Redesign for beta with user-centric design

[liamzebedee]

Now it's time to do form over functionality.

I'm not particularly certain about my intentions with this project, as of now it is simply a personal one to solve my need. Once the fundamentals are complete and it's functional to me, I can start experimenting. Neo-futurism embodies the attitute I want to take to this: “the structures built today byproducts of new materials to create previously impossible forms.”

I'm entranced by the idea of futuristic features just permeating throughout a design, like in the original Meteor demo.

• form over functionality. More personal approach than say, that of Excel or Tableau.
• experimenting with various forms of input (voice, natural language, 3D explorative networks I don't know)
• integration with other data sources a la april zero and utilising images and visuals more than text
• fantastic data visualisation (d3?, inspiration from Tableau)

I had a think about it last night, did some sketching and wireframing. I've got it all figured out in a much more natural manner

Design philosophy

• do one thing, do it well
• just do it; finished is better than theorised
• build a flexible model
• humanist: make it fit the person, rather than the computer (e.g. rather than forms, do workflows)
• don't get ahead of myself with features and ideas
• innovative features over boring improvements (experiment)

[liamzebedee]

[liamzebedee]

Use cases:

• students for assessment and finance tracking
• people for health and career tracking

Now there is a tradeoff in the user interface design. Do I settle for a single record per metric type and have simplistic measures such as averages, or include an advanced system where you can define multiple record dependencies and a JavaScript based computation.

[liamzebedee]

[liamzebedee]

[liamzebedee]

http://coolors.co/app/74b3ce-508991-172a3a-004346-09bc8a

[liamzebedee]

Look into using natural language APIs and IBM Watson

[liamzebedee]

Think about the AIs from Her

[liamzebedee]

http://optimized-app.com/ does exactly what I want and a bit more - it has automatic correlation mining which is amazing.

Things which Metric does differently:

• privacy-conscious - data stored on device
• desktop web app not a mobile app
• goal-based input compared to activity-based input. main difference

[liamzebedee]

Why am I continuing?

• because metric has a different personality
• because I want something open-source
• something that fosters a community
• something human

I've been working on the behaviour-centric view of design. Specifically a natural language based interaction of questions, kinda socratic in that manner.

The colour scheme I would like to use for this:

Something calming.

I've mocked up some sort of prototype of this futuristic socratic personal Her-like interface:

http://lea.verou.me/2011/09/pure-css3-typing-animation-with-steps/

[liamzebedee]

some work that I then lost and then I added again
http://jsbin.com/dehobebasa/1/edit

[liamzebedee]

http://liamzebedee.github.io/react-natural-language-interface/

Been working on this a lot.

Found a couple more competitors:

• https://www.beeminder.com/money
• Coach.me
• http://www.stickk.com/

Realised that my motivation for this is more in the domain of learning about agile development and user experience design, how to architect codebases using React, serving as an example to the community, etc. It's a nice experiment.