"The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - How to Simplify Your Design"

"The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - How to Simplify Your Design"

For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment. Five years later, I can say that writing on the Internet is among the best life decisions I’ve made. The 90 minutes I spend writing every morning is my most important habit and the activation code for just about everything good that happens to me.

Writing in Public is the art of broadcasting your ideas to the Internet so you become a beacon for people, opportunities, and serendipity. The game of online writing rewards people who publish consistently. Though frequency is the price of entry, quality writing is a force multiplier on your success. If your ideas resonate, the number of opportunities available to you will explode. Writing consistently and frequently is key.

Writing from Abundance is the art of collecting ideas so you can think better and avoid writer’s block. Writing from Conversation is the art of using dialogue to identify your best ideas and double down on them. Building a bank of inspiration while you’re away from the computer and before you sit down to write is essential. Capture your epiphanies. Save the best quotes you read. Identify ideas that resonate with you and jot them down as notes. Let's Glasp!

If you capture ideas when they’re in the forefront of your mind, you won’t have to pray for them to come back when it’s time to write. Yes, every great writer I know obsessively curates their information diet. They rightfully know that high-quality writing begins with good taste for what you consume. It’s easier to have unique ideas when you read things other people don’t. Uniqueness equals ideas that other people don't know.

Early in his career, Warren Buffett got some of his edge by going beyond the Annual Reports that everybody else was reading and picking up 10-K filings that were tough to get your hands on back then. David Epstein aims to read ten journal articles per day when he’s working on a book. Many of his best ideas come from reading papers that others won’t and synthesizing them for a public audience.

We’re trapped in a Never-Ending Now — blind to history, engulfed in the present moment, overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos. Here’s the bottom line: You should prioritize the accumulated wisdom of humanity over what’s trending on Twitter. Agree? Find people whose recommendations you consistently enjoy and subscribe to their newsletters. It’s not enough just to binge eBooks and list a stat on your website (one Write of Passage student refers to this as “Book Chugging.”) You should save the best parts of what you read, so you can easily reference them later. Collect your favorite words so that they come back to you when needed.

Being a writer doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice huge swaths of your life. You don’t need to bunker down in a library for days straight in order to find inspiration. You already consume media, have thoughts, and write ideas in group chats. When you practice the habit of capturing what’s already happening, you’ll find that you have all the material you need to start writing. Effective ambient research happens when you capture the best ideas you consume, the epiphanies you have, and the things you’ve already written to friends and colleagues. Glasp.

When I come across an interesting article, I save it to an app that automatically downloads it to my phone so I can read it later. Saving these articles gets me out of a reactivity loop, where I read things immediately after I find them (which is what most people do). I want my reading to be much more intentional than that. I remember that Tiago Forte also mentioned something like this before.

By saving articles to an app and refusing to instantly read things you come across on the Internet, you raise the bar for what grabs your attention. With a Read-it-Later app, whenever you sit down to read, you have hundreds of articles to choose from. You can allocate your attention to the best one. The clarity of memory decays quickly, so we shouldn’t just save other people’s ideas. We should save our own ideas too. Until we have a central place to capture our best thinking, the joy of epiphany will turn into the anxiety of forgetfulness. Chances are, you’re already generating ideas. You just don’t realize it yet. Have a central note-taking system.

James Clear, who wrote the wildly popular Atomic Habits, keeps his notes in a massive, multi-hundred page Google Doc. Even Eminem, who sees note-taking as a way of “stacking ammunition” for his lyrics, packs words and phrases into a box with all kinds of folded and crumpled up paper. The point of taking notes is to write, not to have the perfect note-taking system. First, you collect the dots by capturing ideas, then you connect them by writing. I like this phrase! This is what I thought for Glasp hatching ideas.

Study the writing practices of history’s top writers and you may be surprised by how many kept a commonplace book. A commonplace book is a central place where you can save ideas, quotes, epiphanies, photos, drawings, and whatever else you want to remember. So long as (1) you can capture ideas quickly, and (2) all those ideas go into the same place, you’re setting yourself up to Write from Abundance. It doesn’t really matter what note-taking app you use. I start my essays in split-screen mode. On the left side of the screen, I have my notes. On the right, my blank document. To fill up the blank page and give myself momentum, I’ll run a few searches through my note-taking system, and copy & paste the best stuff onto my new essay document. Interesting.

Now, let's switch gears and talk about how to simplify your design. We can define simple as something that is easily understood or done, presenting no difficulty. Removing difficulties on the way of users to their goals will help you move towards simplicity. How can we redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more? If you want your product to be simple, you need to define a core value and identify who this product is really for. Not every product should have Facebook built-in.

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove secondary information, not frequently used controls, and distracting styles. "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple." - Jonathan Ive. Simplify your design by focusing on the core value and removing unnecessary elements.

When you know users are interested in trends and changes, help them with visual representation rather than a bunch of numbers. Hick’s Law predicts that the time and effort it takes to make a decision increases with the number of options. So if you want your user experience to feel simple, you need to support quick decision making as much as possible. Offering consumers less choice can be good for sales. Provide a recommendation yourself or share statistics of what is most preferred by other customers. Help users make decisions quickly and easily.

"Users don't read." And it's kind of true, we are really selective about what we actually remember or deep dive into. Use typography to communicate the hierarchy of content - typeface & font, size, kerning, leading, capitalization, and color. Use that to communicate the hierarchy of content. Organization of elements not only improves recognition but also makes it easier to remember. Make your design visually appealing and easy to understand.

Finishing small subtasks gives the user a portion of endorphins and satisfaction to carry on. Uncertainty makes us anxious, so it should be avoided as much as possible. Progressive disclosure follows the typical notion of moving from "abstract to specific," including the sequencing of user behaviors or interactions. Users spend most of their time on other products. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know, and they come on with specific expectations of how your product should look and behave. Meet those expectations in order to provide a simple and intuitive user experience.

The first-time experience is very important for any process. We humans are very quick to form our opinion about a product and walk away immediately if we are not satisfied. In digital design, I suggest forgetting a manual approach. User expectation is that the product should be simple enough to understand, and they expect help on demand or when something goes wrong. Don't break that flow with popups. Make the onboarding process simple and intuitive.

Inclusive design is also an important aspect of simplicity. There are over 1 billion people worldwide who have a disability. Don't use color as the only visual means of conveying information. Ensure sufficient contrast between text and its background, support keyboard navigation, and provide alternative text for images. Make your design accessible to all users.

In conclusion, writing online and designing with simplicity both require intentional actions and thoughtful reduction. Writing consistently and frequently, capturing ideas, and curating your information diet are essential for successful online writing. Simplifying your design by focusing on core value, supporting quick decision making, using typography effectively, organizing elements, and providing a simple and intuitive user experience is key for creating a user-friendly product. Remember to have a central note-taking system, connect your ideas through writing, and prioritize the accumulated wisdom of humanity over what's trending on social media. Incorporating these actionable advice will help you become a