HeroMode v2.3 is now available in the App Store!
- Brand new navigation icons
- Streak counts are now available!
- Alerts have a new style to prepare us for desktop launch!
- Quests can have zero points!
- ... and many other UI updates.
As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback -- you can email us at heromode.product@ovisly.com.
New month, new HeroMode release! HeroMode v2.3 is now available in the App Store. We have introduced a lot of goodies in this version. Let's take a look!
New Navigation Icons
The navigation bar at the bottom of HeroMode app takes you across the three screens: Quests, Adventures, and Hero. Quests screen is like your to-do list. Adventures screen is like your project list. And Hero screen is like your user account page.
To make the Quests, Adventures, and Hero concepts more clear, we have updated the navigation icons with brand new custom designs!
Above: New custom navigation icons have arrived in HeroMode v2.3!
Streaks: Unreleased First Try
We have been thinking about streak for as long as we have been thinking about HeroMode. And we have explored several user experience designs, and have had many interesting debates. For example, it goes without saying that tracking streaks is an important tool for motivation and habit building. Yet, breaking a streak, sometimes due to factors outside of our control, can be so demotivating that it actually induces the opposite effect.
In fact, this is not our first implementation of streaks in HeroMode. When we
were building HeroMode v2,
we had actually implemented streak tracking. It took a lot of effort to design
the user experience as well as the technical implementation. And we were so
excited to bring streaks to HeroMode -- the pull request title was "resolves #655 STREAKS!!!"
But... when we got to internally test the streak feature, it didn't feel motivating. The functionalities worked as we had designed, but as we tried it out, it didn't bring us joy. Even though it was a hefty implementation, we decided, painfully, to rip out those ~1K lines of code. And that's why in the actual v2 release, streak was not part of it. Intead, we introduced Activity Calendar.
Above: The unreleased streak implementation. When completing a quest, user can see how their streak is extended (left). In stats (right), user can see the current streak for each adventure, as well as its longest streak. We were very excited about this design but it didn't feel motivating to us when we tried it out as users.
Streaks: Released Second Try!!
But we could not stop thinking about streaks. This time around, we are doing a more light-weight implementation. It only took 40 lines of code!
In HeroMode v2.3, in your Activity Calendar, when you click on a day, you'll now see both the number of points you got that day, as well as the streak count for that duration. And this works for every Activity Calendar within each of your Adventure detail, as well as for the overall Activity Calendar in your Hero page.
Above: Streak counts are now available within activity calendars in HeroMode v2.3!
More Consistent Week
It makes sense that we debated so much about streaks. It's important for motivation and we want to do it right.
But we also debate about what seem like much more trivial things. For example, on what day does a week start? Should it be Sunday? Should it be Monday?
For example, if I say, "This week I got 12 points in HeroMode!", which days are included? Or if I say, "I've been slacking off; next week I'll be super productive!", should I start being super productive on Sunday, or on Monday?
Believe it or not, this has been an ongoing debate for us for months. And previously, HeroMode starts each week on a Monday because Monday feels more like a new start of the week rather than Sunday.
However, most calendars start the week on Sundays. So in a (monthly) calendar, one week is a row going from Sunday to Saturday.
That means when we display weekly stats, it's very awkward that the time range being shown is not the same row displayed on the calendar.
After a lot of debate and back-and-forth and even experimenting changing all our Google calendars to start on a Monday, we decided a consistent experience is more important. So in v2.3, both activity calendars and stats consider Sunday as beginning of each week.
Above: In HeroMode v2.3, calendar weeks start on Sundays instead of Mondays.
New Alert Style!!
We have been working on bringing HeroMode to desktop. As part of this effort, we are updating the style of alert messages to be cross platform. And because the new alert style is now consistent with the rest of the app, we think it looks better too!
Above: In HeroMode v2.3, alert messages have a new style to prepare us for the cross-platform, desktop release.
Zero Points
HeroMode has a "0.1-1-2-3" point system, inspired by basketball. But why not 0 point? One of the users suggested that having an option to give a quest 0 point means that you can complete a quest without adding points into your stats. This can be useful if you want to keep a quest in the record, but you don't feel you've made progress or earned points with it.
That means now you have more ways to control how you would want to close a quest!
- Complete a quest with 3 points: Excellent effort and excellent progress!!!
- Complete a quest with 2 points: Great effort and great progress!!
- Complete a quest with 1 point: Good effort and good progress!
- Complete a quest with 0.1 point: Some effort and some progress?
- Complete a quest with 0 point: Little effort and no progress.
- Expire a quest: Should've done it but it was not done
- Delete a quest: Remove it from record. Bye forever!
Above: In HeroMode v2.3, you can now give zero point to a quest.
Bigger Quest Checkboxes
We have gotten the feedback that the checkboxes are too small, and it takes super accurate tapping to check/uncheck each box.
So we have made them bigger in v2.3!
Above: In HeroMode v2.3, checkboxes are now bigger for easier tapping!
As always, we'd love to hear how to make HeroMode more useful to you. You can email us with your thoughts and suggestions at heromode.product@ovisly.com.