Thomas Frank our (Unofficial) Product/UX Researcher?

[nelsonic]

Intro

When you're a small team/company you need to figure out how to leverage "other people's time".
(not to "make others work for you", by lazily attempting offloading your work/tasks into their inbox ... but by discovering where someone else has already done the research/filtering to distill the knowledge and approximate solving a challenge you are facing...) 🤔

A simple example that all developers are familiar with is StackOverflow. Someone else has made the effort to ask/answer a question on a technical topic and instead of having to spend hours trying to figure it out for yourself, you write a few keywords into your favourite Search Engine and (after a bit of term refinement and frog-kissing you) find an answer that solves your challenge/problem.
When there isn't an existing answer, you create a new question and someone in the wider dev community selflessly answers. That person donates their time to your project/task for free in exchange for a few "reputation points" on the Q+A platform.

Thomas Frank ?

If you've never heard of him before, see: https://collegeinfogeek.com/start/

"Start Here!" ... sounds familiar Thomas ... 😉

Most of Thomas' efforts are in his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/electrickeye91

Seriously, you should subscribe to his channel 🔔 it's easily one of the best on the platform!
(no idea why his channel user/URL is still electrickeye91 ... 😕 but it suggests he's born in 1991...)

If you're still a "student" (and we all are @dwyl) I'd highly recommend watching all of his "back catalog" of videos. They are very well researched & produced and he never wastes your life chasing "watch time". ❤️

While @TomFrankly is not currently/yet active on GitHub:

That doesn't matter (for now) because the fact that he is even on GitHub shows he is at least interested in collaborating on code. 🎉Even though he is not creating software, he is doing something else that is incredibly valuable/insightful for the community!

Example Videos Where Thomas Summarises His UX Research

Thomas does a superb job of summarising his research in a digestible form. e.g:

• The 10 Best Note-Taking Apps in 2019: https://youtu.be/ay2GvqVH4SM
• 21 Apps that FORCE You to Be More Productive: https://youtu.be/p-AMooYPO1Y
• How to Stop Wasting Time - 5 Useful Time Management Tips: https://youtu.be/xwsLuxlbY2w
• How to Use Habitica to Build Strong Habits and Motivation https://youtu.be/BxxKm7tSL6I

There are many other videos where he mentions specific products.
If we "mine" all his videos we will get an excellent insight into his product research conclusions.

So ...?

So what I'm proposing is: that we make Thomas Frank our "unofficial" Product UX Researcher.
We should all watch his content and read the comments as (part of) our "product research". 👀
We leverage the fantastic work that Thomas is doing to build what people want.

And eventually, when our app is delivering enough value to the people using it for us to charge for it.
I propose that we form a partnership/sponsorship with Thomas' channel. 💡 #WinWin

[nelsonic]

A Better Way to Track Your Habits [?]

https://youtu.be/0bxIg3M_MHY
The paper-based system recommended in the video is a good starting point but it lacks any social accountability or automation. I think we can do much better UI/UX and increase personal effectiveness.
The video mentions using the paper habit tracker to track reading. I've been doing this for a while and I still want to build a digital reading tracker https://github.com/dwyl/reading-tracker [#helpwanted] because I believe it will be a far more effective way of tracking my reading. 💭

Sadly, Thomas is using a chunk of this video to plug his "productivity" course on skills share. 😞