Peeps Button
Working on the People App interactions, we are aiming to discover a balance between familiarity and new. As often happens, we end up with one big button.
Let me explain what it does. You press and hold for voice interaction: the speech is transcribed for immediate feedback while we send your voice to the AI that has your people, their needs, and capabilities, and the People app itself in “mind”.
The simplest thing you could ask it is to find something, say designers. It will find people, including some who are not listed as designers in their profession, but provide design services.
A bit more advanced is the capacity for conversation: ask the agent to help you with a new project, a new hobby, an errand, or a business.
The Peeps agent is smart enough to gather all the context about your community and help you connect with people and opportunities in your networks.
The interaction with Peeps Button is what I need to get right. My current thinking is to make sliding up bring the keyboard, sliding right lock the speech interactivity, and sliding left dismiss the input. I will need your help with it: sign up, give it a fair try, and let me know if it feels right.
We are defaulting to speech instead of typing, but we are keeping typing easily accessible. Our hypothesis is that people will engage more with speech over time; soon we will see if this is the case in our usage data.
Something we learned from Mubarak Marafa and Pi.ai – you want to provide context. So if you just tap the Peeps Button (without holding it) we bring a wall of cards suggesting what you might do:
It is very liberating to build this product in the open: I used to work for companies with all my work under NDA. It is refreshing to be able to share my raw thoughts and process with you.
This is my eighth post in the series about People App, and the response was amazing. We got 459 people reading about it and 39 joining the waiting list. I got a lot of long-form feedback in my personal messages. Three people decided to join me at the People App team (and become Peepsies).
Thank you!
First time hearing about People App? Check out original announcement.
