As a user who has so many goals that I live on a day-to-day basis goal wise I want Beeminder to show me what is going to eep! the next few days. Within the akrasia horizon (which for me could do with being less than 7 days).
Yeah that information is already shown in the spreadsheet like table view that is the website’s dashboard. But I don’t breathe spreadsheets. I want something more visual. Like a timeline. My background in human computer interaction and personal experience tell me that this table is a horrible user experience.
And before somebody cries “but how is this gonna fit my 3 million goals”: For goals with status blue, green (in far distance future land with limited space in this logarithmic view) if there is insufficient space those few irrelevant goals could be reduced to “3 goals tagged college”.
Or you would just show their slugs which are also short and concise.
I also envision there to be a little magnifying glass. Using pinch-to-zoom or the scroll wheel would zoom into the timeline horizontally, giving busy days more room to show off their due goals or zoom out and provide a bird’s eye view over the next couple days.
Thoughts?
Yes please! I thrive on emergency days!
Nah, I am a bot, I love tables and am fully aware of what’s up and ahead.
Good point! I forgot about the gallery view! Why did I forget about the gallery view? Because this does not give me a quick overview over the next few days:
You can try setting up an IFTTT recipe that will add a calendar entry for beemergencies and/or “N days of buffer”. You will obviously have multiple entries for goals that have new data on a daily basis.
I tried the IFTTT recipe to have goal deadlines in my calendar but didn’t like it. I don’t use my calendar this way.
And yes the iOS app is going in the right direction but I need a leap of usability and not small steps. It still does not provide a clear separation of individual days. Instead I need to move my eyes a lot over the entire screen to find the goals relevant for the next x days.
oh yes, it’s close. But I want a finer resolution than the coarse “per day” I would get out of that. There is an IFTTT recipe already that does that and I used it for a bit but it crowded my calendar a lot more than I liked.
Also I don’t normally look at my calendar but set up alarms for events so that I get alerted in time. This behaviour did not change when I used the IFTTT recipe.
Well if on a Monday you have a goal with a deadline on Wednesday and a trigger to create a calendar entry if you have a deadline in two days, the ifttt recipe will fire up and add an entry in your calendar for Wednesday.
Then you might do some work on the goal and the deadline gets moved by a day to Thursday. So, on Tuesday the goal deadline is again in two days so the recipe fires up again and you have another calendar entry for the goal (on Thursday)
I like the idea of a timeline view. I think I’d rather still have it grow downwards. I like the idea of not having graph thumbnails, and having most everything collapsed to nearly nothing, and having a nice sharp line at days and at the 1 week akrasia horizon.
Hmm. I’m not sure how this would be functionally different to the current dashboard sorted by deadline? As I scroll down my dashboard, it’s essentially a timeline, and it even makes it convenient to open up the next goal that’s due, add data, close it, move on…
For visual/spatial thinkers, having the goal distance from the top of the line may be a nice way to indicate the deadline. Right now, I have no idea where the akrasia horizon is on my list of goals, and I’ve actually asked for us to add a line that indicates 1 week from today.
My slight grumpiness with the list of goals may be related to my issues with the graph colors, too.
Also, while the colors are a good indicator of time if you haven’t changed your deadlines, things start breaking down if you have. A 10am deadline, for instance, turns red even when due tomorrow well before the end of the day. Having a mix of goals with differing deadlines means colors become a lot less useful for indicating what needs to be completed in a specific day.
Functionally in the sense of “if you look at it long and hard enough you will find all the information you want in there”, yes.
Functionally in the sense that a lightweight time line provides just the information I require in just the way I can process it quickly and non ambiguously, then no. It’s not equivalent.
This feature request and your sketch is quite related to what I asked for ages ago:
I’d appreciate if at the very least there was a small but noticeable vertical gap in between dates (@dreev also suggested this). Making everything you grouped together with curly braces into a visually separate block of goals. I want more though
Even with that there is still a lot of information that you don’t need in a lot of situations, such as the graphs (pretty as they might be). This just adds noise and distraction. I know tables are easy to program I need spatial clues though.
I also second that the colours are next to useless when you have deadlines prior to 24:00 and so on. You will have BIG RED GOALS in your face the entire day and need to convince yourself that red = OK because there is nothing you can do about it.
But that’s okay. It’s fairly inevitable, since it sounds like a very visual way of organising things, and I have absolutely zero visual imagination and no mind’s eye.
(I’m also really bad at math and with any kind of numbers, in any configuration. Sometimes I wonder what I am good at. )
The applet list is equally spaced out per goal, rather than per deadline, it doesn’t indicate different days graphically, and it’s only available for Android users.
I think he’s talking about the lack of an uncle button, something we have talked quite a bit before.
I need spatial clues though.
It’s fairly inevitable, since it sounds like a very visual way of organising things, and I have absolutely zero visual imagination and no mind’s eye.
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