It’s not often that I argue for more complexity in a user interface, but I’ve got plenty of cases where I want my standard goal settings but not my standard reminders, or vice versa. These two things seem like they ought to be distinct, and I suspect that there are only two classes of thing: eep-day behaviour and goal-settings.
To be clear, I love that new goals default to my default settings. In particular, I love that I can have reminders mostly off and no mercy turned on. These things make me more productive, and reduce my frustration after creating a new goal, because inevitably I forget to change the techno-behavioural settings when I’m focussed on the purpose of the goal.
Yesterday, I was unaccountably surprised by a pledge increase after a derailment. Here’s how it went down:
One fine day, I had happily configured my default derailment settings, thinking in my head about new goals.
Another day, I had happily configured my default reminder settings, thinking in my head about existing goals.
Then I decided to apply those reminder defaults to all of my goals.
It didn’t cross my mind (despite the derailment settings being on the same page) that I’d just inflicted my default pledge cap on all of my goals, including the ones with currently lower caps.
On the plus side, I now have a concrete reason to re-evaluate each goal and whether it’ll be more effective to have it on the default-everything plan or the special-snowflake plan.
I have a separate feature request (somewhere, maybe in email or in my head rather than on the forum) to be able to orthogonally edit any setting across all goals.
For defaults, I think that reminders vs goal-settings might be the fundamental divide, partly because of the current-goals vs new-goals split in my brain. (Which might just be mine, of course.)
I have just collided with the fact that the innocuous looking use defaults checkbox on your goal’s reminder page also unexpectedly changes your no mercy and pledge cap settings. Even if we believe in conflated defaults, we got the affordances wrong.
Oh, but, no, please don’t. Because the “uses defaults” setting is all-or-nothing, the defaults get less useful as you add more settings to the umbrella. For example, in the limit, the defaults include all settings and therefore you can’t use it at all.
I suspect that goal-settings defaults should only apply when goals are created. The current behaviour is unexpected, not least because it’s tied to ‘run time’ reminder settings.
I also would like an ‘orthogonal’ feature that lets us configure any given goal parameter across all of our goals, on a single page.
