Rob Haisfield Profile picture
Imagining new internets @websim_ai. GenAI, TfT, BeSci, HCI, UX. Ex-Tana, Edge & Node, Spark Wave
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Jun 9, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Feel free to reach out if your app is losing users bc they aren't accomplishing their goals.

Informed by behavioral science, game design, & a career helping over a dozen cos w/ continuous onboarding, I'm pretty good at improving adoption & retention through product decisions. Start here and open new tabs with reckless abandon:

robhaisfield.com/notes/designin…
Nov 18, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Odds are higher than I'd like that we lose Twitter, so please fill this out to stay in touch.

I don't have a newsletter or anything atm, but if I start one, or migrate to another social platform, I'll be sure to reach out so you can join me over there ❤️

guidedtrack.com/programs/eo33u… I met the love of my life, made many friends, found community, clients, research opportunities, and jobs all through Twitter. I'll stick around as it goes down, but seeing the effect the leadership is having on the morale and lives of the people who built it is making me doubt.
Nov 16, 2022 10 tweets 5 min read
Notion’s new AI functionality is interesting because it’s mindblowing to many while simultaneously trivial to anyone who’s played with the GPT-3 playground. Probably just a few prepackaged prompts triggered by buttons with some special effort towards using Notion formatting. Here are some more examples of things you can do within GPT-3. It's not hard, you just need to play with it. At the top, you'll generally have a prompt that gives it a character and a scenario (sort of like improv). Then tell it what you want it to do
Nov 15, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
Quick and dirty video on how to use GPT-3 playground to generate structured data automatically to paste directly into Tana.

In this case, I give it a list of birds, tell it what fields I want for each of them, and then GPT-3 will fill them in and format.

.@cazza42 uses @tana_inc to help her with birdwatching. I thought to myself, maybe she wants to record some data about each of the bird species, but that might take a lot of manual work. GPT-3 can do it for her!

Nov 12, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
Love this! @reneedefour uses a bunch of fields here too… that may be useful to you, but remember that fields are optional prompts, not chores! When I tag a #gift, I have fields for who it’s for and whether I’ve given it already or not. Can be as low or high friction as you want. Here you'll see two ways I captured a gift idea for Ally and both will show up with a LINKS_TO search. LINKS_TO is a wildcard field, and will pull up any relationship to nodes that reference "Ally."

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Nov 10, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Every user being verified as human would be valuable to Twitter as a public good. That's not visceral to individuals. One of the problems with verification as a paid service is that most people aren't worried about impersonation, so don't experience the pain directly. I don't like the idea of making Twitter "pay to play" by charging for reach. Fortnite, one of the most profitable games in the world, never sells players an advantage against other players... it's all cosmetic, self-expression stuff. Game itself is free.
Oct 25, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Love the reframing towards “linked data” as I suspect more people will understand that vs. ontologies. Data describes objects and links them together! Sometimes those links have labels, which you can do through fields. A schema is a consistent way that data links up. Of course, as time goes on, we want to make this technical mumbo jumbo invisible. People use relational columns in linked notion tables without knowing what a relational database is. We’re still figuring out the best words to use to convey Tana’s mental models at a visceral level
Oct 13, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
I would not fully attribute @tana_inc's "steep learning curve" to difficulty. From user research, I'd hypothesize the curve mostly comes unfamiliarity. Once bits of it start to click, they climb fast.

"a steep learning curve, but I'm seeing value quickly"
People who watch videos by our community or team (see help center help.tana.inc for both) experience greater success once they start

This isn't why we have a waitlist and we'd love to clear it quickly, but pre-familiarity is a happy side effect

Oct 4, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
Whether you're working in files and folders, or in a database like Notion, the problem is the same. You have to figure out where to put data (which folder, which table) before you write it.

In @tana_inc, you start by writing data, then the nodes flow into tables through searches It's not just tables - we can view live search results in different ways: as a list, gallery, board. But here you'll see that I'm searching an entire workspace for a few fields. Fields aren't owned by a table. Many types of node might have the same fields

Jun 27, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Given that @geobrowser is a web3 app posting on-chain, users need a wallet and (traditionally would need) funds. However, we want to bring new people to web3.

Have you ever tried doing that? Creating a wallet and getting money on-chain often kills the onboarding experience 🧵👇 When a new user goes through onboarding, we generate a wallet on their device, removing the need to go through another "app" onboarding (likely more frustrating than ours) first

Then we abstract away the need to fund wallets before users can do anything with metatransactions!
Jun 14, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
It seems obvious to me that semantic search has some role to play in the "Search as a primitive" design discussion. scalingsynthesis.com/I-Search-as-a-…

Still need to fill out the edge connecting it to the question about the role of AI in facilitating discourse graphs scalingsynthesis.com/Q-What-is-the-… I haven't collected much on this yet, but I'll try...

Neural databases are well set up for answering questions about domains without predefined schema (often the case with innovation). We can deliberately encode prior knowledge into the training.

scalingsynthesis.com/Q-Can-neural-n…
Jun 14, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
This is a huge reason why hypertext-based organization systems (Roam, Obsidian, etc.) became necessary for my work. In my independent consulting days, I would work on multiple projects at once and wanted work to carry over, independent of their project silos Make information modular such that it can be used across time and projects. Disconnect your thoughts from the ephemerality of a stream of consciousness.

May 29, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Many US problems seem to ripple out from the Federal Reserve's mechanism for changing the money supply. They lend money at higher and lower rates to banks, who then lend to everyone else.

How might we design our monetary levers to increase the money supply from the bottom up? Our new money literally mostly goes through rich people working financial markets before it go to us. They charge invisible fees everywhere people have accepted as a fact of life. Banks are an invisible intermediate government. Of course there's gonna be income inequality.
May 20, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
I'm thrilled to FINALLY publish scalingsynthesis.com, a living hypertext notebook outlining my research with @balOShere and @JoelChan86 discussing how Tools for Thought can facilitate synthesis. Click around and see where it takes you!
We spoke with > 30 users and builders of thought processing software. From users we learned common behavioral patterns and what they want from their tooling, and from builders we learned their design questions and philosophy. We also introspected our own workflows and needs.
May 4, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
I dream of a world where apps that are basically a UI on top of a spreadsheet or database give you access to the database and let you query/edit from there A friendly UX on top of a database enables prosumers to push the boundaries of their tools to do things that would previously require custom features
Feb 13, 2022 13 tweets 7 min read
A few observations from this piece from @danshipper about why he isn't using @RoamResearch anymore:

1. If all links are intentional, then reviewing them is less likely to surprise you

2. Many people review notes so infrequently as to make upfront structuring effort not worth it 3. It is valuable to remove the friction of "where do I put this?" as that can get in the way of writing the note (people like @EleanorKonik who have a well architected system and a sense of "mise en place" are the exception)
Feb 4, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Writing code with @github copilot as a beginner is surreal

It presents 10 possible ways to code my instructions. Some have mistakes I would've made! I scan through them, evaluating them in my head or in the REPL. This tests my understanding and shows me the shape of the solution @github Sometimes I'll evaluate something in the REPL and it'll say that a function in a library I'm using doesn't exist. Then I realize that it just wrote pseudo-code for me 🤯️ so even if what they gave me doesn't work, it still maps out the solutions for me to finish?
Jan 4, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
I like Web3 as a way of describing a shift to decentralized backends and user-owned data

I don’t like lumping every internet company together as Web2. People aren’t rebelling against Box and Figma, they’re rebelling against FAANG and the outcomes of advertising business models A big reason Web3 resonates with me is bc I know how painful it feels to migrate my data to another app.

In the QT, w/ extra programming, it was possible to instantiate my data into another app's format. That's not always the case

Jan 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Cryptocurrency friends interested in financial inclusion:

What do we do about this? Electricity is a prerequisite for cryptocurrency usage Not a total answer but proof-of-stake requires less electricity than proof-of-work, and Ethereum nodes after the merge will be able to run on a Raspberry Pi. Not all chains prioritize the ability to run a full node on very light hardware, Solana requires extremely beefy hardware
Jan 1, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Tools for thought predictions for 2022-2025:

1. The thought processors people know and love today will be leapfrogged by builders who have their own unique theses on what is important for knowledge workers

The future is unrecognizably innovative. Not everyone will switch though Encryption, powerful permissions primitives, and potentially local first peer2peer (vs. cloud) will come to be a table stakes expectation for serious knowledge workers who need to deal with sensitive data.

More data is sensitive than you think.
Dec 19, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
Anyone use NFTs as a business model for software sales? With physical goods, I buy & resell online when I stop using it. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent second-hand market for software resale? Also not sure if devs get royalties on license resale? In Working in Public, @nayafia observed that there's a common economic misconception that software has no marginal cost to produce additional units. If software is to continue, software engineers maintain code, provide support, and update it for future users.