[hunvreus]

Looks sharp, definitely a lot of great work on design.

I just can't seem to see the value in it; what actionable or information do you get out of this? I've tracked my movements with OpenPaths [1] in the past and had fun building a couple data visualizations out of it (I love the fact that others can request access to anonymized data collected by OpenPaths).

I just have no anecdotal or empirical evidence of users putting this data to good use. If anything, folks I've seen using Fitbit/FuelBand could use a bit more exercise and a better diet. People tracking their sleep activity tend to stay late and have poor sleeping habits (for example).

Do you really need a fancy dissection of your every move and interaction to even know what you should be doing with yourself?

[1]: https://openpaths.cc

[aprilzero]

For me, it has served a similar purpose to the dashboard in a car or plane. This latest design also slightly reflects that visually.

When you're driving a car, you're not staring at the speedometer, or constantly checking the gas meter, but they're still useful tools. Especially when things start to go wrong. If you're almost out of gas or in the redline, then it becomes much more useful.

The other thing to note is that this isn't finished. The new structure — splitting things up by brain, heart, core, fitness, travel — is something we designed to grow into. There are tons of new data points we want to add, which will hopefully improve the actionability. Maybe you already have a sense of how much you've walked today and the step counter may not seem that exciting, but that same logic doesn't apply for things like Vitamin D or Glucose, where having good visibility and software is much more valuable.

Each of the various sections has already had pretty significant effects on me as we've been building this. They are mostly very svbtle changes, like trying to walk more every day instead of taking Ubers after seeing how low my steps were, or realizing how much time during the day I was spending on Twitter after seeing that in the graph, or seeing how much weight I had gained in just a couple weeks and switching to ordering food from Sprig instead of Caviar. Seeing the map of where I went last month has led me to venture out of SOMA more and mix up my routine, which also improves some of the other sections. Theoretically I could've realized and done all those things without seeing any of the data, but it is unlikely.

Some things like heart rate I haven't really done anything about, but it is cool to just see it automatically come in every day. The lowest and resting heart rates are quite variable and seem to be much lower around days when I exercise properly, so that would be a fun thing to try to optimize for and some people have used it that way. My blood pressure also seems to be high, which I haven't really done anything about lately, but having that alert constantly there keeps it on my todo list.

[hunvreus]

The best interface is no interface. Don't get me wrong, I find the work you do stunning and well thought through. But I fail to see any actionable value in it.

I could see down the line how measuring continuously vital signs and blood work could help us detect or prevent illnesses or risky behaviors, but the complexity of its analysis will demand something a lot more intuitive than a dashboard. As of now though, these are all vanity metrics, just as useful as tracking the number of visitors landing on your front page.

I appreciate the car analogy, but if you car were as well designed as your body, you would not need a dashboard. Getting more sleep, controlling your food intake, getting more exercise, drinking less... It doesn't take a dashboard to know when you should act on it; your body let you know naturally. You get fat, tire easily, yawn, feel like your overate.

Knowing what to do isn't the hard part, your mom probably told you everything you should be doing since you were able to take your own decisions ("Don't stay up late", "Go play outside", "Eat your greens"). But as pretty as our tool is, I see this as useful as the tons of gadgets and fancy sport gears I see people wearing at the gym: a palliative which distracts us from the real hard work.

[mahyarm]

During a stressful 4-6 months of college, a girlfriend who took up baking, moving countries and getting a new job I gained 40 lbs. Part of the reason why I gained so much so fast is because my scale was lost, I wore loose clothing and I was too busy to buy another scale. It took a year or two of on and off dieting to lose it all.

That is why you want these kinds of metrics, because shit like this can sneak up on you. And losing weight is way more work than gaining weight, at least for me.

[refik]

You still have to not lose your scale.

[sickrumbear]

I don't quite understand why you're being so dismissive of this. By this logic, a scale doesn't have much actionable value because its just telling you your weight, its not getting you to lose any. Of course all the 'real hard work' still needs to get done, but a dashboard like this gives you a tool to visualize state and progress to help direct your 'real hard work' effectively. Personally, I think there's a lot of value in that.

[losteric]

I agree that this isn't terribly useful as-is, but I think it's part of a grander vision. It's a step towards the actionable product, following the trend of other analytic tools:

1.) Show the data - This is all about selling people on collecting data and using the tool. Example: this product, or any other plain dashboard.

2.) Push actionable data - This is about training people to delegate decisions to the tool. Example: Reminding you to sleep earlier if you chronically undersleep, suggesting an evening jog to wind down from too-much-caffeine.

3.) Act on the data - Customers completely delegate the problem space to your product. Example: Placing Prime orders for food based on your fitness goals, proactively buying melatonin if you take too long to fall asleep, etc.

I don't know what the owner's vision is, but right now it's a very "Dribbble-pretty" product... from the experience and utility perspective, it's still a classic dashboard.

There's nothing wrong with that though! I really like the tool and hope to see it when it hits the more advanced features. But for now... Kibana is my persona-data dashboard.

[purpled_haze]

Where the value comes in is when everyone is using it, then you can do analysis on the massive amounts of data produced.

I enjoy seeing projects like this though, because it means people are analyzing data. Without that, we aren't learning much.

Good job, Anand!

[edelans]

You are talking about the value for the app owner, but the debate seems to be about the value created for the user !

[jlgaddis]

Ok, so this tool isn't for you. That's fine. It's not for me, either, so I closed the tab and moved on. Maybe you don't see the point but obviously it scratches an itch for the author.

[chejazi]

One of my university professors always said: "No metrics, no movement."

The opportunity to add value is by intersecting the metrics. As a software engineer who likes to work in cafes, I'd like to know at which cafe I have the highest commit frequency. As a coffee drinker, I'd like to know at which cafe my resting heart rate is the highest (strongest cup!)

[jcheng]

I don't know if this was intended to be tongue in cheek, but I started working remotely 6 years ago and found that where I was working had a huge effect on my productivity. It took a while to identify the pattern but I think it is settings that are unfamiliar or, even better, where I feel very out of place. So the first time I go to a cafe, and especially if there aren't a lot of people with laptops there, I do great. If I keep going there for a month and feel really comfortable, then my productivity falls.

I gave up on trying to understand why, and just accepted it.

(That being said, firing up Self Control[0] and a pomodoro timer provide a much bigger boost for me.)

[0]https://selfcontrolapp.com/

[chejazi]

I was being sincere, and I think I identify with what you mean. A subtle (not discomforting) blanket of anxiousness has the power to snap me into focus.

[hunvreus]

I honestly doubt that the low hanging fruits in terms of productivity hide in these kind of things. I'm pretty sure there are about half a dozen obvious things you could do to drastically optimize your commit output (if that's what you're shooting for) before these tweaks become viable.

EDIT: however I agree on the first point you made. You can't improve something you don't measure. I'm merely pointing at the fact that as of now most tools/products in this space provide nothing actionable beyond the obvious.

[TeMPOraL]

The point being, you have to actually do some movement to reap the benefits of metrics. The current trend among people both in fitness and in ad analytics is to have pretty graphs (with details often abstracted; because smoothing things up and removing scales makes a graph prettier) that give little more than pleasure and sense of being in control. People often don't know what they mean, besides "higher is good, lower is bad". We can do better than that. Charts and dashboards are means to an end.

And I say that as a person who absolutely loves pretty graphs. AprilZero's design is exactly what I dreamed of building for my own tracking. But again, it's not the data that matters, it's what you conclude from it.

[rbinv]

But maybe you just frequent one particular café when you're in a good and productive mood to begin with ;-)

[dragonwriter]

Of course, once you have a hypothesis (this café causes better productivity), you can actively choose to go to that café in circumstances where you wouldn't before, continue tracking, and test the hypothesis.

[rbinv]

Agreed. This is the problem with pretty much all "health trackers": how actionable are the data and visualization? Yes, you need to measure stuff to improve it, but still, a step counter is like a website hit counter and has little actionable value in and of itself.

[samstave]

What if you made a white labeled incentive health tracking app that can be used by schools to set contests for activities each week. You can have prizes or incentives set for people individually and as groups.

"Who ran the farthest?"

"Who lost the most weight over the school year"

"Who is eating the best"

And allow competition groups in each between friends as well, e.g. A competition for all students to run or bike, but I can do an individual group challenge with just my friends too...

It might be a good way to get value and start setting good habits at younger ages.

[nkozyra]

I've encountered quite a few of these already, I'm not sure how much incentive it actually provides by simply gamifying it.

To make it useful, there needs to be a carrot and stick. Some companies do this by way of competitions but then it becomes a resources / management issue.

[samstave]

Agreed. I would see success in gamification on the younger user base. Get this into middle school PE and drive through highschool

[2arrs2ells]

If anyone wants to do this, let me know (contact info in profile). My startup (Clever, YC S12) has APIs that'd make the school part incredibly easy.

[samstave]

I want 0.5% equity :-)

[paxswill]

Not white labeled, but this is pretty close to what Fitocracy does.

[morgante]

I agree that the quantified self movement needs to do more work on tying data to motivation. In many cases, it's too easy to just look at the data but not act on it.

That being said, I do think that having the data is a prerequisite for improving. The times where I've tracked my food intake, I've inevitably eaten healthier, partially but just knowing how much i'm actually eating.

> If anything, folks I've seen using Fitbit/FuelBand could use a bit more exercise and a better diet. People tracking their sleep activity tend to stay late and have poor sleeping habits (for example).

I strongly suspect that's correlation, not causation. Of course the people who need to lose weight are the ones more likely to buy a Fitbit.

[hunvreus]

I didn't mean to imply causation. What I meant is that most people I've seen adopting these tools just don't correct their behavior in the long run.

They do marginal changes to their diet, go run for a couple more weeks and then end up going back to their former self. Same as the New Year's resolutions athletes who are gonna hit the gym in January and gone by end of February.

[dragonwriter]

That's actually causation, not mere correlation, its just reversed from the direction the GP implied.

[joshsharp]

I think it's really interesting to see the divide between visualisations and "actionable insights" in the discussion here. I'm definitely more about the latter, which has been my focus when building Exist[1] — which you could say is an uglier AprilZero/Gyroscope. AprilZero looks like a magical movie interface (and I feel like Anand has said he was inspired by this sort of thing before). In contrast it's definitely obvious I'm not a designer! So while Exist aggregates a lot of the same sort of services, it's much more about trying to make it work for you — we track rolling averages for all your data points, find simple insights each day (best/worst steps for x days) and automatically correlate everything against everything else to find interesting relations. Correlation != causation, of course, but seeing things like "Your weight is higher after you check into Little Greek Souvlaki" (a genuine result of mine) feels sort of like magic to me, even though with some thought I probably could've figured that out on my own.

Where we still have a way to go is tracking things at a smaller than day-level granularity — I really want to find relations between things that happen around the same time, like checking in to a specific place vs productivity levels, but that level of smarts is still a fair way off I think. Plus the "actionable" part of "actionable insights" is a whole can of worms in terms of computers telling people what to do.

All the same, exciting times.

[1] https://exist.io

[musha68k]

There is the old ops saying of "whatever gets measured, gets managed" and from my experience that is still very true. I'm not saying it's the best idea to "manage" all aspects of our lives but if you want to stay healthy and have a hard time implementing new beneficial habits, comprehensive monitoring might make the difference.

I've always hated running (last one on the tracks in high school, always) often trying but failing to pick up the habit later on during my 20s but only since the first mobile running apps came about I've been running regularly and enjoying it (I still remember my first "runner's high" I had in 2011!). That said I'm one of those old-school arcade gamers who enjoy hi-score hunting so gamification was a huge driver for me personally, people are different - do whatever "floats your boat" :)

There is just one problem I have with the whole "quantified self" (as well as IoT btw) movement which is the fact that the internet is quasi broken, you don't want to "get managed" by any third party - be it your government, insurance company or anyone secretly observing you really.

Things we therefore should be focusing on: down-to-earth complex systems design, cryptography, operating system security, etc.

In general we need to be mindful of the cultural as well as technical details of the systems we've inherited and by knowing and understanding - essentially our history - we should strive for building on top of those systems, making them more secure while still staying true to their original idealistic designs (this still includes probably many more rewrites than we care to face at this time).

[cweagans]

I don't make my data available to the public like this, but I've gotten a lot of value out of having detailed data to look at from my day.

For instance, I use RescueTime to measure my productivity, Misfit to count my steps and measure the amount of movement I have throughout the night while sleeping, Spotify + last.fm scrobbling to capture my music listening habits, and a simple csv stored in Dropbox to track my caffeine intake (0 calorie energy drinks and coffee, mostly) and another to track medication intake and yet another to track water intake (in 8 oz increments) and one more to track alcohol consumption (usually measured in glasses of wine or 12 oz bottles of beer, but sometimes shots :P ). I used to track my mood periodically throughout the day, but this was of pretty limited usefulness, so I stopped.

What can I learn from this?

- One energy drink increases my productivity by about 20% as measured by RescueTime over the span of around 3.5 hours. - Working from a coworking space rather than my home office increases my productivity by approximately 25%. - If I consume any caffeine after 3:30pm or so, or more than one glass of one or more than two beers after 9pm, my quality of sleep suffers (evidenced by greater movement throughout the night and not feeling as rested the following morning). - If I walk more than 10,000 steps in a day, I generally sleep better (~10% less movement). - If I drink less than five 8oz cups of water throughout the day, my productivity and mood are lessened. - If I drink greater than ten 8oz cups of water throughout the night, I'm much more likely to wake at around 3am to go to the bathroom, which causes general grogginess through the first half of the following day. - Listening to music with lyrics before ~1pm decreases my productivity by around 15% (instrumental/atmospheric rock before 1pm with BPM greater than 100 increases my productivity by about 5%).

These may seem like inconsequential things, but I'd have never realized those things about myself without the data to back it up (or at least, it would have taken a long while and a good memory).

More importantly, let's say you're trying to lose weight. Without some way of quantifying your current state, it's impossible to know that you're making progress. That's why we have bathroom scales. Does it not then follow that if you're trying to increase the amount of activity you get throughout your day or be more productive or really anything, you need to be able to measure it?

[TeMPOraL]

I second this. I absolutely love the visuals, this style is pretty much what I dreamed of eventually building for myself if I ever had some spare time. But I'm also concerned with the fact that it's optimized for looks, not for utility, and I want to make a general observation about the current Quantified Self / fitness trends.

What I've noticed about them is that products are optimized to look pretty, not to be useful. Those two things are related, but it matters which you optimize for. Depending on which one you care about, you make different choices about e.g. visualization tools you use. To pick on AprilZero, since it's the topic of this thread, what I see on the site are:

- Charts without scales (or with very impoverished ones) - you can't read too many interesting things from them, whether about time or value of measured parameters. There's data loss.

- Gauge charts, which are cousins of a pie chart, i.e. the thing you use when you care about how nice something looks, as opposed to actually making it useful for learning something from the data.

- The weight chart that seems to be doing exactly the opposite of what it should; splines look pretty, but what you want to aim for is a rolling average, which acts as a low-pass filter, eliminating noise from measurements and revealing your weight trend. See how the line leads the data points? It should be lagging behind them. For an example of what I mean, see [0].

- Just data, lack of any attempt to infer a course of action based on it.

Again, the visual are absolutely stunning and I applaud the work. But now that we've figured out how to make data pretty, we need to focus on how to make it useful. For that, we need to start doing the hard work - understanding what choices we do have and how the data can tell us which decisions to make.

For instance, I could track my weight and things I eat, and draw pretty lines of macronutrients over time, etc. but what I really want to have is something that'll dynamically rebalance my diet to keep them at optimal levels. I want the software to tell me to eat X or Y for breakfast. And if I feel like eating something entirely different, to have it readjust on the fly. I ate too much fat today, so the suggestions for tomorrow will have less fat. An iterated version of this program could plan stuff in advance and generate me a shopping list, etc. You can probably imagine more possible improvements.

But note how in the example above, it turned out that I need exactly zero charts. The input I provide is measurements, but the output I care about is right decisions. Sure, I may like (or need, for something else) to look at the measurement data presented in a nice, visual form. Until my imaginary software is good enough, I might actually need to. But you can see how the focus shifts from just having a line chart to having a representation that will be useful to make decisions.

TL;DR: charts and dashboards are means to an end, not end in itself.

[0] - http://imgur.com/YcXK5af - it's a screenshot of a graph I made for myself when I went on diet a few years back; the blue line connects the actual samples, the green one is a rolling average with 7-sample window. Note how the green line lags behind the blue and how it filters out noise. Incidentally, this is exactly why the common advice given to people is to weigh yourself once a week, and not daily - because it's simpler to tell them that than to teach them about rolling averages and low-pass filters.

[Kiro]

Why does it need to be actionable? Are metrics and stats in games actionable? No, but they are interesting nevertheless.

[TeMPOraL]

> Why does it need to be actionable?

Because that's kind of the point of collecting them. I mean yes, making cool-looking stuff can also be the goal, but one should be explicit about the fact that those are two different goals. Currently, the Quantified Self / fitness toys (aka. wearables) talks a lot about actionable data, while really providing just nice looking toys, often dumbed down to make data not actionable.

I think most people figure it out after spending some time fascinated with pretty charts. At some point you finally realize that all you have are pretty pictures, and you're not really optimizing anything by just looking at them. After this realization, one is finally ready to search for significant improvements. And then comes the enlightenment - tools like dashboards and charts are crutches; the less you need them the better, because the ultimate goal is to have smart decisions, not data, and to minimize the separation between your mind and those decisions.

> Are metrics and stats in games actionable? No, but they are interesting nevertheless.

Usually. Games are good example actually. You can clearly identify the two things a game interface contains - visual clutter, and directly actionable information. Fast-paced, competitive games usually reduce the former and focus on the latter.

[trobins]

Say 10 people all die on the same day, all showing the same unusual markings/indicators, well maybe if they were using this tool the authrorities could get and correlate the data to discover all of them drank a specific coffee that's new on the market which triggers a reaction only when heart rates are highly elevated within a small time frame afterwards and exposed to lots of sunlight - far fetched I know, but only when you have an abundance of such data can you hope to discover such circumstances.

Of course privacy concerns will always be there, but I for one am ok with judicious use of data to further such advancements.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm totally ok with that use too, but that's not what's going on here. The GP's point, one that I agree with, is that we need to match data collection with focus on actually using the data for something. There's no practical point of having pretty dashboards with graphs if you're going to just look at it and smile if a line goes up instead of down. We need to follow with ways to get decisions out of data, and pick our visual tools to facilitate this process in the best way possible.