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April Zero v3

aprilzero.com

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Re: April Zero v3

#81

Post by refik »

mahyarm wrote: post #47
hunvreus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thes…

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.…

You still have to not lose your scale.

Re: April Zero v3

#82

Post by cromulent »

aprilzero wrote: post #39
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…

Thanks! First of all, we're not selling any data, nor do we ever plan to. We do make money by offering a pro subscription--this new design is one of the features, along with things like custom domains and access to our Healthkit app. We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data". We believe that sharing of this data is…

Your software interests me and I would like to try it. However, I am not a Facebook user and don't plan on being one. For me, it's a pity that it is tied to Facebook.

Re: April Zero v3

#83

Post by anant90 »

"What you measure is what you get."

Just wanted to say thanks for building this out. It'll be great to be able to see custom metrics in the dashboard which the user can enter themselves, and yes, the app can remind the user to enter them. This came to my mind since I can imagine people wanting to track body fat% or other specific body measurements which can't just be picked up by a tracking device, nor can be found in Apple's Health App.

Re: April Zero v3

#84

Post by cweagans »

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…

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?

Re: April Zero v3

#85

Post by artifaxx »

nkozyra wrote: post #22

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.

I have been thinking about this too. I agree that time is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring efficiency. Do you think measuring how many to do list items someone completes would be a better metric?

Re: April Zero v3

#86

Post by wall--e »

vessenes wrote: post #80
aprilzero wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! First of all, we're not selling any data, nor do we ever plan to. We do make money by offering a pro subscription--this new design is one of the features, along with things like custom domains and access to our Healthkit app. We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data". We believe that sharing of this data is…

Well, in my case, I deleted my facebook a few years ago, so you actually did lose me, not just as part of some public stand. I think it's interesting you're publishing your data, and I'm glad you're happy with what you're publishing -- it totally makes sense. User-defined privacy is an awesome thing. It remains my proposal that you consider actually cutting off your own access to customer data unless they decide to p…

+1 - Not a facebook user any more, but someone very interested in personal health. The site looks amazing but I wouldn't reactivate my facebook just to use it.

Re: April Zero v3

#87

Post by joshsharp »

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…

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

Re: April Zero v3

#88

Post by trymas »

artursapek wrote: post #15

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

This will be my new go to sentence to describe hip/trendy things.

Talking about site itself, design looks stunning and impressive - lots of work in it. But as tool itself, I do not see much value in it.

I have scales at home to measure my weight, and sports watch to track exercises. Also whole tracking is way too detail. I can see my health trends in no less than a week, but usually in a time scale of months.

Also this tracking sucks my time, attention, etc., and it probably won't tell anything if I have some scary illness growing inside me until I can tell it myself, without any tracking.

Finally, most of devices used have accuracy problems, if you want to track your heart rate in detail you must use a chest band, not a wrist one.

All in all it's just a very very cool toy. It needs too much attention from user. Too many devices to manage/charge/connect/wear, etc.

Re: April Zero v3

#89

Post by bl4ckdu5t »

Splendid interface. I'll never stop saying I'm scared of the future but we have to embrace it. I am paranoid to use this as there isn't a TOS or maybe it's just me that couldn't find any but what if early sign-ups will just be experiments for them to work on? what if there's some way this affects the users later?

Re: April Zero v3

#90

Post by epaga »

vessenes wrote: post #80
aprilzero wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! First of all, we're not selling any data, nor do we ever plan to. We do make money by offering a pro subscription--this new design is one of the features, along with things like custom domains and access to our Healthkit app. We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data". We believe that sharing of this data is…

Well, in my case, I deleted my facebook a few years ago, so you actually did lose me, not just as part of some public stand. I think it's interesting you're publishing your data, and I'm glad you're happy with what you're publishing -- it totally makes sense. User-defined privacy is an awesome thing. It remains my proposal that you consider actually cutting off your own access to customer data unless they decide to p…

Same here, deleted my Facebook account a year or two ago, so any time a "cool" service pops up that requires Facebook, it's a bummer to not be able to try out the service, but at the same time it feels like it validates my stance that Facebook has become one of the biggest dangers to the original dream of what the Internet could become.
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