💌 Tiny Improvements

One of the most effective ways to grow as a developer is by tapping into the vast pool of knowledge available in the developer community.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Small changes and management techniques can transform your team's dynamics and boost morale. Explore practices like expressing gratitude, weekly reflections, and eliminating negative behaviors to foster a positive, growing team.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara outlines how to making customers feel exceptionally special. Let's bring these hospitality principles to tech, by creating memorable experiences, and using hospitality to elevate customer satisfaction in product design, engaging with the people using our products.Get yourself a copy of Unreasonable Hospitality here(00:00) - Designing for Hospitality (00:09) - Introduction (00:37) - Unreasonable Hospitality (02:23) - How We Feel Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The tools we use to get our work done are incredibly important, and taking the time to tune them to work just right can make a huge difference in our productivity and happiness.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ever felt that you've seen a design that just makes sense to you, but you couldn't quite put your finger on why? There's rules for that. Let's talk about Gestalt...Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

A look at the cognitive science behind the Hierarchy of Competence, and how dabbling with new frameworks and tools can make you a better developer.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

I'm a huge fan of products that use their a free tier to prove their value, and then convert me to a paying customer. Here are a few tools I pay for, and why I think they're worth it.(00:00) - Take my money! Some of my favorite tools, and why I pay for them (00:09) - Introduction (00:50) - Transistor.fm (01:07) - Transistor's Killer Features (02:19) - Descript (03:26) - Backblaze Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

I hear from a lot of devs that they don't know where to start with SEO. Here are 3 tiny tips about to get you started.More from me on SEOI wrote a tutorial on setting up Self-healing URLs on your Next.js site that you might find useful.Ever wonder how to correctly add subtitles to your h1 tags? I've got you covered.These are the SEO tools I use to grow my sites to 20k+ vistors/month.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Reflecting on my first year as CTO of Craftwork, and the many things I've learned along the way. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that I've come to love. Here's why I use it, and why I think you should too.Have thoughts on this episode? Drop me a line on Threads @irreverentmikeCreators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Building better products involves skills you won't learn in computer science school, or at a boot camp. Find success through testing, learning from real-world feedback, and adapting.Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The new year is a time for change. But why do so many apps and creators pivot in January? We explore the psychology behind the new year's pivot.See the text version of this edition of Tiny Improvements on mikebifulco.com ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

As a founder, you're going to need to learn new skills quickly and efficiently. Keeping your skill for learning sharp is a critical skill, and should can be practiced like any other skill. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Let's discuss the fascinating topic of human cognition and how it relates to product design. The way people think and perceive the world is often distorted by biases and expectations, and can be manipulated by the way information is presented. The Von Restorff effect, and use of the Entasis technique in architecture are examples of how cognitive science can be used to create visually appealing products. Creators & Guests Mike Bifulco - Host ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Design Tools Everyone Should knowSome links from the showGymnasium: https://thegymnasium.comStark: https://getstark.coCoolors: https://coolors.coColor Hunt: https://colorhunt.co/@color.nerd on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@color.nerdColor Design Workbook: https://hardcover.app/books/color-design-workbookGymnasium's UX Design Collection (free courses!): https://thegymnasium.com/ux-designSubscribe to the Tiny Improvements newsletter: https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter (00:00) - Design rules everyone should know (01:45) - Five Rules of Design to give you Superpowers ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The Von Restorff Effect (sometimes called the Isolation Effect) is a psychological phenomeon that causes people to remember things which defy expectations. In other words, things which stand out in a crowd have a significant competitive advantage.This is a reading of an article stub from my website - head over to https://mikebifulco.com/posts/product-marketing-defy-expectations to read the rest of the story. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

This episode was originally published as an article on my website, mikebifulco.com - you can read along there if you prefer: The third place - the secret to a happy life for remote workersCopyright 2022 Mike Bifulco ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

This is tiny improvements. I'm Mike Bifulco. I want to use the space as. A vehicle to explore thought and influence and psychology and cognition and all of the things that affect us in our day-to-day life I've had a few conversations recently that have reminded me that the mind is a very fascinating machine. That there's quite a bit we do with this thing in our head, this very complicated chemical structure and. Physical structure that we don't really understand how it works, but. In some instances, in some circumstances we have a grapple on how some parts of the mind work. I don't want to talk a little bit about that. I'm fascinated by that. I studied. Human computer interaction early in my career I worked through a master's degree program at DePaul university in Chicago. Although I was remote at the time, living in Charlotte and traveling around the U S working for Microsoft. I learned quite a bit that surprised me [00:01:00] about cognitive science and psychology. It was surprising to me that there's so many things that we can prove sort of mathematically that are. Phenomena of human behavior. That. At first glance, maybe seem like something that's sort of unprovable or a little out there. Today. I want to talk about the Florida effect. You may have heard this before under a couple of different names. It's a phenomenon. Also referred to sometimes as priming. And basically it has to do with the way that your behavior can be influenced by things that you see and read and perceive in the real world. The name comes from a study that was conducted years ago, I think in 1996, by a group of cognitive psychologists who were conducting an experiment at a university where they had a bunch of. Subjects come into a building and take quiz. And the purpose of the quiz was to unscramble some words and put them into a sentence. And they had about, I think it was 50 people do this. They unscrambled words in a sentence and [00:02:00] completed the quiz and were told they were being part of an experiment, but they weren't told what the experiment was about. And what gets interesting is that the accuracy of the quiz, wasn't the challenge in the experiment. They wanted to see the effect of the contents of the quiz on the behavior of the people taking it. So, in other words, in some cases, they were asked to unscramble a sentence that had words that were just sort of innocuous and not really purposeful. It might be something like I walked the dog today or today is Friday, something like that. In some of the cases though, some of the participants were given a version of that unscrambling task where the words that were in their unscrambling thing. We're related to, but not directly about aging. So words like gray and Florida, which is where the name of the the nickname for the experiment comes from. Wrinkle. Age, retirement, some of those sorts of things. And the scientists who are conducting this study wanted to see their behavior would change based on the fact that they were reading words that had [00:03:00] to do with age. Well, lo and behold. As it works out, the folks who were given. Tasks that had the sort of aged words in them behaved differently after the experiment, as a result of reading those things and the way that they proved this was on the way into the study, the subjects of the study were actually being filmed and measured. And they're being timed for how long it took them essentially to walk from one end of a hallway to the other, where they were going to take the examination that they were given. And before the study, they were timed as sort of their baseline speed of like, this is how fast Mike walks down the hallway, for example. And then after the study, when they were then primed with all of those words about age and older sounding words. They handed their exam to the Proctor. Walked out of the room and they were timed walking back down the hallway, headed to where they were going. And essentially what was observed was that the folks who were given these older words, Were walking out of the room more slowly. Yeah, sit with that for a second. Think about that. So, They read a bunch of words. They did a bunch of tasks. They [00:04:00] solved some puzzles that had to do with words that sounded older. And their body physically responded to that by acting older, by walking more slowly on their way out. And of course, there's a lot of things that are uncontrollable here. Right? You don't know like what's going on in the person's day and how they're feeling and all these other things, whether they're injured or whatnot, but the things that they did control for. Helped to alleviate some of the chance of this being a Better than random occurrence. One of the things you do in a study like this is you have it with so many people that you can show sort of a higher likelihood of Correlation of your results being true. So, you know, having 50 people do this is probably a good way to start that. And of course, because it