Jeff Keen

This is what it’s like getting premature feedback on a thing you’re designing or developing.

“I’m not seeing any door handles.”

Right, I haven’t even gotten to the doors yet.

Have we thought about people potentially falling out of the side of the car?

We have. There will be doors.

“You were going to put wheels on, right? We’re going to need wheels.”

Right, yeah, wheels. This car will have wheels.

“The car we ordered was red. Why isn’t this red?”

RIGHT. First we build the car, then we paint the car.

Jake loves lunch. I’m more of a breakfast fan, but he’s nuts over lunch.

And further, 7 out of 10 times he’ll want pizza or a burger. So for his birthday I wanted to make him a shirt that just said “Lunch?”, and this is the design I ended up with, using some very helpful design advice from Bennett.

Bday present from some friends. They know me well. @jeffxl @bilbrauer

A photo posted by Jake Reed (@jakeohsnap) on Aug 23, 2014 at 2:16pm PDT

We all had tried our fair share of todo list apps, and none of them quite did the job. A friend of mine swore highly of his very low-tech system: write down the next three things he was going to accomplish, immediately followed by doing them. In a world of overly complex productivity solutions, this worked surprisingly well.

We started talking about creating a web-app that would better mimic this simple approach, called “Daily Goals”.

Common Problems With Todo Software

1. People tend to put too much on their lists, leaving many tasks unfinished at the end of the day.
2. Most Todo list software is either boring, overly-complex, or too open ended. We felt that with the right UI and right messaging, things could be made much better.

How Daily Goals Would Be Different

1. Focus all messaging on what could be done today.
2. Make our UI stand out, by not taking the typical approach to the problem.
3. Don’t allow more than 3-5 incomplete tasks on the list at a time.
4. Don’t automatically carry over unfinished tasks from the previous day.

Design Principles

1. Simple things should be simple, and complex things shouldn’t be too hard.
2. Talk to your users like they’re humans. Light, playful messaging is key.

“Boring software is broken software.”

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I drove by Greene Auto on South 1st one day and loved the text on the side of the building, and thought it’d be fun to make a vintagey commercial sign on my garage wall, which I wanted to paint anyway.

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