What happens when a tool can do a million things and the user is only aware of a handful of them?
Nudges use progressive disclosure to help users identify AI and use its capabilities in ways that that they didn't know existed. They also help people get back to important actions so they can easily access them the next time.
Think through the journey of your product or feature. What are the moments where AI is most likely to be helpful? Which of those moments are most difficult to discover?
Nudges are especially prominent in generative tools, like Writer.com, Jasper.ai, or Copy.ai, as well as knowledge management systems like Coda and Notion. They help users identify ways to use AI to create value on top of content that already exists (e.g. find action items), to take care of mundane tasks (generate a summary of your meeting notes), or to remix the content and improve it ("make it shorter").
Use this framework to identify the capabilities most useful to the user at any moment. If it's unlikely they will have discovered or mastered it yet, consider a nudge to show them how it works.
Different use cases
1. As in-app clues - The capabilities of these tools go well beyond what an average user might think to use them for. Open chat experiences may give someone full control of the possibilities, but the other side of this is users may feel anxiety to know where to begin. Nudges help users get a feel for how a tool works, and show them the basic features and capabilities to give them confidence to explore on their own
2. Where they serve as in-product marketing - Companies are constantly everboarding users into new features. This will be especially true given the fast-moving nature of this technology and the lack of clear product strategy. Nudges can help users identify new features in a way that gives them the most value - whether the feature itself is new or the user finally reached a moment in the journey where it makes sense.
Take MyMind's Serendipity feature, which is only available once you have saved 25 items. Not only does this make it more likely that a user will get benefit from the feature - it also helps the product developers ensure that the feedback and data they are responding to represents users who have reached a critical threshold of usage.
3. Where they serve to sell you on the AI feature - In other cases, companies are taking a spaghetti development approach to AI–throw everything against the wall and see what sticks! In these cases, the prompted actions are not contextually relevant to the user, or the user is not in a place to use them to positive effect. Notion's suggested Summary action results in a blank purple box when plopped into an empty page, with no affordance about what to do next.
