How Arc grows by bringing the joy back into product

Arc (1/3): How Arc grows by making user experience joyful

🥇 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

If you’re building in a sea of sameness and relatively undifferentiated products. How users feel when using your product can be the difference between a user choosing you over a competitor.

Think about how you can make not just a great product, but a great experience for users.

How can you invoke joy in the use of your product, and not just the outcome.

Bringing the joy back into product

I can’t overstate how much using and researching Arc for the past few weeks has forced me to fundamentally reconsider the way I look at product.

I have never used a product and become an advocate as quickly as this.

Usually you would expect there to be a killer feature making me completely ditch a staple product like Chrome (something I didn’t even realize I had a pain point with).

But there’s not.

And that’s not to say there aren’t great features. There definitely are (to name a few):

• 5 second previews: Hover over links to get an AI-generated summary of a page.

• Spaces: Swipe to change between custom work spaces (e.g. business and personal)

• Split screen view: Split screens in one window

• Cleans up downloads: Automatically adjusts the name of downloaded files to something relevant

• Easels: Collaborative whiteboard-style page with live links (look at this example of their Release Notes - more on this next week 😉)

But why I fundamentally love Arc is because it’s delightful to use.

Everything about the product is a joy. And for a place where I spend ~8 hours a day, this is actually rather important.

Like most people, I never knew that I wanted/needed a different browser experience.

But now that I’ve had it. I won’t go back.

And I will continue to tell people what they’re missing out on. As I imagine most annoying Arc users, like myself, will do. Bringing more users to Arc.

So practically, how does Arc create this joyful user experience?

• Optimizing for feelings

• Creating magic moments

• Redefining interaction on the user journey: aka the membership team

Optimizing for feelings

The first step Arc takes to create this joyful UX is to really challenge what they’re optimizing for.

And for one of the most used products in a person’s day, it’s important to keep the product human-focused. Arc views this as optimizing for feelings over data. Believing that data often leads to optimizing for the wrong things.

The Arc team was fed up with the endless optimization of everything:

“We believe this mindset has led us to a very specific place: one of efficiency, productivity, and profit… but not a place of humanity. Soul. Or feeling.

And when we take a step back, we think feeling is kind of what matters most in this world.”

To achieve this, Arc put the craft of the product at the forefront of its development. And use data as a secondary source.

Arc is not supposed to only serve your functional needs. But also your emotional ones. Like your favorite cafe where the baristas ask you about your day, the light illuminates the place, the joy of the other people there can be felt, and the slightly worn seats make them all the more comfortable.

Arc is trying to bring humanity back to software. Not at the expense of data. But rather using feelings to guide the nuances missed by data.

Using data as the what and feelings as the why.

Here are 2 ways Arc does this practically:

Rely on their intuition and feelings

Arc is building a product that no one even knew they needed.

If you had asked users what a better browsing experience would be for them, I can imagine they would’ve hit a “better horse vs a car” situation.

Meaning users would suggest things that improve Chrome (the horse) rather than ideate something completely new (the car). Because of this, Arc often has to rely on their own intuition and feelings.

What would they like to feel when using a new feature? How do they feel when using that feature? What could close the gap between the two?

Start with the end emotion in mind

Don’t build aimlessly.

Be clear on what emotion it is you’re trying to invoke with a new product or feature and think about how to get there.

Are you trying to get people to feel joy? Add some magic moments (more on this below).

Are you trying to make people feel less overwhelmed? Build simpler or more recognizable UI.

Creating moments of joy

One thing Arc does better than most products is give its members (the term they use for users) little moments of joy. Be it a little animation, a sound effect, or the ability to create your own theme.

You’re eagerly waiting for the next surprise.

Importantly, these are different for aha moments. Where the core value of your product clicks with a user, they get it, and they activate.

These are moments sprinkled on top that you know you don’t need, but which make using the product fun and delightful. Increasing the chance of you spreading the word of Arc.

The great thing about these moments of joy is that they stack on top of each other and snowball.

Individually you enjoy each one.

But together you fall in love with the product.

Arc has plenty of these moments, some that you see once and leave happier, others that are woven throughout the product and keep bringing you back.

To name a few that I’ve really enjoyed:

The onboarding

Which invokes both sound and sight. Given your eyes a spectacle and your ears a symphony.

I would struggle to capture the experience, so here’s a teaser video (from a few years ago, but the principle is the same).

Just know it will set a new bar for what you expect from future onboardings. So I recommend you try it with caution: Download Arc.

Membership cards

Each member of Arc gets a personalized membership card.

Not only does this make you feel like an insider (more on this next week). But it just gives you a wonderful introduction to the product and makes you feel attached before you begin.

Here’s mine for example: (why thank you Arc for the complement)

Custom themes

For each space you create in Arc, you get the pleasure of choosing the theme for it.

Now you’re probably sighing at me and trying to remind me that you can also do this with Chrome. Which you can. But it’s the way in which you can customize it.

It’s like a mini-game rather than a theme picker.

Giving you a fun introduction to creating your window into the internet.

AI but not in your face

Arc doesn’t look at how they need to bring new AI features into their product. But rather, if AI can make their user experience more enjoyable. What processes and workflows can be enhanced from it?

It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

Adding to the UX rather than creating another piece on top of a puzzle that already fits.

One great example of this is one of their most popular features, the 5 second preview, where you can hover your mouse over a web link and it will summarize it for you.

No need to endlessly click links and return to your search when you don’t find anything.

But the special part about this feature isn’t just its functionality. It’s the interface and experience.

Originally, the feature wasn’t a hit. It gave you AI-generated, but paragraph, summaries of each page.

Instead of scrapping the feature, Arc went back to first principles. What were they trying to achieve?

To make the browsing experience quicker and easier.

And so they prototyped out a new look. Bullet points. Where the bullet icons were related to the sentence.

This small change took it from barely used to one of the most successful feature launches Arc has done. And it wasn’t from a massive feature change, but rather how that feature impacted your experience and gave you a little bit of joy.

Here are a few other examples of how Arc integrates AI into their product:

• Tidy Tab Title: Renames tabs to make them cleaner and easier to find.

• Tidy downloads: Renames downloaded files to something descriptive.

• Browse for me: Creates a custom page for you based on search results. Relevant information as quickly as possible.

The one thing they all have in common?

Giving you small, but magical moments to make your experience using Arc more enjoyable.

Redefining interaction on the user journey: aka the membership team

The world of tech and building product has in many ways unified the way to build teams.

You have product, design, user research, customer success, customer support, engineering, etc. etc.

But what if it didn’t have to be like that?

That’s exactly what Arc asked when building out their team. So rather than create teams with predefined notions of what to do. They created new ones: specifically their Membership Team and their Storytelling Team.

But what does this have to do with UX?

Well, everything really.

Because that’s the way the Membership team is designed.

Traditionally, there are different teams for different touch points in a user’s journey. But not at Arc. They view the relationship with their users members as holistic.

It is the same team that takes you from your first touchpoint to your (hopefully never quite) last.

This continuous relationship with their members builds them extreme loyalty and brand advocacy.

Arc uses this to lean into their community-led product development. Finding:

• Pain points to solve

• Ideas to explore and prototype

• Experiences to improve

And overall giving users a better experience using Arc.

And also bringing them into the Arc-inner circle - but let me not get ahead of myself.

There are still more curtains for me to pull back and look behind. next week I’ll break down how Arc grows by making you feel like an insider.

For The Zero to One, this has been your host Sheldon.

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