I got really excited after reading the submission title because I thought someone had finally created a service I've wanted for a while. This is great, but you should take it further! Here's the idea:
I've wanted a personal dashboard to track everything in my life at a quick glance, like weight/health metrics, financials, to-do, schedule, emails, twitter replies, etc; something that'll give me a quick and comprehensive view of everything going on personally, socially, financially, professionally. Basically a Mint meets Ducksboard for my life, or even better, a universal life platform that services can hook into.
A while ago I built a similar tracking tool for my kid and then introduced to his friend's parents in our neighbourhood and they love the concept. We still use but haven't checked if his friend's parent still use.
It allows you to record and create beautiful charts from any arbitrary data you want to send it. It gets the data by you tweeting direct messages to it, so it's really easy to do from just about any device.
Not sure what the snark is for. Perhaps I didn't explain its usefulness that well. I may write a post about it because there seems to be some interest.
Okay, sorry, let me spend some more time and give you an example.
One big problem with a unified dashboard is that not everything in your life should be monitored on the same frequency.
Here's one example: You probably need to check your email several times a day (if not, god bless you!) but checking your 401k balance several times a day is almost certainly harmful to your well-being. It probably doesn't make you happier; contemplating your money rarely does. Instead it will alternately make you worry (as every dip in the stock market causes nightmarish visions of a retirement spent in a cardboard box), or make you irrationally exuberant (as every good trading day makes you dream of buying a second home). The net effect is that it will subtly encourage you to trade, because if you don't trade your 401k is the most boring thing imaginable, and you feel the subconscious urge to tinker with it to make it do something. But trading is a disaster, because churning your investments makes other people rich at your expense, and because timing the market doesn't work, and telling yourself not to time the market usually doesn't work, either.
For much more on this topic see the work of e.g. William Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, The Investor's Manifesto) or any of the so-called Bogleheads, or try Ramit Sethi:
Here's another example: The ideal amount of time to spend monitoring your weight is none, unless your weight is unhealthily large or is increasing significantly. (If you're prone to anorexia, a continuously updated dashboard showing your weight is potentially dangerous. You need to avoid playing that game.) And unless you're some sort of edge-case athlete, by no means should you monitor your weight daily: You should either weigh-in weekly, or weigh yourself daily but compute a running average (and have a deep understanding of what a running average is and why you're computing it). Otherwise day-to-day fluctuations are likely to destroy your confidence in your diet. (I'm told that, for this reason, Weight Watchers explicitly trains members to weigh-in weekly, not daily.)
So why can't your dashboard show different metrics each day? You can just configure the different widgets to show up at different frequencies.
Perhaps your 401k widget only shows up the first time you log in each quarter. Your weight tracking widget only shows up Monday morning. Your banking and monthly budgeting widget shows up daily. Your Amazon order shipping widget shows up only when you have an open order. Your meal plan widget shows up all the time.
You can choose which widgets you want. If you're poor and don't have a 401k, don't turn on the 401k widget. If you're rich and skinny and don't have problems maintaining either of those, don't turn on the budgeting and weight loss widgets. But a shared dashboard doesn't imply everything on the same frequency.
I already have a page where significant announcements show up at a wide variety of frequencies. It's called "webmail". Or an activity feed.
The point of a dashboard is that no navigation is required beyond turning your head and glancing. Dashboards are for things that you want to see by accident, or while waiting for a phone call. A widget that usually isn't there when you turn your head might as well not be on the dashboard at all. If you have to click to see it, it can be in a separate app or site. If you have to wait for a specific date and time to see it, it might just as well arrive in your mail, Twitter stream, or SMS.
The main difference in my eyes is that activity feeds and messages can create a backlog. The user experience isn't quite right either--different types of messages still look exactly the same. But different dashboard widgets could have radically different user experiences.
Please do write about it. I'm pretty interested in this space as well, and I'd love to hear some other people's real-life use cases.
A couple dangers with "track everything" apps: (A) the app may track nothing well, and (B) it may be exceedingly hard to communicate its benefits to people. On the other hand, there may be some significant benefits to a having a data hub for personal metrics: easy cross-referenced reporting, etc.
This is coming from a person who probably hasn't seen a benefit from using services like Mint.com. Since I've started using it I have been drastically more aware of my finances.
The stuff that you are able to put into neat little folders _should_ go into neat little folders.
I use a service like Mint.com. I check it about once a month. That may well be too often, and a sign that my automation and budget aren't fully mature; once a quarter would be more ideal.
A continuously-updated Mint dashboard? If I needed to micromanage my money that closely it would be a sign of trouble. And it would certainly be stressful.
Most of the money-management advice I trust emphasizes the role of automation. If your budgeting system requires constant mindfulness it's not working well.
I understand (and my budget may vary differently from yours). But the original poster's point was that if you have a number of these services (similar to Mint), then it sort of sucks having to check x different sites for a general overview of your "status".
EDIT: I saw your above comment and you make a good point about different check-in times.
But you assume that all users of mint have a mature budget. When you are first starting out you do need to monitor it heavily as it helps you adapt to your budget. Not to mention initial budgets rarely work because there is always some expense that was forgotten.
>Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders.
Whereas you are mr. Joe Adventure, middle name "Unpredictable" now?
The same thing could be said for all "todo", "time management", "GTD", etc solutions. Why the snark for this particular idea, which sounds a lot more involved and useful than 90% of the GTD apps out there?
Actually reminds me of the "personal customized web portal pages" of old, which could be even more interesting in this day and age, showing latest tweets, mails, bank balance, upcoming events, RSS feeds you follow, etc, on top of basic stuff like todos etc.
What? I'm talking about glancing at a dashboard in the morning and being able to tell how much money I should or shouldn't be spending, whether I'm on track to hitting a weight goal and be reminded to watch what I eat, if my afternoon is free to hang with friends, if there are any events of interest in the area, if I've got any important to-do's, etc, etc.
The point is it's all updated in real-time. We've got the services and biosensors to do it. Now it's just a matter of integrating it all together.
Yeah, that sounds amazing. You'd have to integrate with a lot of services that don't necessarily expose APIs, though. Well come to think of it, most of them do.
Seriously, this is one of the most interesting software ideas I've heard in a long time, and I don't usually get excited about productivity software. Do it.
Hey now, don't dehumanize yourself! A dashboard of your life could summarize the boring, fiddly details that you have to keep track of -- budget, to-do items, reminders, package tracking, whatever -- so that you can stop wasting time thinking about them. You are more interesting than your credit card bill, or your list of upcoming events, and automating that crap would almost certainly be a net win for you as a person. Or me, for that matter.
Integration is the hard part but it's the next step in the evolution away from widget based dashboards to better designed experiences that display that info. I think the experience should be multi-tiered - from quick glances to deeper functionality for repetitive actions. You might just want to track some things but you should also be able to do X or Y without going to another destination.
the homepage of skim.me totally confuses me... just 3 bullet points and you want my email address. No demo, no pictures. Asking and getting email ids from users shouldn't be so cheap.
I like the idea, but the app hasn't been updated in a year and a half (see also their "what's new" section - not a good sign for system health), and there are a lot of gaps in what I'd end up using such a site for. Would you happen to know any alternatives? They've always been hard to google for, in my experience :|
Finally decided to poke at it a bit. I hit login bugs, an infinite redirect loop, really inefficient UI, unhelpful graphs (where they were graphed at all - I filled in a week of fake numbers, it just spit it back out in text, and didn't even validate a number field), and a cost that isn't even remotely justified. It looks like a short-term project that has been left to rot.
tl;dr: no thanks. Daytum is infinitely better, and cheaper.
This is pretty neat, but it's not something I would enter my CC details for and pay for each month. I would however drop a one time ~$25 fee and self host it on my own server, and maybe use it. At least this way, I will see it running on my server and periodically update it.
I'm just one person of many, but when I see neat little apps like this I would always much rather pay for it outright than pay for it each month. I don't know why more people don't sell cool services like this. Chances are I am going to just cancel it after a month anyway.
Especially for something like this. I might not need this to land a job for years, but when I do, I'll want to know that all the work I put into adding content to this won't have been wasted (i.e. service disappears for any number of reasons, OP is already 98% busy :/).
That's not so say that a hosted, subscription service wouldn't be useful for some, but self-hosing would allow users to solve problems for themselves that would otherwise be feature requests, and hard to design well for everyone.
I know OP doesn't want to be another LinkedIn, but there's no reason why he or someone else couldn't create an opt-in browsable database of these for better discoverability. How awesome would it be if you could click a link next to your hackathon entry and see the status page of other attendees?
For hosted, an annual fee is appropriate here. A $25 annual fee is quite similar to a one-time fee of $25 because once it is paid, there is nothing to do but use it for an entire year. After a year, it's very obvious whether the app is worth another $25 or not. Either way the developer's compensation is nearly the same assuming many accounts share the low cost of the servers.
There is a mental line between annual and "once and forever" type purchases. I think it comes down to the thought of getting more value and the fact that you own it..it's yours. Secondly, what if I purchase an annual subscription and forget about it the next year? I just paid another $25 for an app I stopped using over 10 months ago. I don't like that hassel of having to remember what my card is attached to and what random fees are going to come out each month, and that's why I don't like subscribing to anything.
I would rather drive a shitty used car at a one time $5k purchase price over a brand new car at $300/month. For the same reason, I also don't get into cell phone contracts and cable subscriptions. I don't know what subset of the population is like me, but I think it would surprise you.
I agree people are like that, although I am not sure more people are willing to self-install than pay for hosted.
You also make a good point about renewals. Because the cost of annual plans is out of mind for most of the year, it's important they allow users to disable auto-renew. I use Pandora, RescueTime and Forrst and they all have this option.
Suggestion: "how much would you theoretically pay for this" won't give you much accurate information. I'd suggest changing it to "pre-register for one of our plans: free, $5, $25", with an overview of each, and see what people click.
This is a wonderful suggestion. OP listen to this.
When you put such an option to people, they will not tell you how much it's worth to them. They will only tell you how much they are willing to pay... if at all they had to. Expect the numbers to skew heavily towards free.
Actually, I'd say, once you get the data you should generously double the price.
Also, if you keep the current format, you should consider dropping the default selection. It would be good to pre-select if you were actually in a signup process, but biasing your data in a survey like this is bad: you could end up with data saying that people are willing to pay more than they actually are.
Quirky's method of generating price information for a proposed product is to say: "At what price would you consider this product a bit pricey but still worth buying?"
And I really like the concept, but I believe that the value of a "status dashboard" is that it's a concise view of what's happening right now. I really don't think that this sort of concept is a good resume replacement it's not a good format for 20+ items.
I'd suggest making it a status dashboard for what you're working on right now, and once things are "completed" they drop off into a bulleted list at the bottom which becomes your "work log" rather than "dashboard" at that point. Make it less overwhelming and I could really see a recruiter or business partner getting some good info from it.
I'm partial to visual design and I'm fairly certain CC's dashboard wasn't an inspiration here.
They share inverted palette and a grid layout, but other than that if you set out to design a "cool" looking and functional 2 column table, it'll end up looking as posted project. There are just too few convergence points for this sort of design pattern.
As someone who does hiring, this sort of thing is kind of neat, but mostly very annoying. I look at maybe a dozen resumes (there's someone else in front of me who looks at far more), and having to figure out the bizarre format of yours is a waste of my time. I would guess that this applies similarly for people hiring contractors.
The consistency of the boring resume format is a plus. If you want to distinguish yourself, I would suggest you work within that format: better typography, a nice header, a striking layout (that still follows the format.)
But won't it work better in case one has just a couple of candidates to deal with. Pick 10 from 100 as per their regular boring format resume, then use these kind of detailed profiles to pick 3-4 to call in for an interview.
I don't really think so, but I guess it's possible. The reason I don't think so is that this thing is much harder to read than plain text, and I have to spend time figuring out how to read it.
Chances are, if I like someone's resume, it's time to talk to them on the phone, not read a secondary resume that's in a weird format.
I'd use this but not as a resume tool. I'd use this as a motivational tool to keep track of the todo items I have since some of them are quite long running and to motivate me into getting those personal projects finished.
When I first looked at this I got excited: A way to track my OWN goals for my OWN records, and help me with my own personal development.
When I found out it was another resume/CV/job board thing I just rolled my eyes and closed it. If I wanted that I would just use LinkedIn or Google+ (public) to talk about my bits and pieces.
That is how I am currently using it (http://kennedysgarage.com/status). I just wanted see if there were other uses for it. I think keeping it basic and to the original point might work the best. I do agree with you that we don't just need another Linkedin.
I think he meant that he would be more interested in using it as a general task tracker, rather than a CV add-on. Maybe a way to track any personal goals like weight-loss, excersize, personal projects, home renovation, etc. instead of just marketable things.
What freaking standard is it to write dates as mm.dd? Not cool. In many countries it's the exact opposite or that is how you write TIME (ie. hh.mm instead of hh:mm).
As an American, I personally hate that standard, and usually use YYYY-MM-DD wherever possible, and only revert to MM-DD-YY on documents that require it in that format. I get that MM-DD follows the conventions of speech ("the event is on May 7th"), but it's really ambiguous when written in all numbers.
Unfortunately, that's just not the way people talk about dates here. Maybe it's because we use a backward date order, or maybe it's a self-reinforcing loop, but that just doesn't sound natural, even to me.
Isn't it MM/DD, not mm.dd in US? E.g. 8/23, not 8.23. My point is that it is more or less insane to start inventing new date format with zero regard to formats in other countries.
> Isn't it MM/DD, not mm.dd in US? E.g. 8/23, not 8.23.
Eh, people will use anything, I've also seen 8-23. 8.23 certainly isn't a stretch.
> My point is that it is more or less insane to start inventing new date format with zero regard to formats in other countries.
You haven't been dealing with the U.S. much, have you? To be fair, most of the fun comes from their use of ancient standards rather than new ones, but they aren't exactly known for consulting with other countries. Then again, at 300 million people it's a little difficult to blame them.
When given three pricing options, the majority of people will go for the middle one. I would personally make that an open-ended question, where you ask people to punch in a number. That would give more conclusive results. I'm willing to bet you're going to see most people pick the middle option, and unfortunately, that won't mean much.
> the majority of people will go for the middle one.
... of those who didn't leave because they didn't like any of them. And even that is not true. It's more of an urban legend popular between "UX designers." In reality, people will go with the cheapest option that fits their needs.
What a coincidence that I would run across this post while taking a break from struggling with exactly the problem this could solve.
I'm in the process of trying to summarize my real work and "value" to someone in reference to what could be a dream job. A job that my traditional resume doesn't quite fit.
It would be wonderful to be able to provide a recruiter or similar with a link to a not necessarily public status chart to demonstrate myself.
It would be wonderful to be able to provide a recruiter or similar with a link to a not necessarily public status chart to demonstrate myself.
That is terribly against your interests, because your future employers do not burn with the need for more status charts. The contents of your existing work are not all that relevant to them. The results are much more interesting. How you are going to apply those experiences to their problems is most interesting of all.
Figure out a way to credibly claim that you increased sales or decreased costs at a past employer and that, by consequence, you could do it at a new employer -- most employers perk up at that sort of thing. Show them your plan for doing it. It's so effective it is practically cheating.
This sort of advice works well for small companies (where employees will wear lots of hats), or certain jobs in big companies. But for a lot of jobs, increasing sales or reducing costs is not the point--at least not directly.
If I'm hiring a graphic designer, a resume full of monetary claims is going to look like vague fluff to me. Instead I want to see a portfolio, because the result I am looking for is really great graphic design. It is my job as a manager to understand how that might fit into our product cycle and business model. But it has to start with demonstrated talent at the skill I need to fill.
I'd been theorizing that some of the baffling responses here are the result of folks are seeing the world purely through the lens of a specific type of company.
I agree with essentially everything you're saying here, but I don't see how something like this couldn't be useful to show work behind my results progressed. Or at least easier to consume than a traditional resume or modern blog-as-resume for that purpose.
I'm thinking of it as a simple tool for providing context and references to what I've done. The first step in making those claims of results credible.
I'm not talking about shipping a link in lieu of a CV or proper introduction to a job I'm pursuing, rather when someone reaches out to me and would like to know what I'm up to - I can show them.
Obviously, once you get to the point of sitting face to face with someone it's a totally different type conversation, but for the first exchange I see nothing wrong with this.
Your customer/employer not only doesn't care how the product is made, they don't want to know: They are hiring you to abstract away the detailed steps involved in making the product. [1]
They don't want to babysit you, or live your life alongside you. They don't want to understand every little thing you do. That is the very opposite of what they want. They want you to deliver something valuable with as little fanfare as necessary, to the point that they might pay extra to be able to download your work product without even speaking to you.
And they really don't want to hire someone who seems to be expecting to be micromanaged, and who is therefore more obsessed with presenting the process than presenting the results. Your todo list should not look more polished than your products.
If someone asks to know what you're up to… you tell them? Using sentences? Probably as few of them as possible, unless you're having the conversation over beer? If they don't find your claims credible… you offer them references?
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[1] Okay, there is a (considerably smaller) market for artisanal products where part of the deliverable is a lovingly detailed description of how the product was made. But those who buy artisanal products won't settle for a mere checklist. They want personality. They want lovingly described blog-style updates with coffee-table-quality photos. Or they want a minute-by-minute first-person account on Twitter.
I fully understand the thrust of what you're saying, but feel like it's reading a lot into my thoughts that I certainly don't intend. It's a bit smarmy too.
Still, abstract from what I actually said or meant it's an educational perspective and I genuinely thank you for it.
Why is your work relevant if you've created the results?
The mentality that carefully-documented work is a substitute for results is the bane of almost all professional managers. It's crazymaking when you set out to achieve a result and receive instead a detailed log of steps that failed to produce it. That happens often enough that I might not want to signal that particular "survival skill" to a prospective manager.
Perhaps the methods used to achieve the results or the context in which they were achieved aren't relevant from one position to another? Maybe the methods would reveal a momentary success that happens to be unsustainable?
I feel like your angle here is frustratingly assumptive in the same way as the other response below.
Having seen it twice now, maybe what I'm saying looks just like the symptoms of some "process not results" types you two have seen before, but it couldn't be further from my intent or work in practice.
Your good intentions aren't relevant. This thread is critiquing a marketing message. I'm sure you're great at what you do, but the strategy of producing volumes of well-groomed data about your process will work against you with many managers, and isn't expected by any managers.
You keep referencing things I made no mention of "mentality that carefully-documented work is a substitute for results", "set out to achieve a result and receive instead a detailed log of steps that failed to produce it", "the strategy of producing volumes of well-groomed data".
I don't see how you managed to fantasize all that from my suggestion about the potential utility of an easy, concise way to share what I'm working on and how with someone.
"That's bad idea." - Fine.
"No one cares." - Cool.
"Don't try to hide your failure to produce results behind a pretty status chart." - What the fuck are you talking about?
That's where the topic of intent came from, you keep baking it into your judgments.
By this point in the tangent I thought the interesting topic was why you seem to think that the work or method behind a specific result is irrelevant?
"I saved my employer $2MM/year with 3 months of work."
vs.
"I wrote Excel Macros and Shell Scripts to automate a bunch of reports."
I guarantee you the first sentence will get a lot more interest. It's also much more relevant-the specific technologies you used aren't really that important. Your ability to identify business problems and come up with solutions is.
I think you're making a big mistake by only asking resumé-builders and not employers about the pros and cons of your idea.
I love the design, though. It's a way to reinforce the idea that there is more to a desirable applicant than their diploma and grade average. Basically why LinkedIn is fundamentally broken.
EDIT: Another way to include speaking gigs would be to provide links to your Lanyrd and Speaker Deck profiles.
Awesome idea. I think it would be awesome if it had the additional ability of exporting my data into a form I could use to update other things like LinkedIn, my paper resume(.doc or .pdf?), and a website (html or even a widget type deal). I just had retyping and tracking. He's got the tracking down and if I was able to keep everything updated with it I would be willing to pay for it.
I think it's a nice idea and I'm really interested to see how you execute on it.
I mentioned it on the form but I'll say it again here. I think for prices around what you're talking about it makes sense to make them per month $25/year is about $2/month, if you ask me to spend $25 up front for something I might think about it but $2 just seems like nothing.
Suggestion for the OP: offer a no-questions-asked money-back refund (say 30 days), and/or allow people to have a free trial period.
Optimizing a successful business around people who think $25 is a lot of money to spend at one time is a tough road (I'm happy to talk offline about personal experiences here). No offense to @almost, I'm not saying he's being cheap, only that he may not value this niche as other people (similarly, I would be a horrible customer for Pokemon anything). The bottom line is $25/year is about what paper refills cost for cheap day planners; not a lot of money in any objective sense.
I'd try to capture people who perceive more than $2/month of value in what you offer, and tune the product to offer them even more.
What I love about this concept is that it's a simple way to share what you have been working on without the appearance of overstating it's importance. It also allows you to update your status quickly while you find the time to write up one of those blog posts that never seem to get written.
Just an interesting thought; you could actually build a page like this using our product (http://interstateapp.com) and its API (just whack up a custom theme and sort the board/roadmap by date). Best of luck with this regardless.
If the numbers in the meters (current workload, amount of stress and chance of emailing back) are percentages and the colours are representative of the percentage, then the 13% chance of being emailed back should be coloured red and not green to indicate the low chance of being emailed back.
It has nothing I need. I need something that shows my bank balance, bills that need to be paid, some stupid very stupid things like preparing some tax documents etc.. So, it's very far away from being my dashboard.
Neat but I'm not sure I'd try to push that into my resume (as suggested by the author). If anything, resumes tend to be too noisy, hard to pick out what really matters.
Nice to have a place to keep all that stuff though.
Very nice! I know you said it's for non 9-5 work but if you added a 'jobs' category on there too, for me to show past work experience, I would definitely use this.
Came here to mention this. I would absolutely make a few donations to make it happen. Understandable to want to make a couple bucks off a great idea though.
Well, he could make it open source and still earn money with it. I haven't always an internet connection, so this would be a huge advantage.(plan to travel in the next time)
I've wanted a personal dashboard to track everything in my life at a quick glance, like weight/health metrics, financials, to-do, schedule, emails, twitter replies, etc; something that'll give me a quick and comprehensive view of everything going on personally, socially, financially, professionally. Basically a Mint meets Ducksboard for my life, or even better, a universal life platform that services can hook into.
Email me if you're interested!