

My four steps to the epiphany - Lessons learned from a research product - amirkhella
http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/02/17/my-four-steps-to-the-epiphany-lessons-learned-from-creating-a-minimally-viable-research-product/

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10ren
The amazon-for-source is a cool idea that could also be applied to navigating
docs. It's a 1st order Markov process (predicting the next link based on the
current link), but could be extended to 2nd order (predicting the next link
based on how you got to the current link), or _n_ th order, of course. This
context might capture the reason you were looking at the current page. We
could do a little statistical AI, and combine the predictions of different
sequences that are similar enough.

The problem that source is changed (unlike books) as it is
fixed/refactored/deleted, probably wouldn't hurt much.

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amirkhella
True. There are a couple of good papers published on the concept of
digital/computational wear, which is the basis for social filtering, that deal
with document navigation.

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elblanco
Great writeup. I'd add a lesson I'd learned coming out of lab research as
well. "Don't develop in a vacuum, involve the end users early and often."
which is a bit of a corollary to "Lesson learned: Customers may have problems,
but they also have solutions." I see this also outside of research, in general
practice also. You seem to have figured this out naturally as part of your
idea development process, but it's amazing how often this doesn't happen.

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amirkhella
Thanks!

Agree about the lesson learned.

It surprises me how companies don't take full advantage of using the
collective power of users to come up with ideas. Uservoice and GetSatisfaction
are great initiatives, but they shouldn't replace 1:1 conversations.

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elblanco
I think that one of the keys is to incorporate the user's desires with some of
your own special sauce to make what hey want. Basically give them what they
want, but add a little to it, or give it a cool twist. If you constrain only
to their desires you end up with all kinds of bad things because users often
have trouble articulating what they want.

Agile methodologies seem to do an excellent job of targeting users. By moving
from a monolithic development and release cycle to a faster set of more
limited releases, you can get feedback from the users much more quickly.
Instead of spending a year building feature x with all of the possible sub-
features you can think of. Spend a month building a rudimentary form of it,
and get users to provide feedback on it. It's amazing how guiding the users in
this way gets you excellent feedback, plus it makes the users feel empowered,
like they are helping design the software.

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sid-
In a different world(java) the social aspect of mylyn/tasktop is pretty
similar - <http://live.eclipse.org/node/573>

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amirkhella
Thanks for the pointer! Mylyn does look similar.

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ajju
Pretty cool product! I would use it.

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amirkhella
I wish Microsoft would release it as part of an upcoming version of Visual
Studio.

