Edit, Explore, Report!

Today i decided to give another stab to the whole reporting pain.

You see, hamster kind of knows how to count hours, but as with many things in the 21st century we are living, it doesn’t really make any sense out of it.

So after some lengthy contemplation (hamster says 01:27) i figured following:

Overview is fine for editing and reviewing activities, and a quick grasp on totals.

Instead of adding anything more to it, we could split out the rest of needed functionality into two tabs. Together i’ll call them “Edit, Explore, Report” (but that’s just codename).

“Edit” part is the overview – you check, you edit, you don’t look at it.

“Report” part will be all the nuts and bolts of filtering by date, activity, category, picking columns, and finally getting a HTML PDF of your liking. Or something close to it.

“Explore” part would be to get a general feeling on how are you doing and is the topic of this blog post.

Now, hold your pants – here comes the mockup:

Figure 1. “The mockup”

Now, before you start – we are talking functionality – what info to put in this “Explore” tab.

First is statistical average hours worked per day, then comes the same thing only in month view (might exclude days that are weakly populated, like sundays to avoid holes).

Then there is that graph which could show what type of bird are you – early or late one. And then i have idea of some human readable slur which could be nice to read.

It would be possible to drill data down by year and category, but no more.

Generally i’m looking for something in direction of dopplr anual report – something that would make you go “ooh, i see” and “aah, how insightful” or something like that.

I would love to go with a 3×3 grid to make it look smarter (or, alternatively, give more useful info) but i forgot what i would like to put in there.

So, errm, what did i wanted to ask… oh yes!

1. Any ideas for interesting totals / averages or other figures?
2. Any suggestions?

If you would like to stab my mockup, here cometh SVG: mockup.svg

Forgetting to change a task

I was thinking about the problem with forgetting to change activities in Hamster all the time.

On one hand, the hamster is just a minor application and shouldn’t bother user. On another – if the user wants to actually track his time, some reminder would be nice.

As of now the hamster changes it’s label whenever you change activity. I think we could rely on human hunter instinct (the increased sensuality for movement in the periphery of vision) and add time spent in hours to the label that would get updated every six minutes (0.1h) – thus the user would be kind of reminded time after time. Maybe it will become annoying after a while, but we should dog food it and then judge.

Mockup with hours added

Still, if user has come to the situation when it has forgotten to change activity, i think the drop-down menu overhaul would help a lot – user would see all the activity log for today in single klick. Maybe it should be simplified though.

Task durations in overview

An idea for overview window: for each task, show its duration, so it’s easier to perceive the information and make sure the stored information is correct.

Drop-down menu overhaul

Applets can drop down more stuff than a standard system tray application. So i thought, maybe we can put everything that’s needed under single click.

More detail for today

Here is how a single day in the week overview looks. It has all the facts and below – totals for this day

A week in your life

The main overview window shows seven days of week and the 8th one is totals, that show you how much time you have spent in total for each activity

Choose and edit

 Changing activities should be fast an easy, so a simple pop-up menu could do the job.

The bottom part shows simplistic way how to edit activities. Click on image for larger picture.