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Innovation

The Five Lenses of Game Design for Software

Design any product experience through goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow.

Difficulty
Advanced
Time to result
~months to results
Steps
6
Confidence
82%

Rahul Vohra's team at Superhuman evaluates a product the way a game designer evaluates a game, using roughly five factors: goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow. Goals define what the player is trying to achieve. Emotions define what you want them to feel at each moment on that path. Controls cover the nature of the interaction — response times, keyboard shortcuts, search, layout — everything that makes the tool feel like an instrument. Toys are the elements that are simply fun to play with, independent of any task. Flow is the state where the work absorbs you and time distorts, which in practice means engineering away latency and friction. Because the lenses describe experience rather than code, they transfer to onboarding flows, sales conversations, and even showing an apartment.

Origin

Vohra was a game designer at Jagex on RuneScape before founding Reportive and Superhuman, and carried the discipline of game design into building an email client. Extracted from Acquired.

Core principles

  • 01No one needs a game, so the only real requirement is that it is fun.
  • 02Feelings are a design surface, not a side effect of features.
  • 03The nature of the interaction (the controls) is part of the experience, not plumbing.
  • 04A great experience leaves room for playful discovery, not just task completion.
  • 05Flow is engineered, mostly by removing latency and friction.
  • 06The same lenses apply to anything a person moves through, not only software.

How to run it

  1. 1

    Define the player's goal

    State what the person is actually trying to accomplish in this experience, in their words rather than in feature terms.

    Pro tip Write the goal as a verb the user would use, not a screen name.

    Watch out A goal borrowed from a competitor's feature list is not your player's goal.

  2. 2

    Choose the emotional path

    Decide what you want them to feel at the start, the middle, and the moment of completion. Treat the sequence as a designed journey rather than a byproduct.

    Pro tip Pick nuanced sub-emotions rather than 'delight' — enthusiasm, optimism, triumph and tranquility are all different targets.

  3. 3

    Engineer the controls

    Treat interaction quality as a hard requirement: hundred-millisecond response times, instantaneous search, command palettes, keyboard shortcuts, typography and layout as first-class concerns.

    Pro tip Set a numeric latency budget and let it drive architecture, even if it means rebuilding infrastructure.

    Watch out Controls are usually where teams accept 'good enough', and it is where the experience quietly dies.

  4. 4

    Add a toy

    Include something that is fun to play with on its own terms — an Easter egg, an animation, an inspectable internal tool — so there is a reason to poke at the product beyond finishing a task.

    Pro tip A toy works best when discovering it feels like the user's own find.

    Watch out A toy is not a reward mechanic; do not turn it into points.

  5. 5

    Engineer for flow

    Hunt down everything that breaks absorption: spinners, server round trips, context switches between local and remote results, anything that makes the user leave and come back.

    Pro tip Ask where the user currently reaches for their phone mid-task; that is a flow break.

  6. 6

    Re-run the lenses on the non-software surfaces

    Apply the same five questions to onboarding, sales, support, or any physical touchpoint, since the lenses describe experience rather than interfaces.

    Pro tip Include senses the software cannot reach — sound, smell, texture — when the touchpoint is physical.

In the wild

Superhuman's onboarding as a designed experience

Vohra notes that Superhuman's onboarding contains very little software, yet the team ran the whole thing through the five lenses anyway: what is the new user's goal, what should they feel as they move through it, how does the interaction itself behave, where is the delight, and where does absorption break. Treating a mostly human process as a designed game experience is why the onboarding is discussed as part of the product rather than as an operational cost.

→ A non-software touchpoint judged and improved by the same standard as the app itself.

Two years of engineering for a search that never breaks flow

Because the controls lens made speed non-negotiable, Superhuman spent close to two years learning how to download, store and index a user's email inside the browser, then merge local and remote results live. The alternative — search locally, then click a second button to continue on the server — was rejected precisely because it throws the user out of flow mid-task.

→ Search that beats native clients, with no visible seam between local and remote results.

Common mistakes

Treating emotion as polish added at the end

If the emotional path is not decided up front it gets whatever the engineering happens to produce. Emotion is a lens you design with, not a coat of paint applied before launch.

Using only the goals lens

Goals and mastery are necessary but not sufficient. A product that lets people finish tasks efficiently can still feel joyless because controls, toys and flow were never considered.

Is it for you?

Best for

Founders, product managers and designers building a tool people use every day and want to feel great using.

Not ideal for

Compliance-driven or infrequently used software where speed of correctness beats emotional texture.

From the transcript

“So there are seven principles that we think of when it comes to what makes a good game at superhuman. And those seven principles, we…”

“This set of principles across goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow really is about experience design.”

From the episode

Special: Superhuman Part II - Designing Software to Feel like a Game (with Rahul Vohra)

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