Proactive suggestions

Why does proactive suggestions matter?

Because humans love magic.

Not abracadabra magic, real magic. The kind where an app does exactly what you wanted… without you asking. It feels like it gets you.

It builds user's trust, hence their loyalty. In business terms, retention. The more the app learns and the more it personalises the experience, and the harder it is for users to switch.

The real moat in a world where anyone can build anything; personalization.

In the past, this was hard to achieve. But now, with AI, it's getting easier. It can look at the messy, large data, find patterns, and learn how people interact. The tricky part, for designers, is teaching the LLM when and how to interject, without being annoying. Clippy 2.0 if you will.

An experiment we ran: What if you could Sign in with OpenAI and personalize based on their personality?

Get it right, and users not only stay, but tell their friends.

Let’s look at how this plays out in the wild.

Key takeaways

1. Don't be loud, be present

Siri Suggestions shows you things exactly when you want them. It has the context of your messages, notes, times and addresses and surfaces them across applications. For example, your meet up location in iMessages shows up as a suggestion when you open Maps. No manual copying, no pasting, no searching. Just a context-aware shortcut that feels as if Siri knows you. Friction reduced in seconds.

Arc Browser's auto-renaming your downloads is brilliance in action. That cryptic "6774fe08-5cd3..." becomes "AeroMéxico Flight Confirmation, April 14.pdf" without you lifting a finger. The AI understands context and organises your digital life effortlessly. Context awareness Pro Max.

AI UX checklist

When designing for invisibility, it becomes difficult to measure if you've gotten everything. We've created a list to make sure you're not too invisible and not too in-the-face.

It’s a tangible gut-check for designers and product builders. If the answer is not YES to all of these, maybe it’s not ready to ship?

Future play

Most of the tools might overlook this interaction but in a world where features can be copied, intuition is the competitive edge.

Tools with proactive suggestions will build stickiness by reducing effort and amplifying delight. When apps predict your needs, switching becomes a chore, and staying becomes effortless.