I wish this was the case but I have found that almost any success in my life took enormous amounts of effort.
However, to some extent I do agree. For example, when learning to play the guitar, it’s important to learn to exert just the right amount of effort to place on the strings. When typing on a keyboard, I have a habit of pressing way too hard and I realized this lead to a lot of hand pain.
So saying zero effort might be an incorrect title - maybe saying “using just the right amount of effort” would be more accurate
I’ve been building a type of an educational app for the last 6 months.
Spent 6 months building the product. Now I’m focusing on marketing and branding.
I’ve spent last few weeks studying other successful educational products.
And so far, from my research, pretty much every single one of these apps/sites prioritized making the user “feel good” about learning rather than actually learning.
And unfortunately, this is what the users want. They want to feel good about learning.
All the successful education sites employ these mechanisms that you’re intending to avoid. I wanted to avoid using these as well - but I just don’t see another way. I’ve even had users explicitly ask me to add milestones, streaks, etc to motivate them.
Reality is - most people who really want to study or learn anything, can do so without an app. Even a book from a library will do. But it requires tremendous consistency, effort and time. Apps are way easier and make the user feel good - there’s still learning being done, don’t get me wrong. But user feeling good about it is what keeps them coming back.
Edit: I’ve also studied many of their ads. Often times on places like TikTok, Instagram, etc their ads are what I would call “intelligence porn”. They get you excited about being more intelligent, investing in yourself, intelligence eliticism, etc. These were a common ad strategy that I have discovered so far.
Some apps literally ran ads with text: “become dangerously intelligent” text and had the song from the show Succession play with images of famous researchers and scientists changing quickly. (Newton, Einstein, etc). Stuff like this cracked me up tbh lol. But apparently it works
This is something that started as a passion project - I wanted to see just how effective of a typing application I could make to help people improve typing speed quickly.
It’s very data driven and personalized. We analyze a lot of key weak points about a user’s typing and generate natural text (using LLMs) that target multiple key weak points at once.
Additionally we have a lot of typing modes.
- Code typing practice; we support 20+ programming languages
- daily typing test
- target practice; click on on any stat in the results and we generate natural text that uses a lot of that (bigrams, trigrams, words, fingers, etc).
I’ve tried it and really enjoyed how it works. I’d like to suggest a small UX improvement: for a typing app, it would be much easier to avoid using the mouse. When a practice ends, the user should be able to press the RETURN key to move to the next practice. (instead of clicking the Continue button)
That's a good point - we actually do have keyboard shortcuts but their discovery is definitely lacking! Using the return key as the default seems more intuitive - thanks for the suggestion!
This way - even if the user changes themes, the colors of the image will be consistent with whatever theme is currently active. Also - the loading time is near-instant since we don't need to fetch the img file for the blog post image - just render the svg.
Just skimming throught the first two paragraphs felt like I as reading a ChatGPT response. That and the fact that there's multiple em dashes in the intro alone.
Tangentially related, but I'm low key miffed that em dashes get a bad rep now because of AI.
They're a great way to "inject" something into a sentence, similar to how people speak in person. I feel like my written style has now gotten worse because I have to dumb it down, or I'll be anxious any writing/linguistic flourish will be interpreted as gen AI
i'll never give up the em dash. and i will continue to evangelize the en dash from now–forever (hint hint, ranges should use en dashes instead of hyphens).
I'm doubling down on emdashes. May even start using language-appropriate quotes too („aaa“ «bbb» 「ccc」and so on). This meme about surface-level LLM tells is actively dangerous.
I spit out my coffee laughing lol
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