The screenshots and demos of every new "tools for thought" app exclusively show:
a) using the app to plan how to build the app, or
b) light historical research notes on TFT
Yet TFTs "require serious contexts for use" – notes.andymatuschak.org/zs5uUEv9iJH7Ju
🤔 We've missed a beat here.
Conversation
Would you say that is the responsibility of the app developers or the users?
Each context has varying constraints and affordances.
I can't imagine developers grapsing the nuances of other contexts 🤷♂️
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Responsibility of whomever leads the product vision – often the product managers, founders, or designers – to do extensive user research with people solving real contextual problems.
Or better, bring domain experts onto the team / work amongst them.
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I wonder how general or specific you need to be in a product vision for tools for thought 🤷♂️
' second brain tools' seem to be all over the place and do different thing...
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Replying to
Agree there's more than one approach – the "box of legos" apps offer a set of affordances and let users design ways to solve their own problems
Vs. UX-research-based apps that solve a specific problem in a defined context
Former seems less guaranteed to be useful than the latter
Replying to
Sounds like a learning paradigm discussion.
No good way to move in that direction over twitter 😅
Pros and cons both sides, I am just glad I am a user rather than developer in this case 😁
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Many of the "box of lego" apps have succeeded though because of the varied ways in which people prefer to work.
Although, I hope to also see focussed apps built to solve problems within a context :) And as a developer, get better at understanding the problems in a domain.
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