17 tweets · May 2021 · 9 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
I spent dozens of hours in the last week getting a couple of achievements in Factorio (playtime shown below is overestimate; I left it running in the background some) and I'm struck by a sense of how it was motivating to be playing with the achievements pinned to the top left. 🤔
Feels to me like there's some basic gamification stuff to take inspiration from here with respect to designing apps like complice.co—a goals app moreso even than a tasks app. How to pin your life goals to the top of the screen like that? Figuratively or literally!
(Aside: the "pin" icon actually isn't a pin, it's a magnet, which could also be an interesting metaphor for being drawn in towards your goal—I'm probably reading a bit too much into it though 😛)
Part of what's particularly cool about these achievements pinned to the top left is that the user *chose* them. Unlike the more general victory conditions of a game, which are kind of predetermined, the user is saying "I want to win *like this*."
Choosing which achievements to aim for is a very similar flip to what Complice guides people to do. Rather than taking for granted what success looks like, choosing for yourself.
Although huh, the chosen achievements still are chosen... from a menu. It would be neat (maybe this is already a thing?) to be able to define your own achievement in terms the game could understand, pin it, and work towards it!
Life is basically like that, in a fundamental sense. This is particularly true outside of the confines of the prison known as school, but even there—some people sent to literal prison decide to unlock "read 1000 books I'm interested in while in prison" and others don't.
It's mostly a mindset switch—one that I started with more of than most but over the years I've noticed how much further there is to go. And my developing the Complice app has a mutual feedback loop with my own learning. I make it and it teaches me.
So as usual, when I notice something like this pinning achievement thing and ask "how could an app do that for life?" Complice is already way better than most apps. One of the main views is the Next Action tab, which zooms in on the particular thing you're trying to work on.
I also just recently shipped a feature that makes that same next action BIG even if you're on the Organize tab. (although some users don't like this and so today I'm going to add an option to disable it)
There's also a new-ish feature called the "whole-day intention" which basically makes one of your intentions be your frame for the whole day, and tints the background color of the page to match. Could be a concrete project, or could be something like "take it slow".
But that's small stuff. At the other end of the scale, Complice doesn't just have areas of life or categories or buckets for your tasks—everything you're doing is organized towards a list of Goals. Even if open-ended, there's still a towardsness energy.
I think maybe the place that could use improvement is the Top Priority feature, which actually used to be called "Milestones" (& still is in retrospect—completed priorities are listed as milestones towards a goal) It's on a similar scale to the video game achievements, I think.
Currently active priorities mostly show up when you go to set your intentions, which makes sense in that once you've set your intentions, you want to focus on what you're going to work on today, not other things you may want to do this week.
But what if you could pin a Top Priority to the top left of at least the Complice webapp… or maybe depending on what your next action was, it'd automatically pin the top priority associated with that goal? That'd help connect each moment-to-moment action with long-term goals.
Okay, a simple experiment. Uhhh turns out the layout I'm using for Complice does not whatsoever afford sticking stuff in the top left like you can in a game where you walk around on a map. Both in normal mode ↙️ and distraction-free mode ↘️, this doesn't work.
So I need to figure out something else! But this is exciting. Anyway, time to sign off twitter and get to coding some of these API features. I've got an achievement to unlock!