Designing software to feel like a game: Rahul Vohra on Superhuman

Executive overview

Most productivity software is built around what users want or need — but no one needs a game. Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman and former RuneScape game designer, argues that the better question is: what do you want users to feel?

Superhuman is built on seven game design principles across five factors: goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow. These aren't aesthetic choices — they drive every technical and product decision, from rewriting Chrome's font engine to engineering search that beats Google's CDN.

The core insight: design for emotion and flow, not features — and your product becomes something people play, not just use.

What makes a game (and why gamification fails)

• A game is something you play; a toy is an object you play with; fun is pleasant surprise.
• Bushnell's law (easy to learn, hard to master) is necessary but not sufficient.
• Gamification — adding points, badges, and levels — is not game design.
• Extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation: a 1970s Stanford study found rewarded children spent half as much time drawing as unrewarded ones.
• Gamification works only when the underlying experience was already designed like a game.
• Superhuman's inbox-zero imagery feels like gamification — but it works because the product itself was built as a game first.

Flow as a design target

• Flow is the psychological state where you lose track of time and self-consciousness dissolves.
• Rahul's personal reference point: racing a Lamborghini Gallardo in mountain canyons at speeds where "words are too slow to think."
• That experience — every sense at capacity, human and machine as one — became the inspiration for Superhuman's speed obsession.
• Programmers naturally experience flow because they write their own tools; Superhuman's mission is to give that to everyone else.
• Flow requires speed: Superhuman spent nearly two years building a system to simultaneously search email locally and on Gmail servers, merging results in real time to eliminate latency.

Engineering for game-quality experience

• Superhuman runs in the browser with no performance penalty versus native — faster than any native email client.
• Local full-text search merged with server results in real time solves a genuinely hard computer science problem: merging two infinite lists without pop-in.
• To achieve typographic perfection, they reverse-engineered Chrome's font layout engine and built a custom CSS framework that places every element on a sub-pixel grid.
• Internal command: command-K baseline reveals the sub-pixel grid to users — an Easter egg that shows the craft underneath.

Designing for emotion

• Superhuman identifies the specific emotions they want users to feel at each moment — not generic "delight," but triumph, longing, tranquility, awe.
• Tool used: the Hunter Institute emotion wheel, which offers far more granularity than Plutchik's wheel.
• Inbox zero is one of the most emotionally resonant moments in email; Superhuman uses it to push beyond joy into love and surprise.
• Image choices are deliberate: peaceful landscapes evoke tranquility; high-contrast cityscapes evoke awe and a sense of flying.
• The user rarely consciously registers the emotion — they just feel control and power. That's the point.

Testing game mechanics without building them

• Before building the streaks feature, Superhuman ran SQL analysis and sent users personalized email digests of their own usage statistics.
• Three rounds of testing, varying which stats were surfaced, measuring sentiment and engagement.
• Finding: streak data was highly compelling; other stats were not.
• Conclusion: a streak feature, if not front-and-centre, would reinforce rather than undermine intrinsic motivation.
• Silicon Valley gets product testing right even when it gets gamification wrong.

Applying game design beyond software

• The five factors — goals, emotions, controls, toys, flow — apply to any experience design, not just software.
• Example: renting out a condo through the same lens — what is the visitor's goal, what emotion should they feel, what do they smell and touch?
• Vanilla scent in the kitchen evokes childhood baking; lavender in the lounge evokes relaxation.
• Emotional vocabulary also improves personal relationships: separating the objective behavior from the feeling it caused, and naming the actual emotion rather than a passive accusation ("I feel attacked" → "I feel lonely").
• Game design discipline makes better managers and better partners.