Comment by diwank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diwank | Hacker News Reader

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You nailed it. Either way, I think the most important thing is to go out and talk to people. Our mental models are pretty limited in that we see and feel what we wish to see and feel. Talking to people helps open up whole new ways of looking at things. There's always another perspective you failed to see.

I recently came across the Stanford design Bootcamp Bootleg [1]. It outlines the whole process for getting from an itch to a working product. And they obsess over empathy. It's all over the Bootleg. Interview potential users, learn how they currently solve the problem you're trying to solve and show them how your idea could help them.

The Bootleg is highly recommended. Even if you don't follow the practices it describes, it pays to have those mental models.

We were brainstorming recently. And we did this entire exercise. We went to meet students, shop owners, teachers and even some folks at the local administration. It was extremely tedious but our efforts paid off. We gathered insights that range from pretty obvious to mind-numbing and some even rather stupid.

We then made a small web presentation [2] of the most interesting ideas and asked people to vote and give their suggestions. It has been a very rewarding experience.

[1]: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Bootc...

[2]: http://idea.diwank.name

Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas, but I don't have the patience to do any of it in the way described. There's too much process.

Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?

> Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas

I understand. It's a whole bunch of neat design processes. But it's huge! You can take a look here for the separate ideas. http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/

> Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?

Yup. We're currently building IHeartCode (turned out to be the most popular). A rough prototype lives at http://iheartpy.com

Did your users tell you the animations or design wizardry are important to them? I find them really distracting, and couldn't find any useful content on iheartpy. I know it's rough, but you seem to have started with too much skeleton and no meat.

It's only a few weeks since we began working on it. And we've been working on the backend all this while. The design has received a wide spectrum of opinion: some seem to love it, others find it confusing. I think we'll redesign it once we get the backend finished.

We're filling in the meat right now! There's a lot of work to do and we hope to get things in shape so we can call it a beautiful pig and go from there.

Thanks for the feedback though. Would love to bug you some more if you don't mind. :)

There are only two things that you could do that would help me learn Python: create and curate good learning material. When it comes to education, I think the highest value even today is created by making good new content, not more tools.

> create good new learning material and curate good existing material

Great advice there and I totally agree with you. In fact, we are looking into incorporating great Python tutorials in the public domain to supplement our content.

Actually, we took the interactive approach because to people with little background in programming, the biggest deterrence is fear of breaking things on their PC. On iheartpy.com they can easily try out basic commands without that fear.

I like interactive, but it seems to work well only if you can simulate the commandline well enough in the browser (like Codecademy does). If you do anything advanced, it has to be done really well. These are couple of good examples:

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s

@revorad: Thanks for the links. I liked the Ladder of Abstraction.

On a different note, this discussion is slightly off-topic. Can I shoot you an email some time? (If you don't mind.) Also, I'm really sleepy now (yawn!)

Yeah of course, email's in profile.

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