We’re working on a great set of new features and improvements for Mindwave. So let’s document the most important changes, and capture my thoughts and expectations for these improvements.
Personalization
Soon there will be 3 reflection methods in Mindwave. Journaling for daily reflection, Writing for weekly reflection and the North Star for periodic reflection (m/q/y).
Three awesome reflection methods that work great together. But it isn’t necessary to use them all. Or, to do them all in your Mindwave. Some of my users swear by Bullet Journaling (an offline journaling method/system). If you got a system working for you, that’s great! Then try one of our other reflection methods first.
So, I don’t want to bother users with reflection methods they don’t want to use (or don’t want to use in their Mindwave). Let my users create their own focus and experience.
Onboarding
Implementing the (new) personalization will be a great opportunity to improve onboarding at the same time. At this moment new users will get one prefilled log and one prefilled story. That’s all the onboarding there is atm. But I still get a lot of questions about how Mindwave works. Plus, many don’t use notification settings to help themselves to get Mindwave in their system. So, let’s try something new.
Every method will start with three onboarding steps, that will look like this.
- How it works. Show a short movie (let’s try screen recordings) of the basics, and add a link to a more extended How it works page.
- Settings. Let people choose and confirm their settings upfront. No need to look them up in their Account & settings.
- Let’s go! Some last tips before getting started.
Journaling – New features & improvements
We are going to add streaks to your daily journaling. Keeping up a streak can be a good motivator. We’ll keep it simple and just count the days in a row. No exact time frame or any. So you can always log a day (or 2) later to keep your streak alive.
We also are going to brighten up the page a bit. Overall, the page got a bit monotonous and uninspiring in my opinion. So we will add a bit more color and energy while keeping it clean and minimalistic at the same time.
Advanced journaling
I also want to experiment with some advanced journaling options. If we really want to be ‘the easiest way to capture your thoughts’, then we have to rethink the journaling options. Using a website isn’t the easiest way. Plus, everyone has their own preferences. Why not let people use Mindwave as their ‘journaling database’ and use alternative ways to capture ideas, feelings, and thoughts. So, I’m going to experiment with:
- Text journaling. Send a text message to a Mindwave phone number and sync the message to your Mindwave account. Maybe even use text message for your daily push notification as well.
- Email journaling. Send a mail to your unique Mindwave email address and sync the data to your Mindwave account. Inspired by Evernotes email functionality.
- Telegram journaling. Send a message to the Mindwave Telegram Bot and sync all data to your Mindwave account. Maybe even use the bot for your daily push notification as well.
Public Journal – New features & improvements
We’ve got some minor and bigger improvements for the public journal planned. The most significant change is the new ‘subscription’ option. We’re no longer going to use Mindwave as the place to follow other founders & makers journals. Mindwave is going to a personal workspace. Why? Focus on you.
Plus, it’s easier and more common to just subscribe to a blog (in our case a journal) anyway. And at the same time, we’ll add RSS as an option, for followers who prefer RSS over email subscriptions.
We also made some smaller design improvements to make the page easier to scan and more beautiful to look at. Oh, and we added a call to action in the header to attract new leads. We shouldn’t forget about our own marketing & sales. Paid users will be able to unbrand the public journal somewhere next year.
The North Star
The North Star is an easy way to prioritize who you are and who you want to be. It’s is a compass or the future you. A simple method for periodical reflection, focus, and direction. Users can adjust the basic template, create their own North Star and auto-email it to themselves every month.
I wrote a story about this new feature about a week ago.
I can’t wait to implement all these new functionalities and improvements. It will be great! And who knows, maybe then I’m ready to build the first mobile and desktop app versions.
