I felt that my experiments had somehow distanced me from my aim: enabling people to acquire rich understanding of complex ideas that really matter to them. I’d been building systems and running big experiments, and I could tell you plenty about forgetting curves and usage patterns—but very little about how those things connected to anything anyone cared about. I knew that I was making some progress, but I was mostly flying blind, without the feedback I needed to drive my iteration.

So in 2023, I switched gears to emphasize intimacy. Instead of statistical analysis and summative interviews, I sat next to individuals for hours, as they used one-off prototypes which I’d made just for them. And I got more insight in the first few weeks of this than I had in all of 2022.