To its creators, Reporter is about gaining self-knowledge. "We don’t own your data, but we try to show it to you in new ways" He left Facebook and began working on a pure utility that let you document your life privately and locally (unless you want to sync with Dropbox). Meanwhile, Felton checked his personal data charts and noticed that he had been spending more time "in meetings" and "in email" than "designing" - an activity that had previously dominated his life. But Facebook soon learned that it made a fatal assumption: people don’t always want to document their lives as a historian might - publicly, at least. Timeline launched to much fanfare, and Felton was named one of Fast Company’s 50 most influential designers in America. He wanted to let anybody share their "life events" like graduating from college, but also the minutiae of daily life, like the song you’re listening to on Spotify right this second. Logging events and activity has long been a preoccupation for Felton, who got his first chance to bring his ideas to life at scale while at Facebook.įelton led design on Timeline, the company’s life-spanning profile pages, and Open Graph. The app’s workflow has been manicured so thoughtfully that it takes just moments to report. "That context is missing and these events have such a huge impact on your activity." In building Reporter, Felton and Breunig hoped to add a customizable human input to lifelogging. "Fitbit is missing when you got married or bought a car," he says. "Fitbit is missing when you got married or bought a car."įelton still has a Narrative lifelogging camera clipped to his lapel and a Fitbit in his pocket, but he feels like these gadgets only tell part of the story. It was a scary point when I thought I’d been working too much and should spend more time at home." "I typed in M (in response to ‘Who are you with?’) and got my co-worker Mary instead of my wife Megan. "Some of the most interesting things I learn are not from visualizations but from the app’s autosuggest," Breunig says. But for Felton and developer Drew Breunig, the best lessons aren’t always learned from charts and graphs. It should be pretty simple, Felton says, to see which month of the year you were happiest, or compare productivity levels between two jobs you’ve held. Felton realizes that not everyone has statistics expertise, so he hopes to add a feature that lets users print their own books in the future like he does, and expects members of the Reporter community to create web tools to visualize data in unique ways. The app stores all your data locally, but lets you output it as a CSV or JSON file - at which point you can map it out any way you’d like.
Reporter displays a few pocket-sized infographics to help you reflect on your answers, but the real sum of all this information is far from accessible until you export it.
The act of "reporting" (in Felton’s terminology) is kind of like journaling - a practice that’s therapeutic, but provides the most real value in hindsight and in aggregate, as Felton learned. 'Reporting' is like journaling - a practice that provides the most real value in hindsight Each time you report, the app also pulls in various pieces of information like the current weather, how many steps you’ve taken today (using the iPhone 5s’ M7 motion coprocessor), and how noisy it is around you using your phone’s mic. You can also add your own questions (like "Are you happy?") or program certain questions to occur only when you hit the app’s Awake or Sleep switch (like "How did you sleep?" and "What did you learn today?"). They range from "Where are you?" to "What are you doing?" and "Who are you with?" Some questions can be answered by tapping Yes or No, while others are multiple choice questions, let you type in text, or offer a location picker that polls Foursquare for nearby places. Reporter works by buzzing you several times per day with a brief quiz based on the questions Felton asks himself.