More ways to visualize our data
The graphs are nice as is, but could do so much more! I'm imagining beeminder as not just a self-binding tool but a self-awareness tool. For a simple example, say I have goals a and b -- it would be awesome to be able to graph a vs. b on the same graph, or the sum of a and b, and look at patterns in the data. Are a and b inversely proportional (suggesting limited reserves of time and motivation), or directly proportional (suggesting independently fluctuating levels of motivation)?
This is maybe way beyond what beeminder is intended to do, but I can't help but think that there is some as-yet-unharnessed power for self-knowledge here.
Isaac
shared this idea
-
David Gessner
commented
It is awesome that we can export all our data and then analyze it to our hearts content with whatever tool we want. Nevertheless, I think that having some additional visualizations of our data right on beeminder.com would be very convenient and useful to many users. Many users might not be too familiar with tools to process data dumps and might thus miss some interesting insights from their data. I'm not suggesting providing many different fancy visualizations, but just a few basic ones, like a bar graph, line graph, and calendar view where for each day you can see the recorded value for that day. Allowing to select more than one goal to plot on the same graph would also be nice. I'm basically thinking of providing some visualizations similar to the ones provided by
http://askmeevery.com/ -
Isaac
commented
How did I miss that link? For some reason I expected to see it near the graph and/or the data input box and didn't think to look at the sidebar.
-
Admindreeves
(Cofounder, Beeminder)
commented
We've viewed data export as a mission-critical feature from the start. The link is right below your avatar on every graph page.
We'd love to see what you come up with, data-visualization-wise! If you make something awesome it probably won't be hard to convince us to build it in to Beeminder!
-
Isaac
commented
Actually, an option to export the data might be easier and just as effective, with the ability to run our own analyses in octave or matlab or whatever.