Show HN: We just launched the redesigned Quantified Mind | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We just launched the redesigned Quantified Mind

quantified-mind.com

70 pointssinak21 comments

The design looks nice, and conveys the purpose of the site really well. Well done!

Some of the copy on the front page could probably do with a revision. The use of capitals when describing the focus of a test seems odd and is a little inconsistent (coffee, Meditation, breakfast, Sex). There is a typo in the 'Create your own' section.

Most of the copy reads really well, but the overall feel of it distracted me for some reason. Perhaps I just need another coffee! Love to see what metrics you pull out - do you intend to publish the data and analysis, and if so in what formats?

After some digging I was able to find this quote:

"Quantified Mind is a volunteer project, and we'd love extra help with development, web design, test design, and gathering participants for Quantified-Self-style studies."

It's not 100% clear to me what is the driving force behind Quantified Mind, and that is something I would love to know. Is it just interested hackers building tools? Who is funding it?

In any case, it's a very interesting concept, congrats on the launch.

ps: I can't navigate to the home page from the bottom navigation bar. On a long page (eg 'Science') this meant I had to scroll to the top to get back.

pps: If you have a public repository of your code base you should add a link to it so people can start helping more easily.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Typos and the links definitely need fixing - we'll get on that after the traffic dies down.

We definitely plan on publishing the metrics, and there's some cool discoveries that have already been made. Check out Nick Winter's talk here for some examples of some of the interesting things he figured out with just an n=1 experiment: http://blog.quantified-mind.com/2012/08/05/21/

The driving force is a bit mixed. Nobodies funding it, we all just help out because we really think there needs to be something like this out there. The real core science behind the testing is Yoni Donner's thesis at Stanford, and he's the founder and lead developer ... the rest of us are just helping get it out on the web.

Thanks!

Actually, this has nothing to do right now with my Stanford research. I do computational biology for my PhD, not psychology. I built Quantified Mind because I want to discover effective ways to boost cognitive abilities and slow down age-related cognitive decline, and I did not find any existing tools that are sufficiently precise and give me the kind of access I want to the data. It's all about doing science and making discoveries about the associations between our actions and our cognition.

I just completed one session, and I came across a bug.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/luLCk.png

This is with Chrome 22.0.1229.94 on OSX 10.7.5

Great site by the way, seems interesting.

My feedback, for what it's worth, is that I clicked "try it out" and got 2 minutes into the white dot test before closing the tab. I really didn't feel engaged with it and even missed one of them because my eyes were wandering around the room thinking about other things. I suppose this is exactly the kind of thing that the tests can pick up, controlled for the various variables, but not if it's so tedious that I don't even finish the test. I'd be interested if you have the data on when people are closing tabs and to what extent I am an outlier. I felt like I was being patient lasting two (out of three) minutes, but perhaps I'm unusually low-attention spanned in this kind of task.

Perhaps you would enjoy one of our super-quick batteries: try creating your own experiment and choose "Telepath" under "Special". It has three tests in two minutes total time and doesn't give you much time to relax.

Thanks, this was a good recommendation - I did enjoy Telepath a lot more!

Interesting concept and I like the design. My only suggestion is to consider drawing in users a little more before prompting them to give personal info via the Google sign in. Maybe this could be accomplished by connecting some kind of interactive demo of an experiment to the "Try it now" button. In any case, I was interested in the site when I clicked "Try it now;" I just wasn't quite hooked enough to give up my info at that point.

Thanks for the suggestion, and I agree - it's definitely something I'd like to improve, but since I do this for fun in my free time I have limited time and try to focus on the science / data-analysis side. Thankfully Sina was kind enough to make it look much better.

I have been working on games to track and improve cognitive performance http://brainturk.com

"Phone rang in the middle.. Don't save this result!" <-- very clear and good explaining without explaining. Good job!

I hate to be "that guy", but you have a minor typo on the home page.

"How does coffee affects your reaction time..."

No worries - thanks for pointing it out. We'll correct that as soon as the traffic dies down a bit ...

Looks awesome. I found 'experiemnt'.

I like the idea. While I understand you need a decent sample size but I am not sure I will patient enough to login 29 times. Some feedback 1.it is not possible to cancel test execution 2.it is not clear if I need to complete all tests each time to get a result at the end

If you are impatient you can try designing your own experiment that will use a shorter battery. The answers: 1. To stop a test in the middle, just click on the Quantified Mind logo and it will take you out of the test with no negative consequences. 2. That actually depends on the experiment - for most experiments we need complete data so you should complete all tests, but for some, you will see an "end session" button show up after you complete the first test, allowing you to save a partial result.

http://www.quantified-mind.com/tests/sorting/practice/practi... - input via numeric keys doesn't work here, but asdf keys does.

Beautifully done!

You should set the viewport width to 960px so that mobile phones see the whole page on page load rather than a zoomed in corner.

You need to update your tutorial page to reflect the new design.

Other than that, this looks really cool.

Good work, guys.

I like the basic idea; but don't quite understand what the Google Connect is needed for... ?

Yeah it's not great that it's the only option- we'll hopefully add other logins soon.

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