How Tangle Puts Connection First
In pursuit of a connection-first, user-friendly, and fun personal knowledge management tool.
In our last post, we discussed some of the problematic design and organizational principles we see in current knowledge management solutions. In this post, we transition to how the Tangle team plans on correcting these issues with connection-first design. Don’t forget to sign up for early access to our alpha release!
Rethinking skeuomorphism
You might remember a specific design theory called skeuomorphism from last week’s post. If you don’t remember, skeuomorphism is the transplanting of physical themes onto a digital environment. It brought us the digital legal pad and pixelated sticky notes that we have been using forever. While skeuomorphic design is naturally familiar and accessible, it’s elements do not necessarily empower the user with the tools or behaviors she needs to be the most productive, creative, or innovative. We believe the benefits of technology and ease-of-use do not have to be mutually exclusive in product design.
To solve this problem, we decided to flip the paradigm 180°.
Instead of designing a product that mimics the feature set and organizational limits of physical items, we are designing Tangle to help complement, optimize, and support our core thought processes.
The primary function of our mind we are focusing on is its ability to make connections between information, explicitly or implicitly related, old and new. Our ability to make connections is crucial to our analytical thinking, creativity, and general intelligence.
The existing sea of personal knowledge management tools, however, don’t put connection first. They encourage manual curation and for the most part, will only help make connections after tedious organizational work that leaves the content in linearly structured files and folders. This organization necessitates frequent and cumbersome updating to maintain. The requisite work has even given rise to a consulting industry that teaches people how to make the most of digital PKM tools; connectivity being one of the lessons taught.
Tiago Forte, an expert in personal knowledge management and productivity, describes our very humanity as “the sum of our connectivity,”which rings true at even a physiological level. To help improve the outcome of this equation, we are building Tangle with connection-first design principles and with features that encourage connective practices and behaviors. Tangle lowers the hurdle over which you must jump to get the most out of the notes, ideas, and tasks you capture. Best practices are built-in; no assembly required.
Connection first
Tangle’s design facilitates three core actions:
- Find explicit and implicit relationships within your information.Intentionally and automatically drawing connections between information helps turn it into knowledge. A pivotal step in making individuals and teams more effective and creative.
- Keep your working memory “fresh.” Humans naturally forget things. Active reflection — re-reading old notes and ideas — will make more of what you know top-of-mind and useable.
- Insert randomness into your workflows. Entropy can be the key to unlocking a new idea or the aha! moment when attempting to solve a problem, basic or complex.
These ideals are embedded in Tangle’s user experience. To achieve them, we completely scrapped the traditional concept of organization.
Putting information in files, folders, and digital notebooks is self-defeating; humans naturally aren’t very good at it, and we often have a difficult time predicting how we will eventually use the information that we save.
Instead of forcing organization on the user, Tangle creates automatic, visual connections between related information (e.g., meeting notes, an idea, or a to-do). These visual connections replace the need for manual organization. Tangle accomplishes this using something called entity extraction: the system identifies key-terms and searches for other information you have captured with those same or related terms. It then connects the information in real-time on the screen using a graphical interface. It becomes immediately clear why two things are connected. The experience of “connecting the dots” after capturing a bit of information helps strengthen the connections between what you know and refreshes your working memory.
Tangle also encourages you to make your own connections. You can make explicit connections between the information you capture using hashtags as well as a feature we call Brainstorm mode. More on that in posts to come…
Tangle is currently in its infancy. Like us, it will become more intelligent as it gets older. Eventually, it will be able to connect the dots between your implicitly related information as well. For example, while they may not necessarily have a direct text-match, separate notes captured about two people may be recommended as a connection if those people share a commonality. You may capture one note broadly related to “technology” that mentions Joe, and you may have captured another note related to “technology” that mentions Jill. In the future, Tangle might recommend a connection between separate captures about Joe and Jill because the two are topically related. These “smart connections” will transform how you work.
Tangle doesn’t just surface connections when you capture new information, it also allows search. In traditional note-taking applications, a search will yield results that directly match the query. The issue here is that when we search for things, we often don’t know exactly what we are looking for, just directionally what we hope to find. So, rather than providing just traditional search results, Tangle surfaces a whole graph of visually contextualized connections including both direct and indirect matches. Just toggle to the search bar and enter a query like you would a search engine. Easy. To drive the point home, there is no responsibility on you to organize your information, Tangle does it automatically, and keeps all of your connected knowledge at the tip of your finger. Search, explore, and find the connections that can make you a more creative thinker.
Finally, one of our favorite features is what we call the “surprise me” button. Press it and Tangle presents you with something random you have captured in the past. Tangle’s canvas becomes a map whose destination changes at every click; you’ll never know what you might find. This functionality is an ideal way to inject some entropy into your workflow, aiding the creative process and splashing your working memory’s face with some cool water.
The mission
Our mission is to empower everyone to capture and connect their thoughts to create big ideas.
Tangle is merely a tool to help us achieve this goal. We have done away with the skeuomorphic design principles that we believe prevents people from making connections, keeping their memories fresh, and being the creative thinkers that will make them successful in today’s knowledge society. Instead of designing for familiarity, we have designed Tangle to support our core thought processes with connection-first principles. Tangle replaces organization with connection, removing the burden of self-curation and helping you focus on what is most important: learning and creating.
Want to sign up for the alpha and haven’t yet? Don’t miss out — there are still a few spots left.
— Tangle team
