I think I am among the people you want to target… or maybe not? I am following the QS movenment from the beginning, track maybe 20-30 habits, believe in data and KPIs… at the same time I am not a programmer, not a mathmatician, and I like got done things quick and easy, I like self-explanatory user interfaces, and obsessed with saving time. I use beeminder to pull data from my todist, my garmin watch, and fitbit… but I don’t think I would invest time to write scripts, or to login to command line interfaces. I can do it if I must, but it is really a time investment for me, and not something I would do as a free-time activity to relax.
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Ditto - Bingo - Whatever - totally agree!
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Beeminder doesn’t work by ticking boxes, although there should probably be an easy mode where it does!
It works by creating a road of varying slopes, which changes under different circumstances, and which cannot be changed for the next week, and then you enter data for your graph, and so on.
This is really interesting - so a UVI may not be an “improvement” after all! Maybe something should only count as a UVI if it’s been thoroughly documented in a central repository and everything it obsoletes has been updated!
I’m pretty firmly convinced Beeminder needs to slow down on the changes and better debug and document what it already has.
UVIs are great. I’ve worked with projects that deploy in batches and with projects that deploy when things are ready, and I very much prefer the latter to document and support. It’s much less prone to unexpected interactions of changes, and much more responsive to what people need. Beeminder’s very nimble for the age and complexity of the code.
If you find the help docs are lacking something, let us know! I do try to get those updated within a day of major changes, but I am a fallible human, so if I’ve missed something then I’ll get on that. I do think there are some subtle wording changes that I need to check for in the help docs, for a start, unless Danny already did them – which he may have! He’s normally on the ball with that.
To be frank, the tutorials are a speculative, non-essential item that are taking some experiments to figure out… Nothing should be held up waiting for them, especially as we’d be waiting for the end of the pandemic for me to have good recording conditions!
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I also prefer that approach: ‘release Tuesdays’
Still a moving target but one that stops longer more frequently and predictably.
This allows for notices about upcoming changes.
I love quantifying myself but I hate to input data manually.
Beeminder intrinsic value for me is the combination of 2 key things:
- Automatic data pulling through integrations
- Serious monetary commitments
Being a person that values #1, I value practicality a lot!
So the easier and less input an app requires in its daily use and during its onboarding, the better it is for creatures of my kind.
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I agree that video tutorials are not necessary. I prefer the written word when trying to understand something.
I think that clear newbie-friendly introductions and explanations of how Beeminder works are vital, though.
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Totally! So that goes back to what I was asking about the Help Docs. E.g. we have the Quick Start Overview articles – what’s lacking there, for you? What don’t you understand that you think a newbie should be able to read about, for instance?
It’s really difficult to know what users actually want here, because often the feedback we get about what people are looking for is really vague. Just that it should be “better”. I’ve done a round of improvements to a number of the docs, and created new pages for some of the things people have mentioned, but as someone who knows it well and always found it intuitive, it’s difficult to guess what exactly people want and can’t find. Specific feedback on that is always really welcome!
[Yes, yes, fellow workerbees; it is my day off and I should buzz off. Buzzing!]
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Putting in my +1 for “moving autoratchet to at least infinibee” - it’s the only feature of Bee Plus that I particularly care about, and I don’t care about it enough to double my monthly cost. Let me make it easier to have to give you money! 
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Sorry for the old-post-bump, but also not that sorry: has there been any movement towards making autoratchet available on at least infinibee? The more goals I have the more annoying ratcheting during calendial gets, which seems ungood.
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Funny you should ask – we were just talking about it this morning. Which is not to say “movement” exactly. I’m arguing for The Great Autoratchet Flippening in which no one accumulates more than 30 days of safety buffer unless you pay for more as a premium feature.
But in the meantime, autoratchet is sadly just locked away as a Bee Plus feature and there are technical reasons that it will take us a while to change that even though we’re on board in theory.
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Is “30 days of safety buffer” Beeminder’s “640k should be enough for anyone”? 
I tend to agree and I think I’d like TGAF…
I’m sure one could find things to Beemind which should only be done less than once a month, but making those premium seems reasonable at first glance.
I’ve long advocated that trimming safety buffer shouldn’t be premium, not least because more frequent nudges should create more awesomeness (as well as more revenue, which we think is strongly correlated).
Looking at my own goals that have more than 30 days of safety buffer, here’s what I found:
- a weight goal that’s in flat-forever definitely-stay-below-this-weight mode
- inbox zero goals, which although they might look like they’ve got loads of buffer will be on emergency days more often than not
- my Anki goal, which the pessimistic projections from @bluetulip’s Anki addon: maintained progress mean that it’s in the red every couple of days
- a professional development goal, where I aim to spend at least a set amount of money each year on courses, conferences, and learning. It autoratchets to 90 days.
- a tracking-only ‘goal’ that I could dispense with
- goals that have real-world end dates, such as a conference or other deadline that’s sufficiently far in the future that the Beeminder goal shouldn’t start to bite yet, but will start to prompt action with the appropriate lead-time
The other 21 Beeminder goals all have less than 30 days safety
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Another one I thought of right after posting my previous reply would be a goal to make a yearly dentist’s appointment, for example. That falls under your last bullet point.
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I’ve definitely had plenty of goals that by design regularly had more than 30 days buffer, but I’m also a premium user, so…
On documentation: Have you guys considered making doc updates and training material count as UVI’s? Or adding another UVI-like in the vein of your growth “UVI’s”? (I know you have a cute name for that, but couldn’t find it right now…)
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Thanks, everyone! I think there’s going to end up being a best-of-all-worlds answer to this. Like maybe (probably not actually this but…) if you accumulate more than 30 days’ safety buffer it gets ratcheted away by default but you can explicitly reconfirm every 30 days if it’s intentional. The more I think about that the more I like it. But it needs a whole spec to be sure.
We do! Most recently http://beeminder.com/changelog#3911.
Groovies. But we hated doing that so much that we dropped it. I’m tentatively willing to defend that as rational. Working on growth is not the fun part for nerds like us. So as long as we are growing, no matter how slowly, we’re ok focusing on where our passion lies: the actual product.
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I have several goals that intentionally have more than 30 days buffer— most notably, my goal to get a flu shot annually— but I am also a premium user and would be happy to have long-autoratchering be a premium feature.
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I’ve been thinking about road-dialling and that 30-day buffer warning could serve as a notice to manually (or automatically) multiply the slope of your goal by a set percentage, say 10%…
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Here’s a bunch of links to forum posts about what @Mary invented as the autodialler in her (doubtless now defunct) dashboard: Search results for ‘autodial’ - Beeminder Forum
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