Brought to you by Nicholas Felton, famous for his “Feltron Annual Reports”, Daytum.com is one of those unique tools that you never knew you really wanted or needed until you actually start using the product. Their tagline is “Daytum helps you collect, categories and communicate your everyday data”.  Through my experiences, it allows me to visualize all of the boring data I collect but still deem important in pretty graphs that really bring life to it.

I liken Daytum’s product to the case of Twitter or Dropbox where you don’t quite understand how powerful the product is until you actually dig deeper beneath the surface. You discover it’s many uses beyond just being a stream of thoughts and links (Twitter) or just a “magic” folder that syncs to the cloud across all your platform (Dropbox). The sheer amount of possibilities and applications is astounding and gratifying, once you start collecting data.

Since Daytum’s core use is to “collect, categorize and communicate”, I’ll be focusing on the core strengths and some oversights of the product in terms of how they collect data.

Collecting data

Daytum makes it widely known that the key action that users should make is to actually start entering data. From number of coffees had to even the number of times you’ve went to the washroom, the possibilities are all up to your imagination of what data you want to collect, measure and communicate.

While it’s been well thought out in terms of the UI/UX, I believe they can further simplify to lower the friction of first time users to churn and never come back. Simple things like having highlighted instructions for first time users, or even a minute video to teach the users how to use it can play an important role in adoption and continual use in the long run, and incite the user to start the action of entering data to collect.

Making it even simpler and faster

What’s great is that their laser focus on manually collecting and entering your data. However, their implementation can be improved. Following the 80/20 Rule, 80% of your results (in this case data) comes from 20% of the entries/categories that make. So to that end, being able to list the top 20% of entries makes sense in allowing the user to enter their data even more quickly with less clicks, to improve the user experience. When you enter data, you’re prompted to enter the date, but you’re required to manually type it out.

One thing they hit the nail on the head on is their use of autosuggest.  While displaying your most used items (your top 20% most used), this definitely works for the remainder of the 80% of the long tail items you want to track.

It’s about time…

Perhaps this was through the process of building lean really fast, but forcing the user to manually type out the date is a bit cumbersome experience, especially when you’re trying to do so on their iPhone app or mobile optimized version of Daytum.  A simple solution to get around this would be to add something natural like a jQuery popup calendar to choose the date, with the default date being “now”.

Some other decisions they’ve made is leaving in the time of when you entered that data. Perhaps that’s a bit overkill, in terms of measuring all your data at the exact moment of when an event or thing occured, which through my own heavy use has never been the case at all.

Categorization

The way they allow categorizing (which is essentially tagging) can be critiqued the same way as well: show the most used categories to enable fast tagging to collect and categorize data in the most useful way. What they did get right, is their use of autosuggest for the more obscure categories and entries. It allows you to sift through the number of entries to properly assign the right name and categories so there aren’t duplicates and minimize error in that regard.

The future of Daytum

It doesn’t look like the founders of Daytum will be working on the product on a full time basis after they were “acq-hired” by Facebook.

While the focus of the product is collecting data actively and manually typing it in, I’m sure they’ve thought of hooking into other social API’s to collect data in a passive manner, where each check-in to a coffee shop instance, can count as “having coffee” and typing in “Americano” into your checking with the data being fed into Daytum and automatically categorizing and tagging your check-in like how Mint.com does with your transactions.  What about other important data like your health or finances? DailyBurn and RunKeeper have “health related” API’s.  If you’re into lifehacking, measuring and optimizing all areas of your life, how cool would it be to visualize all your personal data to draw upon insights in graphs and the like? 

It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, that with such a great product, they were only half way there in terms of really making it fun and being ultimately a “life dashboard”.  Be it a solitary experience that it provides or gamifying the product and inciting competition or reaching goals even, there’s so much potential, but at the end of the day, I’ll still be using Daytum to visualize my personal data.