23:00 - 31:00 Discussion of striking a balance between maintaining the status quo vs coming up with new ways of interacting with computers so we don’t get stuck in a rut trying to translate everything too directly.

• It goes back to first principles. By and large, the reality is that a lot of usability is driven by the cognitive architecture that is... See more

0:00 - You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life. So all these things come together and so for some people community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products or games, where [those topics] became 2nd importance. Because the community became the main driver to come back to this group of people to nerd ou... See more

• 26:34 - A “big source of inspiration for me [Mark] has been the world of analog tools. We’ve been thinking about how to build good digital tools for maybe 50 years or so. We have a couple thousand years of explicit and implicit study of how to create analog work environments.” Eg: personal libraries, studies, workshops, artist studios. How can we... See more

48:00 Where and how you post content or reach your users to form community entirely depends on knowing your users. Know their personas, their user journey paths, do they start on your forums, or in chat, or is their default behavior when looking for stuff to type into YouTube. For Logseq 90% of how-to content is videos because of the nature of the ... See more

54:00 - It's always a challenge to see further down than 6 months along the road because you don't always know what the platform is working on and what they are going to do. They have their own competitive forces to deal with. So you hope, "Hey I hope my niche isn't too interesting to them, that they want to take it over. But interesting enough tha... See more

You can also work in HCI as a practitioner, such as an engineer, and do product work and engage with the community.

38:45 - Great tips on how to dig into the literature with Google Scholar

40:30-50:00 discussion of community overlap between academic & product designer or engineers.

Bottom Line: Anyone can step into this world without a degree.

55:00 - It’s pretty common to have these two-sided integrations. For example, building on Slack, and also on Google Calendar. You are 2x-ing your risk. Because you have to keep up with changes happening on both platforms. And either platform may steal the idea as well. But those 2-sided integrations can also be a goldmine niche.