April Zero v3 • Hacker News Board

Re: April Zero v3

#21

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

rbinv wrote: post #11

chejazi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

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

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.

Re: April Zero v3

#22

Post by nkozyra » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

I love the UX but I still find the self-quantification data shallow. Time as a measurement of efficiency is inherently flawed, for example.

And there's (as best I can tell) no goal setting nor recommendations for meeting goals based on prior successes and failures.

That's still the big gap in self-quantification. In the mean time we're just making prettier charts.

Re: April Zero v3

#23

Post by vessenes » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

robbles wrote: post #14

vessenes wrote: post #3

Super cool theme. The company seems to be at https://gyrosco.pe/ . They lost me at the facebook login, but it made me think about privacy and user-defined privacy a bit. Gyroscope's pitch says you can share or instead keep everything private. I think a service like this would be a lot more appealing to me (and it is undeniably cool) if the data were kept encrypted on server, and only available on my end device. I sup…

I don't think this service is targeted at tinfoil-hat-wearing types. The original prototype, after all, was intended for sharing the data publically on the web. Making it private and secure would be a totally different product.

Well, it's clearly not aimed at privacy-oriented people.

But, you imply that's a tiny minority -- I take exception to that viewpoint. Many 'non-tech' types I talk to have a strong aversion to the idea of this sort of information going out broadly because they rightly believe they don't understand the ins and outs. So, the target market may grow quite a lot with a clear and understandable privacy story.

Re: April Zero v3

#24

Post by samstave » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

rbinv wrote: post #8

hunvreus wrote: post #6

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 put…

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.

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.

Re: April Zero v3

#25

Post by aprilzero » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

hunvreus wrote: post #6

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 put…

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.

Re: April Zero v3

#26

Post by jm4 » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

Why in the world would I want to connect this to Facebook? You really need an option to sign up with email.

Other than that... Very cool looking design. Looks like it would be interesting to try. I like the integration with other apps and sensors. Lots of potential.

Re: April Zero v3

#27

Post by zbraniecki » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

artursapek wrote: post #15

This is the most San Francisco thing I've ever seen

As a Pole living in San Francisco I don't even know if I should be proud or ashamed, but you're totally right :)

Re: April Zero v3

#28

Post by gkoberger » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

Cshelton wrote: post #9

I was just thinking about the UI on a lot of shows/movies and how rarely we see any UI like it in the real world. Even those 'FBI databases mainframes...' that a character hacked into do not look anything like that in real life. This is pretty cool and fits in well in 'Hollywood'. Now I want to find a project that I can actually use a similar UI on haha.

Here's some more info on the creation: https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d2...

Re: April Zero v3

#29

Post by 2arrs2ells » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #24

rbinv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

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.

Re: April Zero v3

#30

Post by aprilzero » Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

fieldforceapp wrote: post #4

Big change since v2, congratulations. Any plans to commercialize? Would like to see this applied to athletic team performance monitoring.

Thanks! This is actually already available, and a demo of our new Gyroscope Pro offering, which is $7 a month and includes things like this new theme, custom domain name support (which is how I have it going to aprilzero.com), our healthkit iPhone app to power it, etc. Check it out at https://gyrosco.pe/

We want to build this as something that anyone can just go and sign up for and start using. I would love to get more athletes using this. We recently released a running app powered by the Gyroscope data — (see gyro.run) — and it's been really exciting to see people use it to share marathons, training, etc. We still don't have a good solution for things like gym training, which are hard to passively track, but that's something we're definitely thinking about.