New mnemonic medium prototype: floating prompts in Shape Up and Intro to Modern Statistics

Last month’s mnemonic medium design is now a live prototype. After a dozen live observation sessions with test readers, I’ve already learned a great deal—but I need more sessions and more distance before I can write thoughtfully about what I’m seeing.

For now, I’d like to share the prototype with you all. There’s a lot more design work necessary to make these elements introduce themselves to readers, so I explained the interface before handing control over to my test readers. It may only make sense if you’ve seen last month’s video. At this stage, I’m interested in how “an experienced user” would interact with these primitives.

The prototypes

First, as in the June prototype, I adapted two chapters of Ryan Singer’s Shape Up, a book on product management (subtitle: “stop running in circles and ship work that matters”). I chose this book because the topic is heuristic, contingent, a matter of opinion; the voice is informal; readers will have different backgrounds and views on the subject. And yet I think spaced repetition prompts can still really help readers internalize the material more deeply.

Click here to read the Shape Up prototype. I’m linking to the introduction here because it provides necessary context, but the prototype interface won’t appear until the first “real” chapter, which you’ll access from the bottom of the introduction. Chapters 2 and 3 are adapted for this prototype.

I’ve paired Shape Up with a chapter of OpenIntro’s Introduction to Modern Statistics. This is a formal textbook on a technical topic, like Quantum Country. But I don’t think Quantum Country’s design would work here: readers will have a wide range of prior knowledge, and perhaps a stronger opinion on which subtopics they might like to read. Click here to read the chapter. It’ll work best if you have some hazy memory of statistics from school days, but you’re quite rocky on the details.

These two texts differ substantially in voice, and in how much they demand of readers. Likewise, the adaptations use the mnemonic medium in different ways. Echoing its more relaxed stance, Shape Up embeds a small list of “takeaway” prompts at the end of each chapter, alongside subdued marginal prompts which offer more detail. For the statistics textbook’s explicitly instructional stance; I’ve interleaved embedded reviews like Quantum Country’s as the default path, but with extra affordances for more control.

On testing

If you’d like to play tester, I’d be grateful. A few words on that:

Bug reports are fine, but I’m mostly interested in how the interactions make you feel.

Likewise, if there isn’t some live, authentic reason for you to learn the material in these books, then the “right” way to interact with the interactive elements is to ignore them all! That’s totally fine, of course; it just means you’re not really my target audience for this test.

Stream-of-consciousness logs are very helpful. If you’re willing, consider opening a text file and just typing whatever thoughts and feelings come to mind as you read and interact with the interface. Alternately, you might start a screen recording and talk aloud as you read.

If you send feedback, please give me some context on your background and interest in the book’s topic, and on your background with spaced repetition.

The prototype doesn’t sync with the live Orbit server, but you can downlod your session as an Anki deck by clicking the Orbit icon in the bottom corner.

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I’d like to thank Hammad Bashir for tag-teaming the prototype implementation with me. It was exciting to go from demo video to high-fidelity prototype for something this complex in just two weeks. My thanks also to Adam Wiggins, Andrew Sutherland, Roam Research, and Sana Labs for making that collaboration possible by funding a modest special budget for hiring help.