The galaxy brain problem; speed-running UIs

I’ve been spending a lot of time these last few weeks trying to make Orbit explain itself.

In Quantum Country, the essays themselves are, in part, essays about the mnemonic medium. The first essay spends 1,000+ words introducing, motivating, and elaborating the system; later essays spend hundreds of words. But we don’t want every author who uses Orbit in a book or article to have to write a lengthy introduction to the medium. The system needs to introduce itself—at least in part.

This is quite a challenge! If we make people click through a tutorial or something before they can use the embedded prompts, many people will simply leave. But we can’t delay too much explanation, since we need people to sign up in order to send them their review sessions.

Exacerbating this problem is a challenge typical to products with new paradigms. I’ll call it the “galaxy brain problem."

See: the concise, easily-understood way to explain Orbit is: “effortlessly remember what you read” But that’s too reductive. It sells short what the medium can do.

A more elaborate explanation is: “helps you understand complex topics more deeply, efficiently, and reliably.” Unfortunately, this is also much less concrete and immediately informative than “effortlessly remember what you read”. And still, Orbit’s aims are wider than either of these summaries.

As I’ve described (e.g. in Timeful Texts), an even broader framing is that Orbit keeps you in contact with material over time, potentially in a programmable way. It’s a way to “bring ideas into your orbit.” That phrase does a much better job of capturing what Orbit’s about… but it’s also mostly meaningless to anyone without context.

Finally, the most general, galaxy-brain-ish instantiation is: “Orbit is a system for orchestrating dynamically-scheduled microtasks.” This captures the “programmable attention” sense, beyond the instantiation in media you might read. But that explanation is totally meaningless to basically anyone outside this audience.

So what do we do? Right now, my approach is to initially present Orbit as a way to remember what you read, but to “season” that presentation with phrases representing the broader aspiration as you get deeper into the system. Then follow-up emails and content at the end of the review session will slowly unpack more of the ideas.

So your first glimpse of Orbit might look like this. Note that the banner text is introducing a shallow framing of what this is about: “Quickly review what you just read.” And there’s coach text by the button along those lines too.

The banner and coach marks continue to unpack the interface as you proceed through the review. Then once you finish, you see this longer explanation, which starts to introduce the broader aspiration. It’s still too wordy, but I’m at the point where I struggle to remove more detail and keep it something which someone has been given enough motivation to make an account for yet another service.

When Orbit initially launches, I probably won’t have much more than this in place in terms of storytelling. That’s OK—I’ll add the extra pieces with time. This stuff is so hard!

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Have you seen /r/speedrun? This is a community of people who “speedrun” games. So they do things like try to beat Mario 64 as quickly as possible, exploiting bugs in the game to improve their time. But there are more exotic speedruns. Like speedrunning Windows 95 setup.

Michael and I noticed one behavior that makes Orbit’s onboarding design problem extra challenging: people speedrun interface text. Show me a modal dialog? I’m gonna find the “dismiss” button as fast as possible. Some tutorial screen I need to read? Click click click. We found that even people who are serious about the ideas in the interface do this—heck, we do this ourselves! Often, this behavior is justified: this kind of text is usually bad marketing copy, or text trying to paper over poor interface design. But even when we write interface text very carefully, showing great respect for the users’ time, people still don’t read it.

This is in stark contrast to essay text. People read essay text surprisingly carefully. We had people quote back to us whole sentences, verbatim, from the Quantum Country passages about the mnemonic medium. It’s not just that this prose is written by more capable authors: the same people wrote the interface text!

The author of the essay’s prose had worked hard to build credibility and trust with the reader—to show the reader that their time was being respected. One strategy we pursued was to trade on that trust in Quantum Country’s interface: we could use the same tone, the same diction, the same phrases in both essay prose and interface prose to unify the apparent authorship—and to perhaps get people to stop speedrunning the interface. This wasn’t a complete solution by any means, but it’s not a strategy we can use with Orbit.

I think my next best approach is to create essay-like prose contexts to talk about Orbit—contexts which aren’t in interfaces, so they’re not something to be speedrun. For instance, I might write a series of essays on various ideas about the medium and how it might be used, then send those out over time as a newsletter to Orbit users. Or maybe just let them circulate naturally around the web, via social media and the like.

I continue to make progress! We’re in a high-craft phase—the last 10% always is—but week over week things are feeling better and better.