Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. Digital distractions are so seductive because they seem to offer the chance of escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t apply: you need never feel bored or constrained in your freedom of action, which isn’t the case when it comes to work that matters (here). You can combat this problem by
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“What if we designed [our products] to minimize stress and create calmer states of mind?”
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
Storing Value
Nir Eyal • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
The Hooked Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential.
Nir Eyal • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
The key to habit formation is convincing customers of the ongoing rewards they will receive from returning to your product or service. In Hooked, customer behavior researcher Nir Eyal explains how the most engaging products do this, which is through a process he describes in his Hook Model (depicted below), or what’s referred to in growth hacking a
... See moreMorgan Brown • Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
I’ve worked in tech long enough to know when a product isn’t designed for delight, but for addiction, long enough to be suspicious of anything that feels ‘‘too fun to quit’’, and long enough to develop a strong belief that ethical tech doesn't exploit humans, it enhances their life.
A point I explore in part 2 is that many attention economy companies want you to think about their services in a binary way: either you use it, or you don’t. This allows them to entice you into their ecosystem with some feature you find important, and then, once you’re a “user,” deploy attention engineering to overwhelm you with integrated options,
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