because what we really needed was a good document management system, with optionally some simple signoff loops and notifications.
That was great. Yes, it was just unix like tools with a window. That is the craigslist of os improvements.
It really was the use case, but the simple one. I saw plenty of power users try to do complex and ultimately fragile uses that died away.
In the case of this user, I love the idea of turning an email to an action, but I also need to add that to my action board and assign it, and check people time, at which point the simple action only makes sense for individuals, not teams or orgs. and I need to add a couple missing actions, and summarize. So suddenly the all in one is a marginally useful tool that is also a straightjacket. And then I go back to outlook and jira and excel and trelli or whatever.
CharlieDigital•1m ago