Hello!
Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.
You wrote an article about Mad Libs forms?
Yeah, I did. Back in February 2010 I wrote up a piece called "Mad Libs" Style Form Increased Conversion by 25-40%, and it's one of the form design ideas I keep coming back to.
Here's the backstory. A while ago I came across a unique registration form built by Jeremy Keith for his audio sharing site, Huffduffer. It asked people the same questions you'd find in any typical sign-up form, but it did so in a narrative format, presenting input fields as blanks within sentences (Mad Libs-style, if you will).
The clever part is that it still worked exactly like a standard web form. You can tab between the "blanks" just the way you tab between standard input fields, click on any blank to start typing, the password blank masks characters, and the whole thing manages errors if you answer something incorrectly. It works like a standard form, but it looks and feels completely different: inviting and fun instead of like doing your taxes.
That got me curious. Would people actually be more inclined to complete a form because of the narrative format? Or would the unfamiliar presentation just confuse them? Thanks to Ron Kurti and the team at Vast.com, I got some early answers. They ran A/B testing comparing a traditional web form layout with a narrative Mad Libs format, and the Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.
Now, one honest caveat. In their test, a few other things changed too: the comments text area became a "personalize this message" link, and the three phone number fields became a single flexible input. It's possible those tweaks contributed as well, but they were unlikely to be solely responsible, so the Mad Libs layout likely had a real impact.
The bigger lesson holds up: in the real world, forms are rarely used for pleasure, so why do we adopt the same dull interface on the web? Give your forms a little personality and people just might enjoy filling them out.