Hi
Can someone explain the graph.beeminder.com tool?
Only heard about it for first time from the Anti-Magic vs carrot dangling post
What can I do with it? Is there an explainer guide on how to use it?
Is it possible to change the y axis to what is achieved each day rather than cumulative total?
Thanks
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Hi! Thanks for mentioning it – the visual graph editor is a tool that’s currently separate from Beeminder itself, but I hope to see it integrated into the main site someday soon, so it’s useful to hear any feedback you have about it.
You can use it to change the rate of your graph (as long as it doesn’t make it easier within 7 days). For example, you can use it to add or edit breaks, or to set a change in rate that won’t kick in for some time, or even retroactively change how the graph looked in the past. It should be pretty intuitive, because you can do all the edits via the graph image: double-click to put a node down on that day, then drag it around to change the slope. Changes don’t get submitted until you deliberately click the button, so you can play around and explore without changing your actual commitments.
You can’t make the graph non-cumulative that way, though; you’d need a custom goal – I think you’re thinking of something more like my /clockoff goal, for instance, right? That’s a custom do-less goal with the cumulative setting unchecked. You could totally do something like that with a custom goal, but I wouldn’t actually recommend it for most types of goal. Beeminder isn’t designed to work that way, so it doesn’t always behave right; you couldn’t get reminders, for example, and the derail behaviour can be a bit odd.
There’s a great illustration of why we think cumulative goals are better – let me see if I can find it… here we go! It’s an old post, but a good one.
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Advance warning: this is a bit of a rant, but please take it as “tough love” and constructive criticism rather than pure snark.
What’s going on with interactive graphs? I first heard about them in the weekly beemail almost exactly four years ago (10 Jan 2019):
12 days later, another beemail said this:
That was supposed to be in an Oprah voice. Anyway, we’re gradually getting these new graphs turned on for everyone and if you’re reading this (daily and weekly beemail subscribers) then all your graphs are currently being generated by the new (and open source) javascript graphing engine.
Please let us know of any differences you notice, good or bad!
Next steps (all theoretically quite easy now):
- Turn this on for everyone and officially retire the old Python code.
- Switch to SVG images which should look even better.
- Switch to interactive graphs!
Again, we’re eager for more feedback on the new graphs before we complete the switch. Just hit reply on this email! Thanks everyone!
I remember getting quite hopeful at the time when reading the “all theoretically quite easy now” bit. “Ah cool,” I thought, “it must be coming soon!”
Then in a private email discussion with @dreev in Sept 2020 (i.e. 20 months later):
and the prototype version of interactive graphs – road.beeminder.com – are getting closer to ready to being part of beeminder proper!
In Oct 2021 he posted in this forum that:
at the moment we’re more focused on things like merging graph.beeminder.com into beeminder-proper
and then another post in Jan 2022 saying:
Even dumber is that we’re still paywalling the static graph editor even though graph.beeminder.com is free to all.
This gave me the clue I was looking for, and finally I found premium – beeminder where it shows that the “graph editor” feature is available for Bee Plus and Beemium users. But https://graph.beeminder.com/ still works fine, so I guess this inconsistency hasn’t been addressed since it was discovered 12 months ago?
If you want to incentivize people to pay for premium features, I’d suggest making it more obvious what those features are. For example, you could have some text next to the static graphs telling users that they can get better graphs by upgrading. You could even disable the free graphs 
Although IMHO that would be a mistake. The static graphs are pretty horrible without the ability to zoom, so I think it would make more sense to ditch them altogether (or at least offer them as a fallback for NoJS fans). Instead you could provide a zoomable interactive graph by default, and then maybe limit some of the extra features (such as editing) to premium users if necessary. It feels wrong to me to have a business model where users have to pay to upgrade from a poor UX to a good one.
But actually, it seems to get quite a bit crazier than that - I also found a link from the Premium page FAQ to Graph Editor - Beeminder Help which says:
There’s no “preview changes” functionality, so you can instantly derail your goal if you make a bad change. The Undo Graph Edit button will restore your graph to its previous state, and you’ll need to reply to the legitimacy check for support to cancel the charge. You’ll probably prefer to use the visual graph editor instead, which will not allow you to submit a bad change, allows previews, and allows you to drag the lines around rather than having to figure out the row system!
Let me check if I understand this right. You have a graph editor as a premium (paid) feature, which in at least one respect works worse than a freely available alternative which the official FAQ recommends using over the premium feature? 
I don’t want to say I have a love/hate relationship with Beeminder, since “hate” would be far too strong a word. It’s more like love tinged with sadness and disappointment. I so want to love it unconditionally, since the concept is great, and it has so many great aspects… but my experience goes in cycles: I use it for a while, then one or two things get so irritating that I ditch it, only to come back a year later when I’m fed up of not maintaining some key goals (mainly inbox zero).
Last time it was the unreliability of Android notifications which pushed me away. Yet here I am back again 18 months later, and to be honest the site doesn’t look significantly different from what I remember in 2019, let alone from 18 months ago. The clunky static graphs are a big part of that impression, but in general it feels to me like the whole UI/UX isn’t doing justice to the quality of the service, and deserves a redesign.
I noticed several other issues whilst restarting my gmailzero goal. For example, the default slope was something crazy like 0.0000014 mails per day. Why would I ever want a goal to increase the number of emails in my inbox?! And why present the number in such a user-unfriendly way? If it’s such a slight slope, why not default to measuring it in mails per month or year, to reduce the number of zeroes? Or even better, just start with the actual goal number rather than the gradient.
I also notice it falls foul of the dreaded Javascript floating point precision issue, e.g. it was on -4.6 and clicking the minus button yields:
These are all minor things, but it’s a case of death by a thousand cuts - they all add up and really impact the overall feeling of quality. Given your admirable public commitment goal to continual user-visible improvements, I can’t really understand why issues like this weren’t tackled a long time ago.
Since this has been a largely negative post, I hope I can lighten the mood by sharing the greatest tech lightning talk of all time, in case you didn’t see it before. Or if you did, here’s a couple of otters holding hands:
Either way I hope this feedback is useful!
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Here’s another example of a “UI papercut” related to the graph: changing it from counting read mails to all mails
doesn’t automatically update the Y-Axis Label, so it still looks like this:
which leads the user to think “oh shit, I thought I’d changed what it counts but I guess I must have forgotten to save that setting”.
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Solemn-nodding-emoji. But as for incentivizing people to pay for premium, this is actually another reason for us to regret ever having introduced premium plans in the first place. We’ve talked about that in a few places: how Beeminder is now pledge-focused rather than premium-focused and death to lifetime plans and the startup egg-basket principle.
Agreed.
This is definitely the plan. It’s called Project Dynagraphs and we keep getting bogged down with getting it out the door but progress is happening behind the scenes!
Right, no such plans!
More solemn nodding. See previous point about regretting introducing premium plans at all.
It’s like an abusive relationship! Wait, bad metaphor. It’s like a loving long-term relationship with some pauses?
But in all serious, we’re really grateful for the constructive criticism and we know your motivation is to help us improve! Also really appreciate the kind words!
Amen. We’re making progress on this too! Fun historical note: our blog post about our previous redesign.
This is kind of a long story but we have a help doc that touches on it and some gorier notes on it. Basically it’s quite fraught to describe goal rates as anything but daily.
I guess beeminder.com/changelog is the long answer to that, but you’re right that those things need fixing pretty urgently!
Yes, thank you!
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Thanks for the rapid and very informative reply, much appreciated.
Haha definitely not abusive, just some issues around lack of understanding like any relationship 
But the fact that I always get super helpful and near instant replies from the support team, plus on this occasion responses from both co-founders within ~24 hours makes it a relationship which is really difficult to walk away from I’ve always appreciated the super high quality of support from you guys - it’s the hallmark of a classy team.
Ahah, I see! That does make sense. However, I don’t think showing numbers like 0.0000014 per day is a final optimal solution either, because those values are way too small to be immediately meaningful to most humans. We can hardly tell the difference between that and 0.000014, or 0.00000014.
If you need to keep showing the daily figure in order to avoid people into misleading people into thinking beemergencies can only arrive once a week, even when it’s almost meaningless, why not simultaneously show the weekly/monthly/yearly rates (or at least the ones which aren’t stupidly large numbers).
But also, in Picking Your Initial Bright Red Line on Goal Creation you wrote:
Eventually we realized we could just make the date of the first beemergency explicit and unmissable.
So given that you’re now doing that, what is the concern about showing weekly or monthly instead of daily? Is it that they’re in different parts of the UI so the former could be missed? If so maybe bring them together?
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