Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Habits question

I've got an interesting question/problem, answer to which would affect how the app will be implemented in one of its part. It's about recurring actions and goals.

The great idea is to add a motivational  feedback to the Goal page. The one that would show you how many actions you have already completed in addition to the total actions count shown there already.

When there are non-recurring actions - no problem, we just count the number of done vs. total and show. But, what should we do when a recurring action is done today, but not the next time its occurrence must appear?

There are two solutions:
1. the simplest - ignore the recurrence, count all actions as simple, non-recurring
2. take recurrence into account. This is not so straightforward to implement.

One might think that the right way would be to go with the second solution. But! There's one nuance - suppose there's an everyday action. The action is done yesterday, but not today. How should the indicator behave? Show 100% for yesterday, but 75% for today (numbers are just for example) ? Isn't this behavior confusing?

Upd.: Another similar issue: when you click a goal as 'reached', all its actions should be set as done. But what should we do with recurring actions? Stop recurrence, delete recurrence?

Any advice?