Thanks to the Round 2 Judges for their comments. I’ll post a few key quotes:
“…I would finally be able to see how much time I spend in various apps everyday. It’s a truly original idea with a phenomenal featureset and has never been done before.”
– Paul Stamatiou PaulStamatiou.com
“…A very original idea. Is there anything like scientific research that this could be based upon?”
– Oliver Breidenbach O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog
Great question, Oliver. Forum member dek pointed out this blog post by Cabel on how gaming motivates users to achieve goals (multiplayer related as well). As far as relevant academic or scientific studies, does anyone know? I’ll look into this too.
John Gruber of DaringFireball.net had such great advice I had to bold some key thoughts:
- “This is the best idea in the whole batch: it’s feasible, it would be useful, it might be fun, and people might actually buy it. I can’t say those things about any other idea.
- You really need to concentrate on making it as easy, quick, and obvious as possible to configure goals and rules. …
- The whole point is to get you to concentrate on the things you want to be concentrating on; Blossom needs to be a motivator, not a distraction in and of itself. Make it as simple as you possibly can. …”
I agree, simple is best. The next round of UI designs will be mindful of this advice - perhaps coming back simpler rather than more ‘feature packed’. Blossom will hide a lot of the magic, detecting opened apps and docs in a smart way - once it’s set up, all you see is a (potentially)healthy plant, and get deeper reports when you want.
Check out this earlier blog post for a lot more UI and functionality discussion.
