Day 2: The Paradox of Technology, Building communities before product, 3 rules for creating recall questions

Learning: 3 rules for creating questions I've found to be extremely helpful - instead of a general question like "Does Bitcoin pass the Howey Test?" with a paragraph as your answer, a much simpler and more effective question would be "What are the 4 conditions for a Howey Test", or even more simply, "The 3rd condition of the Howey test states that there must be an [...] of [...]" A: expectation, profit..you get the gist..

1. Be clear on the intent of your question, are you trying to understand the Howey test in general? Or are you trying to memorize the specifics of what makes up the Howey test?

2. Brevity - Don't waste precious memory space in your hard drive (brain) with superfluous information, a good rule of thumb: your questions and answers should be no longer than 140 characters (OG twitter!)

3. Understandability - provide context for yourself in the question! If you're using an abbreviation that would only make sense in context, don't leave them out for the sake of brevity; i.e Liquidity Pool Tokens vs Pool Tokens

Building Product: Find your community and build it before building product! By finding your community, you'll be on the ground hearing their problems first-hand! Plus, it's easier to sell to a community you've been actively contributing towards! From the wise words of SHL: "Helping others precedes building a business to help a user do X"

Community -> Problem -> Product

UX/UI: The paradox of technology: "Added complexity and difficult cannot be avoided when functions are added but with clever design, they can be minimized"*.*

On natural mappings, controls and functions - the best products/software are the ones where the controls are exactly where it needs to be. Some things come to mind; (i) fingerprint sensors on the back of the phone, (ii) Notion's "/" for commands, (iii) Google Calendar's "+" icon on the bottom right on mobile devices.

Natural mappings take advantage of physical analogies, cultural standards as well as visual cues - these provide immediate feedback to a user that they're on the "right" track of accomplishing what they want - imagine if your cursor and trackpad moved asynchronously!