Sources of Insight Refresh: Insights and Actions for Work and Life at Your Fingertips

I’ve done another intensive user experience exercise to improve Sources of Insight.image

Sources of Insight is a knowledge base of principles, patterns, and practices for helping you get better results in work and life.

A friendly way of looking at it is:

“Skills to pay the bills and lead a better life.”

I started the site a few years back to help give people an advantage in work and life.  We don’t get a great playbook when we start out, and there are a lot of skills that we don’t learn in school.  For example, motivation, productivity, time management, personal development, etc.

I’ve used Sources of Insight as a clearinghouse of ideas you can experiment with to help you figure out better ways for better days, find your breakthroughs, and get over some issues that might be holding you back.

You can use Sources of Insight for several things, including, but not limited to:

  1. Re-imagine yourself with You 2.0  (this will help you build your firm foundation and find your way forward in a sustainable way)
  2. Find the best books on different topics including Business Books, Leadership Books, Personal Development Books, and Time Management Books.
  3. Inspire yourself with wisdom of the ages and modern sages in the form of great quotes.   You’ll find hand-crafted collections of quotes including Inspirational QuotesLeadership Quotes, Life Quotes, and Simplicity Quotes
  4. Learn lessons from the great ones, both famous folks and ordinary people that do extraordinary things.  My Great People page includes lessons learned from Bruce Lee, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Stephen Covey, Steve Jobs, and Tony Robbins.
  5. Fill your bag of tricks with 101 of the Greatest Insights and Actions for Work and Life.
  6. Learn a powerful results system to help you master productivity, time management, and work-life balance with 30 Days of Getting Results.
  7. Learn some of the best insights from insightful people and best-selling authors.  My Special Guests page includes guest posts from Al Riese (author of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding),   Gretchen Rubin (author of The Happiness Project), Jim Kouzes (author of The Leadership Challenge), Michael Michalko (author of THINKERTOYS), and more.

 

I also do hard-core Book Reviews.   They are like mini-movie trailers but for books and they give you a deep dive into significant highlights from the book.   Here is an example of my book review of The Charge.

So what exactly did I do in terms of improving the user experience for Sources of Insight?

I took a look at all the feedback and looked for patterns and things that I thought could be improved.  I tested multiple combinations of layouts and changes to things like menu items and placement.  Here’s a highlight of some of the more important changes that overall should help create a better user experience:

  1. Simplified the menu and fixed some quirks
  2. Smaller home page with more focus and quick jumps to hot items
  3. Added an Explore menu item.

I made a number of other changes, too, but I think the addition of the Explore page is what will make a big difference for a lot of people.  You’ll want to bookmark the Explore page because it’s got enough articles that you’ll want to go back to.   It features key articles for Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Personal Development, Personal Effectiveness, and Productivity.

Each time you Explore, you bound to walk away with some insight and action you can immediately apply to work or life for instant impact.

I’m still in the process of making improvements so if you have more ideas, be sure to send my way.