How do I make people feel after they put their phone down?
The question came up over dinner at one of my favourite restaurants in London, St Barts in Clerkenwell, with a friend and mentor.
They swirled the wine, took in the fragrance, took a sip, and gave the slightest of nods to the sommelier.
Then they mentioned the aftertaste: crisp and fruity, perfect for a warm summer day in London.
That one word sent us on a tangent. What happens after you put the phone down, close the lid of your laptop, or turn off the TV?
What is the aftertaste of software? Does software even have one?
So many of us spend half our day interacting with visualised 0s and 1s, yet their aftertaste rarely makes its way into our discourse.
In the tangible parts of our lives, it's quite different. Aftertaste is literally on the label.
If you've visited Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, you'll notice that each chocolate bar goes beyond listing the percentage of cacao and region it was sourced from. It articulates the aftertaste, along with the name of the lucky person whose job it was to taste it and describe it. Dream job alert!
Books have perhaps the most underrated aftertastes They can extend beyond individuals and impact society as a whole. I remember reading Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 a few years ago, and it still influences my decisions about what I build and how I build.
Even running has an aftertaste. A sustained state of energy and attention that feels completely counterintuitive. Just yesterday, my colleague was talking about their weekend 15K run. You just spent a shit ton of energy—why do you feel more energetic?
And we talk about these aftertastes.
On the flip side, the recent discourse in tech has been singularly focused on “taste”—what good products look and feel like. We talk about features, radiuses of rounded borders, cleverness in onboarding, the grind of the engineering teams, quotes from people using the product. But not so much the notes that linger afterwards, the hours after the user has moved onto something else.
Next Episode
The attention to detail in the autoplay Next Episode button is true craftsmanship. It doesn't wait until the actual end of the episode, after the credits have rolled. It appears just as the episode finishes. It's not abrupt. There are a few seconds between the end of one episode and the beginning of the next, and the button shows exactly how long you have before it starts.
It tells us what is going to happen, when it is going to happen, and lets us click to make it happen sooner.
It's a button you don't even need to click for it to do exactly what it's going to do.
Binge-watching The Witcher was epic. But what happens when there is no next episode?
Every single time, two thoughts dominate my mind.
Fuck. I need to figure out what to watch next.
Fuck. I just wasted my Saturday.
As a kid, watching one episode of Dragon Ball Z at a time was a ritual. Every weekday at five o'clock, I'd sit down and watch it. The next day at school we'd talk about it, debate what would happen next, argue over whose theory was right, and then do it all again the following day. None of my friends watched Mythbusters, else that would have been debated too!
That had a good aftertaste. The gap between episodes was part of the experience.
Messenger
For the past decade, the software that has dominated my screen time has been Slack. And what a product it has been.
If it were down for the day, I have no idea how I would operate. It is ubiquitous. And I love, absolutely love, the custom emoji reactions!
When I am in it, things are flowing. But when I am not looking at it, I feel anxious. I find myself checking it often—so often that I skip checking the notifications to see if there actually is anything to see, and just scroll through the list of channels and DMs.
I sometimes wonder how many of my greys are down to Slack.
It leaves me feeling like I spent the day trying to drink from a fire hose.
A product can feel excellent in the moment of use but not so much afterwards. Happens in real life as well. My friends who drink and wear Oura get to see their aftertaste quantified in a graph the next morning.
Social Media
An essay about tech wouldn't be complete without talking about social media. This is actually a hard one.
It is really easy to make the case that social media has a poor aftertaste. But as someone who now uses Instagram one day a quarter, I love my relationship with it.
I open the app to curated posts that my friends have sent me, and I stumble across cool events happening in London. The next time we meet, we have a good laugh or a great conversation about something that was shared. Currently it is climbing videos, and I found there is something called climbing chess, where you have to play your move in the time it takes your opponent to do the next climb.
Many of the protests I've seen, where a community has come together to stand up for something, were organised on social media. It connects people who care about what is happening in their community and, sometimes, what is happening thousands of miles away.
The app closes, but the conversation continues. That is perhaps the epitome of good aftertaste.
We all experience this aftertaste. We just don't have a language for it, let alone a metric.
And that might explain why it is so absent from software discourse. What gets measured gets attention. What gets attention becomes important—not necessarily because it matters more, but because it is easier to see.
Tech teams are surrounded by things they can measure: activation, session length, conversion. We can tell you exactly what someone did while they were using a product. We are much less likely to ask what they felt ten minutes after they closed it.
In the thousands of hours I've spent in product, design and engineering debates, we've talked endlessly about what happens while someone is using our product and how to get them back. I can't remember a single conversation about how someone should feel after they close it.
In our pursuit of “taste”, we've paid surprisingly little attention to “aftertaste”.
All software eventually ends the same way. The screen goes dark.
What remains?