Andy Matuschak
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The galaxy brain problem; speed-running UIs
🕑 Added 2020-09-12 04:07:51 +0000 UTCI’ve been spending a lot of time these last few weeks trying to make Orbit explain itself.
In Quantum Country, the essays themselves are, in part, essays about the mnemonic medium. The first essay spends 1,000+ words introducing, motivating, and elaborating the system; later essays spend hundreds of words. But we don’t want every author who uses Orbit in a book or article to have to write a lengthy introduction to the medium. The system needs to introduce itself—at least in part.
This is quite a challenge! If we make people click through a tutorial or something before they can use the embedded prompts, many people will simply leave. But we can’t delay too much explanation, since we need people to sign up in order to send them their review sessions.
Exacerbating this problem is a challenge typical to products with new paradigms. I’ll call it the “galaxy brain problem."
See: the concise, easily-understood way to explain Orbit is: “effortlessly remember what you read” But that’s too reductive. It sells short what the medium can do.
A more elaborate explanation is: “helps you understand complex topics more deeply, efficiently, and reliably.” Unfortunately, this is also much less concrete and immediately informative than “effortlessly remember what you read”. And still, Orbit’s aims are wider than either of these summaries.
As I’ve described (e.g. in Timeful Texts), an even broader framing is that Orbit keeps you in contact with material over time, potentially in a programmable way. It’s a way to “bring ideas into your orbit.” That phrase does a much better job of capturing what Orbit’s about… but it’s also mostly meaningless to anyone without context.
Finally, the most general, galaxy-brain-ish instantiation is: “Orbit is a system for orchestrating dynamically-scheduled microtasks.” This captures the “programmable attention” sense, beyond the instantiation in media you might read. But that explanation is totally meaningless to basically anyone outside this audience.
So what do we do? Right now, my approach is to initially present Orbit as a way to remember what you read, but to “season” that presentation with phrases representing the broader aspiration as you get deeper into the system. Then follow-up emails and content at the end of the review session will slowly unpack more of the ideas.
So your first glimpse of Orbit might look like this. Note that the banner text is introducing a shallow framing of what this is about: “Quickly review what you just read.” And there’s coach text by the button along those lines too.
The banner and coach marks continue to unpack the interface as you proceed through the review. Then once you finish, you see this longer explanation, which starts to introduce the broader aspiration. It’s still too wordy, but I’m at the point where I struggle to remove more detail and keep it something which someone has been given enough motivation to make an account for yet another service.
When Orbit initially launches, I probably won’t have much more than this in place in terms of storytelling. That’s OK—I’ll add the extra pieces with time. This stuff is so hard!
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Have you seen /r/speedrun? This is a community of people who “speedrun” games. So they do things like try to beat Mario 64 as quickly as possible, exploiting bugs in the game to improve their time. But there are more exotic speedruns. Like speedrunning Windows 95 setup.
Michael and I noticed one behavior that makes Orbit’s onboarding design problem extra challenging: people speedrun interface text. Show me a modal dialog? I’m gonna find the “dismiss” button as fast as possible. Some tutorial screen I need to read? Click click click. We found that even people who are serious about the ideas in the interface do this—heck, we do this ourselves! Often, this behavior is justified: this kind of text is usually bad marketing copy, or text trying to paper over poor interface design. But even when we write interface text very carefully, showing great respect for the users’ time, people still don’t read it.
This is in stark contrast to essay text. People read essay text surprisingly carefully. We had people quote back to us whole sentences, verbatim, from the Quantum Country passages about the mnemonic medium. It’s not just that this prose is written by more capable authors: the same people wrote the interface text!
The author of the essay’s prose had worked hard to build credibility and trust with the reader—to show the reader that their time was being respected. One strategy we pursued was to trade on that trust in Quantum Country’s interface: we could use the same tone, the same diction, the same phrases in both essay prose and interface prose to unify the apparent authorship—and to perhaps get people to stop speedrunning the interface. This wasn’t a complete solution by any means, but it’s not a strategy we can use with Orbit.
I think my next best approach is to create essay-like prose contexts to talk about Orbit—contexts which aren’t in interfaces, so they’re not something to be speedrun. For instance, I might write a series of essays on various ideas about the medium and how it might be used, then send those out over time as a newsletter to Orbit users. Or maybe just let them circulate naturally around the web, via social media and the like.
I continue to make progress! We’re in a high-craft phase—the last 10% always is—but week over week things are feeling better and better.
Comments
Andy Matuschak
At least when doing initial explorations, I think it's best to do "unrigorous" A/B tests: I do open-ended exploration on the data in the two conditions. The most interesting variable often ends up being one I wouldn't have thought to measure. Of course, once you've identified the relevant measure, you can follow up with a higher-powered test on just that—but I've found that starting with pre-registration often leads to myopia.
Martin Bernstorff
Just a quick thought on that, would you a/b test on click-through-rate or something like 2-week retention? :-)
Andy Matuschak
Boy, this is why people work with editors—it takes someone else's sharp knife to cut deep enough! Thank you for this, Andrew. I think I'll try it. One comfort: I'm normally pretty cynical about A/B testing one's way to better design, but this is the kind of thing which does lend itself quite well.
Andrew Sutherland
Here's my stripped-down suggestion for the prose: ``` Bring these ideas into your Orbit. This page uses Orbit, an experimental system for deeply internalizing what you read. To stay in contact with the ideas you just learned, enter your email address, or learn more. [email entry box] ``` If people are curious for the justification of how it works, they will click learn more. If they're willing to chance it, they'll enter their email.
Andy Matuschak
Indeed! My sense is that I'll have to put that in e.g. the transactional emails, follow-up posts, etc. Diction can do some of the work, I think: the writing here doesn't focus on efficiency, optimization, memorization, etc. I use words like "internalize" and "contact" and "understanding" instead.
Martin Bernstorff
I loved the post on the nascent art direction because it was so fun, light weight and focused on deliberateness. I think there's potential for bringing this more into the writing – eg. focusing on choice, opportunity, meaning. But I can definitely see the challenge of doing so while keeping it brief!
supposing the user will encounter several Orbit prompts in a short period, i'd try to reveal the post-answer explanation sequentially: adding a new sentence/paragraph in addition to the faded ones from the last time's explanation. and maybe even remove/de-emphasize the subscription form until the explanation is complete, to prevent user from learning to parse it as noise Edit: came up with a post-hoc justification >< 1. Each explanation-interaction in short enough to feel fun and playful 2. Continuation of the explanation-dialogue over multiple interactions builds trust to reading a series of blog posts from the same author 3. During the dialogue, Orbit only gives and entertains, not asking anything in return until the required level of trust is established
