Hi!
I’m a new user of Beeminder and a big fan. It’s already tangibly helped me to maintain some positive habits in my life, and I’m looking forward to diving deeper into its capabilities. More generally, I just admire the curiosity and verve of the founders. I hope you all keep up the good work!
That said, I tried the iOS app and got snagged by a few rough edges in the UX, so I thought I’d share them here in case they’re useful intel. Most of the issues pertain to the individual goal pages.
- When I add the first datapoint of the day, the date field displays yesterday’s date and only updates itself after I click Submit. I think this is just a bug?
- If the user’s entering data for today (which is probably 99% of all use cases) it would be good to have confirmation of that by having the button read “Today” in addition to the numerical date. I’m always doublechecking the date on my watch before submitting data.
- The textual data just repeats what the graph shows and feels more like debugging data than user-facing info. In the screenshot, “9 0” definitely seems like debugging data-- it’s necessary for generating the graph, but as a user I care about the fact that I lifted on the 9th, not that I was at 0 before I was at 1. It might feel cleaner to display it in proper tabular form or remove it entirely.
- The red “+1 lifting sessions due by 12am” message is ambiguous, especially when looking at one’s phone after midnight. Do I have until the next midnight, or am I already overdue? The messaging and color encourage the second interpretation, but in fact it’s the first. This could be helped by either displaying the absolute due date (e.g. “due by 12am, February 20th”), the relative time left “due in 23 hours” or ideally both “due by 12am, February 20th (23 hours left)”.
- 12am in low-contrast text in the upper left hand corner of the graph recapitulates what’s already (correctly!) shown in bright red at the top of the screen.
- I think it’s great to show the financial incentive on this page but low contrast text in the graph seems like the wrong place for it. Maybe better at the top, after the due date.
- Nit: The Akrasia Horizon makes plenty of sense as a general product feature, but I’m not sure how much sense it makes to display on every graph. It seems easy to confuse with due date, and there’s no clickable explanation within the app.
- Nit: on the Goals page, search is nice and snappy but the “Filter goals by slug” copy is really a back-of-house term, would recommend just “Search goals” instead.
Anyway, thanks again for making Beeminder, I’m really glad this product exists and I’m excited to see where it goes next!