Interview With Alan Chan, Co-Founder of Heptabase • Ness Labs

If you think you know everything, then you design the entire system from the beginning, and the risk is that you might be wrong about many things.

If you think you know just a few things, then you start by designing a system that handles these few things well, put it out and see how people use it, gain more knowledge on how people work, and use this knowledge to evolve your system to accommodate more capabilities while taking care of usability.

The most challenging part of this approach is to resist the urge to try to design a perfect system from the start and admit that there are still things you don’t know. Once you admit that, you’ll start thinking about how you can acquire those insights from your users.

Heptabase’s whiteboard is designed with two insights. The first one is obvious: humans think much better when they think visually. The second one is less obvious: to gain a deep understanding on a topic through visual thinking, you need to first atomize the concept you learned. Real deep understanding doesn’t come from the “relationship between two books” but from the “relationship between all the concepts in these two books.”

That’s why in Heptabase’s whiteboard, you can easily break down lengthy card notes into atomic concept notes. I believe this process of “extracting concepts” is the real foundation of deep understanding.