DRAFT/NOTES: Death To Weekly (Non-Daily) Rates

Notes:

1. Reference previous post on The Bright Red Staircase
2. Special thanks to the Focusmate folks for letting us know what a sticking point this was for newbees.
3. https://forum.beeminder.com/t/did-weekly-and-monthly-goals-change/10062
4. The common suggestion to default to a week of initial buffer if you pick “weekly” for your rate. (Which opens a POLA vs Anti-Magic can of worms.)
5. https://help.beeminder.com/article/123-weekstart
6. http://doc.bmndr.co/roadstart
7. It’s not really “death to”. Maybe “All Rates Are Really Daily Rates”
8. [said in beemail] Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: You’ve been using daily rates all along and you never knew it.

Thoughts from Adam:

ADAM: “you have to enter the daily rate during manual goal creation” isn’t quite “death-to”, is it?

DREEV: oh, um, well i guess the thing is that “weekly rates” the way users expected that to work and the way that it would/could/will work in the bright-red-staircase world has never existed. but you’re right, it’s not death, more like pre-birth.
death to the confusing seeming-weekly rates?

ADAM: to me, changing how we’re presenting a rate to a different way in one set of screens doesn’t seem “death to” anything

DREEV: [nodding-emoji] i concede this point

ADAM: we didn’t intend to support how users were interpreting it, right? so it’s not even a philosophical change, more like “this was one of the most confusing things and now we’re going to fix it”. honestly, I kinda like the concession of “let’s change it at goal creation, and then let users show themselves the rate in “per week” or “per month”, since we made them enter the daily rate already.

DREEV: yeah

ADAM: I don’t have extreme confidence that “making users enter the rate as daily during goal creation means that no users will ever have issues with this”, but i think this is a great example of “what’s the smallest change that may work”.

we could have changed it on any other screen, but users might never see it there, but they have to do it during goal creation… unless they’re in the API, and we assume they know what they’re doing.

(feel free to copy and paste any of that into the blog post, or write a rebuttal)

DREEV: pasting!

ADAM: I still like the idea of showing “0.12 / day (about X per week, and about Y per month)”, but it’s likely a great idea to start with the more extreme change first here.

if we still have just as many users confused, then finetuning this is silly, and we should go find another mountain instead of the closest maxima.