Hi Beeminder.
Congratulations! You now have so many integrations that I feel like the first goal-creation screen is a bit overwhelming. 
If I’m already using Pocket, then it’s easy to find the Beeminder integration for Pocket.
I’m more likely to go in the opposite direction: I look at the integration list, think “Hmm I wonder what this does”, and then waste spend time researching online.
I think it would be helpful to group the integrations into high-level categories.
For example: productivity, education, health
Also, have you considered linking to your awesome help page as part of the goal creation process?
I don’t know about other people, just because I click on the Strava link doesn’t mean I have a Strava account. I’m just curious and exploring what’s available.
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I’ve thought about this before, but my hesitation is that it might make people think that you can only use an integration for a particular thing. Like, Toggl is one that people consider to be a “productivity” app… but really, it’s just a time tracker. You can use it to track the number of hours you spend playing a video game, too! Or meditation time, or exercise, or anything else that people would usually put in a separate category from “productivity”. Same for something like IFTTT, where you really could end up tracking anything via its links to all kinds of different apps. Or Focusmate, where the primary goal is body-doubling to get things done (productivity), but all kinds of activities are welcome (I used it to track butt-in-seat, focused, no-screens recreational reading time for a while, for example, which was intended to be the opposite of productivity).
So there’s a trade-off there: any design decisions we make might end up influencing how people use the integrations, and I’m very wary of railroading people away from how awesomely versatile it can be. At the same time, that versatility and array of choice can result in nobody making any goals because it’s too overwhelming, so I definitely get the appeal of splitting things up some.
I wonder if we can make things filterable – like each integration is behind-the-scenes tagged with a bunch of stuff, all the use-cases we can think of. Then we show the full list of integrations available, but at the top you can click a filter (“work”, “productivity”, “health”, “language-learning”) and it updates dynamically to hide integrations that don’t match that tag. That might be the best of both worlds, and maybe even allow people to realise some of the versatility if we include Toggl under a section where someone who only thought of it as a productivity tool might go “hey, I could use Toggl to track my [relaxation activity] time too!”
What do folks think? Bearing in mind this is pie-in-the-sky daydreaming right now – it’s possible Adam and Bethany are sat there clutching their heads yelling “no, Nicky, nooooo…!!!”
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I think having multiple categories per integration sounds wonderful! I think I would also like to see some sort of more verbose integration listing, with one or two lines saying what you can do with each.
How awesome that we have so many integrations that can think about stuff like this!
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Thanks Nicky and Adam for your perspectives.
It isn’t my intention to shoehorn integrations into categories, rather to help people (especially newbees) more easily go from intention to goal creation. Also to help people more easily discover which integrations might be relevant.
The problem (and this is a great problem to have!) is that there are so many integrations that I feel cognitive overload when I see the whole list. It’s like if I walked into a restaurant and they gave me a menu with dozens of items in alphabetical order.
That sounds great to have multiple filterable categories! (I would also be fine with a general “time tracking/Swiss Army Knife” type category for things like Toggl/Zapier/IFTTT/FocusMate.)
I think Beeminder is more about aligning actions to values than it is about “productivity” per se. So yeah, maybe “productivity” is not a useful category here. The point is to help people find what they need.
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