Duck Tales: Delight at DuckDuckGo — and why we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (Dax the Duck) (Episode 4)
In this episode, Gabriel (founder) and Beah (VP, Product) discuss functional and non-functional product delight, how we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (and counting), and why AI is so bad at adding mustaches to Ducks. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.GabrielHello again, welcome to Duck Tales. ⁓ I think this is gonna be episode four. Hopefully it’s getting better. Today I am not interviewing Beah. Beah’s actually gonna interview me about a feature that’s fun that I think you’ll enjoy. But Beah, you wanna introduce yourself?BeahSure. I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. Been here about six years. So seen a lot of things that have happened in recent DuckDuckGo product history. I, Delight is a favorite topic, a theme of mine. So I’m glad to be doing this conversation.GabrielYes, indeed. Yes, speaking of the light, my favorite dog is behind you. Because I don’t have a dog. Well, I don’t have a dog, and it’s the dog I interact with most. Friday.BeahHe’s your favorite. Certainly the one that attacks you the most, playfully attacks you the most. Yeah. Yes, that’s that’s Friday, everyone. He is usually not so low energy as he looks right now.GabrielThat’s true. Yeah. The bar might be low. But yes, so I forgot to say DuckTales is obviously inside DuckDuckGo, behind the scenes kind of information about things we’re doing and how the company works and features we’re building and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ And as you noted, we have a delightful feature ⁓ that we’d like to talk about today. But I worked on it, it was actually part of Hack Days. We had a previous episode, it was also a feature came out of Hack Days. But yeah, shoot some questions at me and I will respond.BeahSure. Tell us the origin, Gabriel. How did you come to decide to work on this?GabrielYes, so what are we talking about? First of all, if you ⁓ search some special words, often characters like Spider-Man, Batman kind of thing, ⁓ the logo, our logo, Dax the Duck for those people don’t know, will change and he will be costumed ⁓ in that character ⁓ in the little logo on the search engine. We actually did this a long time ago. So we used to do like our version of Google doodles or whatever on the homepage. Maybe like literally 15 years ago at this point, ⁓ up until maybe 2012 ish. ⁓ We stopped doing it because it was hard to do. It took a lot of time to make the, make the especially logos. It also confused a lot of people because we put it up in like kind of random situations, like someone may have died or hollowed something and people who didn’t know about that person or holiday were just like what what what is going on with this but a lot of people really liked it and especially liked just the idea and the fun I would call delight as we’re gonna get to the the changing logo and that just the funness of dressing up a character ⁓ and I also am in that category so I’ve been wanting to bring this back for like 10 years but had no great way to do it⁓ And then enter, enter AI. I thought that AI could be useful ⁓ making these specialty logos in some way. ⁓ When I first tried it, it was not, and I tried different versions of image models. But then finally I was hack days a few months ago, got it to work. ⁓ And so now we’ve been making them.BeahOkay. Okay.GabrielOne of suggestions of the community and team members and putting them up as Easter eggs. Yeah.BeahDo you want to just say what hack days is for anybody who doesn’t know.GabrielYeah, so Hack Days is every quarter, anyone who wants to participate in the company, and we’re about 300 people at this point, maybe 350 or something, can get together and create work on anything they want, really. It often is like features, ideas, and maybe designer, engineer, new, don’t have to be a product person, but they don’t have to be engineering a product, they can just join and collaborate, come up with something exciting. It could be like little things like fixing bugs or things in our product, but often like things people are really excited about like this for me. I actually tried it in two different ways. I wanted to do this idea, but I also wanted to get back into programming and try out all the AI programming tools. So in doing this, I actually used AI for the first time, like end to end to like write the code.BeahOkay. Okay. ⁓what AI tools do you use?GabrielI used Curser to kind of manage the creation of the tool. And then I used ⁓ the ChatGPT Create Image API to really be the generation of this. I can share my screen a little bit and we can look atBeahYeah, show us some.GabrielYeah, let me do that. Sharing screen, window. Okay. Let me actually. this way. Okay, can you see this? Sweet. Okay, so ⁓ this is one of my favorites. So if you search the dude, which is a character from The Big Lebowski, I move this so I can see you still. ⁓ And you put your mouse over, you can see Dax is now decked out in the sweater and sunglasses. And I put this in a new tab so you can see it ⁓ zoomed in a bit. ⁓BeahOkay. Okay.GabrielSo this is kind of the idea. A few of my other favorite ones so you can get the ideas. If you search Hydra, ⁓ you get this,Gabrielyou know, and multi-dex, if you will. Moona Nights, for those who don’t know, that’s an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character. ⁓BeahJust for the record. I did not know that.GabrielAre you serious you know or you didn’t know it? Okay, you might have noticed there’s a big Moon poster in our office. You walk through it because we go there sometimes. And the final one I throw up is the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. I just like the idea that Dax is a duck, but you can also make this work with like a mixture of animals, which is fun. Yeah, okay. So a couple of things I want to point out.BeahHmm. Yeah. did you decide how to like, how did you figure out who to do this for, what characters to do this for?GabrielYes, best part about this is, I didn’t for the most part. I put this up and we came up with some guidelines internally, like we’re not doing alive people, that kind of thing, mainly characters. And I just asked ⁓ for suggestions internally. Once I had like initial set, I posted it and I’ve been getting internal suggestions from the get-go. So at this point, I just go ⁓ every few weeks.And there’s magically more suggestions from our team members in there. And I haven’t heard of, would say, 60 % of them. And I will just kind of make them happen. The tool that does that, just to show you this a little bit, which is kind of fun, is, so this is an internal tool. I did this for suggestions that are real suggestions right now. So this is like internal stuff. These might come. I have no idea what Podman is, by the way. I just said this this morning.GabrielI literally just gave it the word Athena and it based on this big image prompt that I can show you in a minute and it’ll generate 10 probe and I suggest variations and then we’ll pick one that seems like it matches the best. Often times, sometimes about 50 % of the time it’s pretty good off the get go like this. And then another 50 % of the time. It doesn’t know what to do. Like this is, there’s mustaches all over the place. We talk about that. I don’t know what pod man is exactly, but I’m assuming none of this is great for it. So what I’m to have to do for this one is figure out what pod man is and then give it a little more instruction. And this is another one that I think is kind of working for the most part. ⁓ Wednesday Adams, although it looks a little angry. So like we want to keep it friendly. So I probably will give a little suggestion about that.Beah⁓ You want to talk about the mustache problem?GabrielYeah, so you pointed this out after we had about 100 that like AI is really bad at placing mustaches on decks. It like, you can see in the array of these, they don’t even ask for a mustache on this one. But like this one’s like on the beak. This one’s in the beak, I guess he’s eating it.BeahYeah. Yes, those are my favorite when they’re eating their own mustache. My theory for tell me how outlandish this is, my theory is that the internet doesn’t have a lot of pictures of ducks with mustaches and thus the training material is inadequate. Although I think with this initiative, probably improving on that.GabrielI’ve been trying to just avoid it at this point. I think it’s a good theory. I have definitely tried, I tried for like a couple of days to like get better mustache instructions and it did not work. A couple of things I wanted to highlight. So what’s actually been most fun about this now is that, because the intention was to delight people from Easter eggs. The community, especially on our subreddit, very excited about this. So much so, especially this one.BeahHahaha.Gabrielcommunity member, actually I don’t know how to pronounce it so I might get this wrong. think they might be French, Sean Mack, apologies if I did that wrong, actually has made a categorizing all the ones that they found ⁓ and also taking suggestions which is gonna be helpful for us. But what’s been fun is they’ve been trying to find them. We haven’t told them which ones exist. So there is infinite theoretical possibilities here. We haven’t even really told them how many there are, I think we should reveal it on this podcast. We have our own internal logo file, this one, so I’m not gonna show them all of them, but there might be one on this page that they haven’t seen. But at the bottom, I have my own count here. There’s 364 currently. And their count,BeahThe big reveal.Gabrielyes, their count is 322.So that is 44 that they need to or that are out there to find.BeahBut by next week the number might be larger. Is that right?GabrielYes, it probably will be larger, if that is correct. And then the one last thing I wanted to show you, which you might find interesting, let me, it’s a different screen. Let’s see here. This is actual code, but I’m not actually gonna go crazy with the code. I just wanted to show, because I think it might be interesting, how this works, the prompt. BeahOkay. ⁓GabrielIt was a lot of iteration to actually get it to work. And this is the current prompt, which changes a little bit, but it basically takes our logo and it takes in at the end. I’m gonna make this a little bigger. Do the whole thing. It plugs in the theme thatyou give it at the end and any additional guidance. But this whole part here is just instructions of getting it to modify our current logo in a way that tries to keep the beak structure intact, like the parts of the logo intact that are important, but add things to the theme. And we don’t need to walk through this or anything, but this is kind an example of what a of evolved deep AI prompt looks like that is doing this thing.BeahOkay. Okay. Nice. Okay.GabrielCool. All right. I’m gonna stop sharing. So I know we were also going to talk a little bit about Delight because this feature is intended to Delight, but at a higher level, we as a company have a focus on Delight this year, probably next year. We always wanted Delight users, but we have a particular focus on trying to build and Delight into our product. I know you’ve been thinking a lot about that.This is a good example of it, but generally any thoughts you can give us on delight.BeahYeah, I mean, first, like, maybe it’s worth just defining what I think delight means, what product delight is. It’s not a very fancy definition. I just think it’s ⁓ product experiences that make people feel good. So you can have product experiences that work in the sense of they accomplish some goal or meet some, you know, acceptance criteria, but they don’t make people feel good.Maybe they make people feel grumpy or frustrated or sad, or maybe just they don’t make people feel anything. ⁓ And that’s fine sometimes, but it’s nice to feel good. We’re all, humans and not robots. And ⁓ it is good to use products and interact with the world in a way that is, that makes you feel things and feels delight and joy. And so we want that. ⁓ And I think it is, it’s, it’s a, ⁓tricky in lots of ways. One is that different people feel good about different things. And so that’s been an interesting.⁓ challenge is trying to figure out like what are the forms of delight that we think are going to meet our users where they’re at given we have an extremely diverse user base and we value that and value the differences in that user base. But I think we’ve had some good successes. can give a few examples of places where we have delight in our product. ⁓ An old... Yeah.GabrielYeah, please. We have question for you. Do you think, I I think Delight’s wider than, I mean, the Easter egg kind of stuff is Delight. It’s like things that you find that are...I also think of delight, I think you think of the same way, but let me know if not. It could be a really just good polished regular workflow. ⁓ You’d have to notice it, and you get to notice it, you’re saying, to feel delightful, but it could be more just a regular product thing, not like this like special thing, you know?BeahYeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, think in fact, the best forms of delight actually make the product work better for you than it would if you did it in a non-delightful way. So like when you can like find the intersection of, you know, the product actually delivering on its promise and doing so in a like somewhat surprising delightful way that makes you feel something, I think that’s like, that’s the top of the pyramid of good delight.GabrielLike this app just like accomplished what I wanted to accomplish and it did it amazingly. BeahYeah, yeah, yeah. I think sometimes that can just come in the form of really nice touches and polish. I think sometimes, I think there’s just a whole spectrum of how you can do that. An example maybe that’s not super obvious in this respect, the way that you clear data in the DuckDuckGo browser is with the fire button. And so there we’re using an analogy and something from the natural world.to do something that you can do in other browsers. ⁓ But we’re also bringing it forward so that it’s just always there in one tap away. We gave it a personality. And I think that’s delightful. And I think it’s delightful in a way that does actually enhance the functionality. Like I said, it’s just you don’t have to go through menus and choose a lot of things. You can just hit a button and get the effect you want.And yeah, I mean, there’s something satisfying about like something being burned up, you know? And so in as much as it actually like lets people delete their data when they want to, like it makes that actually work better for them. It makes it more accessible to them. I think that is probably merging functionality and delight.GabrielYeah. Yeah, it’s a great example. Yeah, not only have we made it front and center, which makes it really easy to do, which I think people just like, because I hear that feedback all the time, but we also, it has a visual flair. Like we added a visual element to it. Like when you hit the fire button, you see, like you said, literally burning up your tabs, which I think is like it ends. It ends in a, has a good ending, has a climactic ending. Are there any others you want to point out?BeahYeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe two at totally different ends of the spectrum. One is, this probably doesn’t help with the functionality, it’s just purely cute in my opinion and I like it and I suspect many people haven’t realized this, but the shield that we have in the URL bar in our browsers and elsewhere at DuckDuckGo is actually in the shape of a duck foot. ⁓ I’ve always really appreciated that.GabrielYeah, do too. Yeah, I don’t think many people notice, but yeah, I agree. If you do notice, really is kind of an Easter egg. Yeah, exactly. You cannot see it. Perfect.BeahYeah, you can’t unsee it. Um, and then another one at the opposite end of the spectrum, think, is, uh, cookie pop-up blocking. So like, this one’s weird because it’s, we’re taking something that you see all the time on the internet that’s kind of annoying and not helpful and we’re removing it. And so it’s a little tricky to do that delightfully because like, how do you make something delightful that people, when you’re actually like removing, you know,a cognitive experience from how people are using your product. One of the ways, I mean, I do think to some extent, like if you’ve been in a different browser and you’re visiting a lot of sites with cookie pop-ups and you’re just like tired of it, I think just, you know, spending a day in our browser and not having that experience is probably delightful to some. But we also did add like a little animation in the URL bar that just kind of shows you that we blocked a cookie pop-up that...I think is like a nice reminder that we remove some friction without putting friction back in front of you and interrupting you because it’s just like in the URL bar while you can still interact with the page and so forth.Gabrielgood example. Yeah I’ve always found it tricky because yeah you know you really need to know that we did it to be delightful fully but you don’t want to interrupt people to let you know that you did it because that’s another pop-up. ⁓ Yeah interesting. So one that I would like us to do eventually which I keep pulling forward with another hack days is like various people have made games ⁓ that we could somehowBeahYeah, exactly.Gabrielput in the browser, especially in the 404 situation. ⁓ Flappy Bird ⁓ is the one that I’ve seen the most from Hackdays, and I would love to get that in, but maybe somebody will do that at some point. ⁓ Any closing thoughts?BeahClosing thought, yes, I have one, is that in trying to navigate what kind of delight do we want to create, what is actually going to be delightful to ⁓ the majority of our users, one heuristic that we’ve used internally that I really like is looking for things at the intersection of delight and trust. ⁓DuckDuckGo’s vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and I think trust is one of our greatest assets as a company. ⁓ And so I think in the space of delight, you could maybe err by finding things that are funny to some people or amusing to some people or charming to some people, but they’re actually annoying or self-promotional. And those things would not build trust. ⁓ Doing things that are respectful of the user, that areauthentically us that are approachable, that increase transparency. I think those are, tend to be things that build trust and are delightful. And so that is the filter that I’ve been trying to put on ⁓ thinking about how we design things. And I think the team has as well.GabrielSo you put the shield and cookie pop-up management in that that bucket.BeahI think so. I don’t know if having a duck foot ⁓ shield builds trust. I mean, maybe in as much as it tells you a little bit about just like who we are and in that way.GabrielYeah, guess it’s not really protection. It’d more like the animation we have around the shield where it’s showing you what trackers we’re blocking, that kind of thing. Yeah.BeahYeah, yeah,I think so. ⁓ I think so. think like the another example that maybe is like, we encourage feedback from users and we try to create like open lines of communications with users and we try to make it really easy to report when something is wrong and we try to like, and we actually read those reports and we act on them and we like, change the product and we try to be responsive on, you know, Reddit, for instance. ⁓which is a place where we can actually respond to people on like if somebody just sends us feedback through ⁓ search. I don’t know, that’s I think another example of building trust and that we’re actually like humans behind this thing that care and like want to know if something’s going wrong. ⁓ If there’s things that we’ve launched that we are excited about, but we know might disrupt people in some way and we’ve tried to proactively message those and make it really easy to get feedback. ⁓So that’s one of my favorite examples to a product manager of me, suppose.GabrielNo, I think that’s great. Okay, cool. Well, let’s wrap. I suspect you’re gonna be back a lot being a host for other things. So I guess a recurring character on DuckTales. So thank you, Beah, and we’ll see. You’re alive, so no live people. Making me make an exception. But yes, till next time, thank you for tuning in. See you later, everybody.BeahHahaha.Maybe I can get a DAX. ⁓ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com
Canada - english