Igor's Computer Blog

To be successful, you must communicate your ideas. The heart of communication is a story which must be written. Emma Coats wrote stories for Pixar, and tweeted a series of “story basics”. Most of these are applicable to communicating, and I’m posting them here to remind myself how to communicate better. What do you want to say? Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there. How you want to say it? You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. Simplify. Focus. Combine chara

The positive computing book lays out a simple model for the approach your designs can be taking, I summarize it here: Approach Description Example None Happiness ignored Most applications today - no attempt to make users happy Passive (reactive) As issues are found which effect happiness, features are redesigned Comment systems allowing anonymous comments. As anonymous comments filled with negativity, comment systems evolved to allow enforcing a user identity, and to block "bad" users. [TBD: Get a better example] Active Augmenting existing features to make users happier Bing home page - displaying beautiful images that makes users happy. Deliberate The goal of the feature is user happiness exclusively Happify- a tool to train users ot be happier

This post is in progress to help me flesh out my progress -- feedback please!  TL;DR:  Moodles, abbreviated Mu, is a measure of in the moment  happiness" (InMoHap), which is extremely helpful when exploring positive computing.  The case for moodles.  The goal of positive computing is to make users happier, which means we need to measure happiness to tell if users are happier.   The current methods to measure happiness have limitations (details on request) , so we'll define a new ideal unit for in the moment happiness (InMoHap)  called the moodle, abbreviated Mu. The properties of the Mu is it can be objectively measured at any moment of time with minimal  user interruption.    For example, just as a fit bit can transparently count your steps through the day, a Moodle-O-Meter can measure your InMoHap throughout the day. Examples of using moodles.  To get a good understanding of InMoHap and moodles the following graphs show some typical events through the day -- I'

TL;DR - Optimizing, is figuring out how to do make a result better.  Testing is checking if something is so good it doesn’t need to be optimized, or so bad you're better off doing something different. Founders spend a significant portion of their time comparing alternative to see which is better and why. For example how to make a landing page more appealing, or what price they should set for a product. This process is incredibly important and called optimizing. Optimizing is often expensive so before you start optimizing, test to see if something has so little traction it's not worth starting to optimize, or has so much traction there's no need to optimize. For example, imagine you have a customer acquisition cost (CAC) budget of 5$ and you run some search ads and get a 0% click through rate.  In that case, instead of trying to optimize search ads, you are probably better off trying a different channel like social network  ads.  Now, imagine when you try social networ

Ira Glass describes the problem of sucking  with the eloquence of the master story teller that he is. Jeff Atwood  has the solution: 1) Embrace the suck - you'll keep sucking until you don't. 2) Do it in public - that way you can get feedback and learn how to suck less faster 3) Pick stuff that matters - the more important it is, the more motivation you have, and feedback you'll get.

TL; DR: Positive Computing is understanding how computing can make normal people happier. Psychology started life as a science dedicated to helping people reduce mental illness.  Recently some psychologists wondered how their craft could help normal people be happier.  This new branch of psychology is called positive physiology. Similarly computing started life dedicated to making people be more productive.  Many early computer engineers expected the increase in productivity to increase happiness. But, while productivity soared, happiness remained flat.   Recently some computer engineers wondered how their craft could help normal people be happier.  This new branch of computing is called positive computing. Positive computing is a brand new field, and I look forward to investing in it heavily.  If you want to go deep into positive computing, there are some resources below: A  slide deck   on positive computing The  book on positive computing A pintreset board on positive comp

As an entrepreneur, figuring out what your customers need is your top priority. When you have lots of customers, surveys are a great way of doing this. If you're doing surveys I strongly recommend typeform . It's simple to setup, and produces beautiful ux on phones and desktops for data gathering.  When you're thinking of using typeform, don't limit yourself to surveys. For example, I use typeform for sign up forms.  This saved me several hours of initial development, and even more hours when I made changes to my sign up process.