Hi,
Thank you for the new design. I’d like to make a few suggestions:
In the Dashboard, I minimize the goals that I’m not going to do today and maximize the goals that I want to do today. The problem is that after I click on a goal and then go back to the dashboard, it doesn’t remember the goals that I minimized, and I have to do that all over again. Is there a way beeminder can remember to show each goal as I selected it to be shown as expanded or minimized? Otherwise there is no point in this feature and there is no point in expanding/minimizing goals, since beeminder doesn’t remember it and all changes are lost after I go to another page and come back to the dashboard. Hope you can fix this.
Please add a setting to auto minimize tasks in the Dashboard after submitting data. Also add a setting to put the expanded goals on top and the minimized goals at the bottom, so that I won’t have to scroll up and down all the time to see all the goals that are expanded and that I plan to do.
I’m assuming that you want everyone to stop using the gallery view and start using the new dashboard view. I saw that you hid the gallery in a sub menu and that there is no longer an option to move the goals above or below the fold with the + - buttons. I used to use the gallery view all the time, and for me the biggest change in the new design is moving from the gallery view to using the dashboard all the time. I’m OK with that if beeminder will remember which goals I expanded and which ones I minimized, so that I could only look at the expanded goals as the ones that I still need to complete. In the old gallery I could put below the fold all the goals that I completed, and see at the top the remaining goals that I had to do. But the biggest disadvantage in the dashboard is that I have to scroll a LOT up and down all the time to see all the expanded goals that I still need to do. Please add an option to automatically minimize the tasks that I completed today with the check mark and put them at the bottom of the list. That way only the expanded goals would remain on the top, and I won’t have to scroll up and down all the time to look for the goals that I still need to do.
You wanted to make the new design more simple and user friendly to newbies. Below the graph there used to be only 3 tabs with the most common features - change goal rate, retroratchet and schedule breaks. All the other settings were placed in the settings button. It looked simple to me. Now instead of just these 3 simple tabs below the graph, you’ve instead put all the settings under the graph. You’ve replaced a simple design with 3 commonly used features with a lot of tabs and a ton of settings that you have to endlessly scroll down through to find. What was the logic behind that? How did replacing a simple design with a ton of settings in different tabs that you have to scroll down to find make the new design more simple and less confusing to newbies? Am I missing something? For me it doesn’t matter since it’s the same functionality. But if I were a newbie and saw a graph and a ton of settings below it (most of which I don’t need to use) I would be really confused. Those menus below the graph are probably the one thing that most users complain about. It makes Beeminder look a lot more complicated than it is.
Sometimes the graphs take a long time to refresh when entering new data, sometimes more than a minute. Please make the graphs refresh fast in the future.
Please add a setting to show the graphs larger. I like to see large graphs, that’s why I usually click on a goal, then enter the data point, and I like to see the new data point added to the graph. I currently zoom %150 which makes the graph a bit blurry.
I’m looking forward to using tags in the new UI design.
I’m sorry to say but the new design needs a LOT of work. @dreev and @bee , I know how it feels when you release something fresh, but you should really consider giving an option to people to use the old layout for the next 3-4 months until you really have worked this out (see also how Google+ has two versions running for over a year now).
That said, here’s me publicly promising more thorough feedback as soon as possible
Getting frustrated with the new design so here are a couple of things so that I can decompress and move on with actual work
Give us back our goal titles. I know it has been discussed a lot, but the new design really has gone to far in favoring slugs over goal descriptions.
Goal titles (referred to as “descriptions”) are now not even shown when you view a goal.
There is zero added value in using slugs. Slugs are meant to be permanent, machine-friendly and short. Goal titles allow spaces, can be longer and more human-friendly. They can also change at any time and have more current information. Slugs can not change if you have setup automations. We are humans, please provide us with features meant for humans, not machines.
Dashboard is badly designed There is no need for me to see a time counter ticking by the second, repeated across 10 goals. There is also no need to create a new type of view (dasbhboard) and then force the old one out (gallery). I was not using the dashboard and did not intend to continue to do so in the new design until…
Gallery has been crustrated Plenty of information has been removed for no reason at all. I can now use none of the two options you provide sufficiently.
Interface needs work A lot of re-thinking needs to be done on font sizes, spacing, margins, paddings and of course what type of information to show. Some fonts are too big, some are too small. In some places you have all lower-case, in other all capitals, in others just regular text. It’s like you split decisions to 3 people and they never talked to each other.
Apologies if I sound to harsh but i’m Beeminder is an important tool in my daily productivity and this re-design feels like a step back in what I was able to do.
I hear this said all the time, but I feel like Beeminder is suffering from a lack of creativity in this department.
For example, Dropbox Paper links are of the form https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/$FRIENDLY_NAME-$UNIQUE_ID. So if your document is called “Beeminder Notes”, the url might look like https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Beeminder-Notes-u32jjfieshJo2. If you change the document title to “My Bees” the link becomes https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/My-Bees-u32jjfieshJo2. But changing the title doesn’t break the old link. You can access that document by putting anything (or nothing) in the friendly name portion of the url, as long as the unique id is provided. (i.e. you can access that doc by linking to https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/This-is-the-wrong-title-u32jjfieshJo2 or https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/u32jjfieshJo2)
I feel like Beeminder could probably eliminate slugs by doing something similar with their goal URLs plus a similar treatment for automation hooks (e.g. parsing the unique id out of the name string).
I’ve put a lot of feedback over on the blog comments, but I’ll add over here: I don’t need to see the full 4-year history of my goal settings in the “road editor” section. It’s great to have it accessible, but it is cluttered-looking and hard to make sense of. Plus it gives me the impression I could actually edit settings in the past. I haven’t tried that, for fear of breaking things.
I created a new GmailZero goal, and it hung at “Saving your goal…”
I think this may actually be a Google authentication issue (as I’m warned when I actually visit the goal page), but there’s no communication of that problem during goal creation - in fact, it seems to go through the whole authentication process just fine. Also, the gmailzero goal creation script is not at all easy to make sense of. It has me pledge to get to X read emails, but by when? There’s no option to say.
Regarding authentication, I get the error message “Your Google authentication info expired. Please visit your services and re-add Google.” Which has two problems: 1) There’s no tab anywhere called “services” (I have to know that “Apps and API” is where I should look), and 2) There’s not actually a way to add any services - just delete them.
I tried to create a new GmailZero goal. Several problems occurred.
The goal creation script isn’t at all intuitive. I’m pledging to get to inbox zero, but by when? There’s no option to say. As far as the user can see during goal creation, they could be setting themselves up on an impossible path.
Goal creation hangs at “setting up your goal…” (or whatever that page actually says - I lost my previous version of this comment during the crash mentioned above)
Possibly related to 2, my authentication isn’t working, despite no error messages during goal creation. I get the error “Your Google authentication info expired. Please visit your services and re-add Google.”
The problem with 3 is that there is no “services” tab anywhere. I have to know to look at “Account settings -> Apps and API”.
Once I’m at the correct screen, the only option under services is to delete existing services. There’s no way to add any.
Even though there’s no way to fix it, the error message from 3 pops up repeatedly. It covers the top menu bar, so I have to close it before I can do anything.
Oh hey, it looks like my comment that disappeared did post after all, despite not showing up on a page reload. Maybe that’s a forum bug? At any rate, apologies for the duplication.
Some more feedback: Not everything should be a form
It seems like the entire interface in the goal view is now a series of open forms ready for submission. This breaks little features such as URLs in the fineprint
Previously, you could have URLs in the fineprint and they would appear as hyperlinks in the goal view. Now they are just text in a textarea box…
Using the +/- arrows, I could only trim to 0 and then couldn’t adjust after that. I was able to type in a value, though.
I had a goal set up with end date and value (ie, rate was extrapolated). Retroratcheting maintained the rate instead of the end date/value, so now I have a road that’s steeper than I want with several days of flat spot appended. I’m not sure if this new behavior or even a “bug” rather than just a confusing part of how retroratcheting works.
Beeminder’s wonderful support has fixed it for me already! But good to know that that’s expected behavior - I’ll keep it in mind for the future.
One more GmailZero item: On my dashboard, the necessary datapoint is shown as [x] total due by [time] - where [x] is the number of read messages that would remain in my inbox. This would be much clearer if it showed up the way it does on the goal page itself: [-Y] due in [time remaining], with Y being the number of read messages I need to clear out.
this is also subtly toggle-able (or should be, at least! i can do it to your goal page, let us know if you can’t replicate this ) - click on the “X total due” to switch it to “-Y” format.
I disagree on principle with designs that have a “click around and see what happens” approach to providing functionality, but that does seem to be the modern approach in the apps and websites I’ve been encountering.
Thanks @josefb122 (and everyone else) for all the great feedback here. I’m wading through it here and in emails/trello, but here are some updates/thoughts:
The dashboard should now remember which goals you’ve expanded/collapsed There is, however, a bug with how we’re storing all of that state where it seems to forget after a while (sad ). This could be browser dependent but I’m looking into making it more robust.
We were actually trying to streamline the settings that a new user sees, in order to not be overwhelming. I assert that the new goal page has a lot less going on than the old one, and one clear call to action: adding data. The tabs below are (we hope) clearly grouped based on what you’re trying to do, without having to understand a lot of Beeminder jargon right away. But this is definitely great feedback that you’re not feeling it
Re: goal titles vs slugs, as @apolyton@grayson@kenoubi@scarabaea and others have pointed out… I might punt on this one, since @dreev has pretty strong feelings that slugs should be central. I definitely hear the feedback that the new design goes too far with emphasizing slugs over titles. I think the takeaway is we need to hurry and fully implement the spec he’s been working on that’s a better compromise between the two.
The gmailzero issues from @gretchen are noted on trello and we’re working on them; same with @apolyton’s form feedback.
And definitely hear you on not wanting to just resort to “click around and see” @gretchen - it’s tricky to make it discoverable without doing a full-blown tutorial overlay, which can be annoying in its own right.
Again, thanks a ton for speaking up about the things you’re finding annoying @all. We’ll get them out the door as fast as possible.
I just tested this on 3 different browsers (chrome, firefox, edge), and it’s the same bug in all of them.
When I click on the top arrow to collapse all goals, and then manually expand some of them, Beeminder remembers the expanded/collapsed state of all the goals.
But when I click on the top arrow to expand all goals, and then manually collapse some of them, Beeminder will NOT remember the expanded/collapsed state of all the goals.
So when the top arrow looks like this - - Beeminder will not remember the expanded/collapsed state of the goals.
I hope you can fix this soon.
Maybe the settings are organized in a more clear way, but I think that it would look much better and more simple if only the most important settings were there. I think that more than half of the settings below the graph are not used often and can be put in a Settings button that would open those settings in another menu (like the settings menu button in the previous design.), that would make the UI much more simple. I think that too much settings below the graph would confuse new users. But maybe you should A/B test this on new users and see what they like more. As I said, I’m OK with the new menu, so for me this is not important (I just think those settings below the graph are really messy). Let’s focus on fixing that bug first, so that Beeminder will always remember which goals are expanded and which are collapsed.
) and 
There is, however, a bug with how we’re storing all of that state where it seems to forget after a while (sad 
). This could be browser dependent but I’m looking into making it more robust.
- Beeminder will not remember the expanded/collapsed state of the goals.