A positive little app to help you form good habits, or kick bad ones.
The thought behind Barley came from a progress bar I saw in Rushmore.fm.
Rushmore's bar was charting all the user contributions to the site over a week. Each week the bar reset and counted up all the contributions to the site. The interesting part is that the total wasn't based off the best week we had had, or some arbitrary goal that the makers of the app had picked. It was simply based off the last weeks contributions. To me this was a bit of a revelation. It meant that we all strived to beat the previous week, but if we didn't, it wasnt' a big deal. In fact it meant that if you had a particularly low week you were almost guaranteed to beat that the following week, which made you feel good.
Overall, this helped with moral for the contributors. Never feeling like the task of contributing to the site was too gargantuan we still plug away at adding data, trying to beat last weeks score if we can. And so, I want to bring that process into my life to keep me positive about achieving my goals.
There would be 3 steps to setting up a goal.
- Name the goal and optionally set an icon/colour for it.
- Choose whether to do more of or less of whatever the activity is.
- Pick a time period to base this off. Daily, Weekly or Monthly.
- Name: 5 A Day (Icon of a banana)
- Type: Additive bar
- Time Period: Daily
I feel that limiting it to a small number of goals is a good thing. I'm going to do some research into how many things a person can take on at one time and see if there's something we can incorporate to help with that. Maybe only letting you form one habit at a time would be best. The idea being that, as per the example, when you consistantly eat fruit five times a day we prompt the user that they're awesome and they don't need Barley for fruit anymore.
This should be a mobile app. Something insanely simple to use that doesn't get in your way, that doesn't require complex inputs or information. I think it would be best to make it a native app however my thought is that it should be API based from the start so that you can check online from anywhere to look at your data, as well as being able to tie into different services to make is more seamless.