Knomee 1.9

New version on the AppStore – planning ahead for 2019

1. New 1.91 version

A new version is now available on the app store. It is a minor release since it comes with few changes:

• It solves Face ID and i-Cloud Bugs. If you have an iPhone X or Xs, you should definitely upgrade. This is mandatory if you want to protect Knomee with personal identification (touch or face recognition).

• The quest library has been expanded with a few new quests. For instance we have added a quest for pregnant women (how to reduce cramps) and a keto diet quest. Knomee is quite useful to help you monitor your diet and we expect to see more such quests in the future. One team member is using Knomee to track the benefits of the paleo diet with surprisingly good and significant results.

• The font size on the home screen is now dynamic and adapts to your iPhone model and the type of labels used by your quest.

• The "quest swipe" capability (the ability to move from one quest to the other by swiping right or left on the home screen) has been significantly improved. This also applies to the "swipe up/down" capability to move from "home" to "chart" view and back.

2. 2018 lessons

Knomee has been available for over a year, it has been a great learning journey from our team. We have managed to recruit organically a fair amount of users, thus gathering very interesting feedbacks. This comes from the analytics (number of user, various steps that were explored) and explicit comments through email and social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter). The short story is that Knomee is too complex for most users who quit after a few days of exploring the different menus. Fortunately, some of you go further with their Knomee experience, which gives deeper insights.

Our main hard problem is that the value proposition is not perceived by most users. For people who start a self-tracking journey, Knomee ends up delivering lots of value because the quests are personalised and because the insights that are permitted by the quest structure are actually useful. Some users have been able to improve significantly their lives thanks to the behaviour change supported by Knomee. Simply stated, it takes a few weeks of self-tracking before Knomee starts to shine and this is too long for most users.

A key request from you, the Knomee users, is to be able to personalise your tracking with notes, short time-stamped memos that record the context of a measure. This is a very legitimate request, since a self-tracking app is very much like a diary. Also it is a common feature of most mood trackers. Another key interesting message that we hear from our users is "if I confide my personal data to Knomee I expect a nice display of my data, both pleasant to look at and insightful". 2019 will be a journey towards getting our data visualisation on par with the best professional tools.

3. Knomee version 2.0

The next release will add all the fixes that we have pushed forward during 2018 because they require a database model change. The good news is that we are going to solve irritating problems or add features that our users have been requesting frequently. The bad news is that it will require you to start fresh and reimport your data (quests or measures) ... or start with a new set of quests.

More precisely, here is the current list of features that we are implementing right now:

• Memos: at last, you will be able to add notes and see them on the chart view, which will become your personal diary.

• Upgrading our database schema will allow to make a number of choices persistent.

• Quests will evolve towards an open library model (cf. next section) - where quests authors (a new role, this could be you) will enrich the quest with additional info such as a "pitch description" (why would anyone use the quest) or a feedback email (if you want to share your data). The notion of a "quest author" should match the needs of coaches (from sports to diet) who want to leverage Knomee to promote behaviour practices.

• As told in the previous section, the "chart view" will improve constantly with better displays of the graphs (data tracking curves) and insights.

The current release date for Knomee 2.0 is April 2019.

4. 2019 strategy

Because our main challenge is a communication problem, our main strategy for 2019 is to listen. The app will continue to evolve to fix bugs as required by our users (after a year of feedbacks, it is obvious that a self-tracking app needs to be flawless), but we have no other plan for new features than those proposed with Knomee 2.0.

On the other hand, you can expect from us a redoubled effort on our communication front, either on this Web site or our social media accounts.

Last, we plan to open-source the library of quests using a GitHub account. Stay tuned, more will be announced after the 2.0 release. Quests are already encoded using an open format. Our new public git site will hold:

1. Data sample files for fellow research scientists who want to apply their machine learning algorithms to self-tracking data

2. The set of quests that is offered in the Knomee library. Very soon, this library will be open-sourced : if you upload a quest to our GitHub, it will be part of the next release !