I also tried and failed to get my family to use it :( Among other things, I think they bounced off particularly hard on the massive drop-down of 10 different risk categories of ppl and various levels of being in a bubble.
I don’t think the blocker here was fundamentally quantitative—they think a bunch about personal finance and budgeting, so that metaphor made sense to them (and I actually expect this to be true for a lot of non-STEM ppl). Instead, I think UX improvements could go a long way.
My guess is that the focus on bubbles no longer makes sense, since almost no one is doing that now. Beyond that, I struggle to know what trade offs could make microcovid UI more approachable, without making it not microcovid. A number of people (including me) already complain it’s too restrictive, and cutting down on options makes that worse. It’s really not obvious to me that the value generated by doing existing microcovid, but simpler, outweights the loss of configurability. Also I literally don’t know how to make it simpler or more inviting beyond tossing out options. I don’t mean it can’t be done, I mean I’m terrible UI designer who literally can’t think of anything.
So I’d be really interested in:
arguments that microcovid is at the wrong place on the pareto frontier
ways to improve usability that don’t trade off against specificity for power users
other numerical tools that could be useful to your family that aren’t microcovid
For the last one: raemon has suggested a unitless assesment of “how risky is today compared to other days?” (and maybe location comparisons as well), created using microcovid, local prevalence numbers, and a single default human.
This will be a bit of a disappointing answer (sorry in advance), but I indeed think UI-space is pretty high-dimensional and that there are many things you can do that aren’t just “remove options for all users”. Sadly, the best I way I know of how to implement this is to just do it myself and show the result; and I cannot find the time for that this week.
I also tried and failed to get my family to use it :( Among other things, I think they bounced off particularly hard on the massive drop-down of 10 different risk categories of ppl and various levels of being in a bubble.
I don’t think the blocker here was fundamentally quantitative—they think a bunch about personal finance and budgeting, so that metaphor made sense to them (and I actually expect this to be true for a lot of non-STEM ppl). Instead, I think UX improvements could go a long way.
My guess is that the focus on bubbles no longer makes sense, since almost no one is doing that now. Beyond that, I struggle to know what trade offs could make microcovid UI more approachable, without making it not microcovid. A number of people (including me) already complain it’s too restrictive, and cutting down on options makes that worse. It’s really not obvious to me that the value generated by doing existing microcovid, but simpler, outweights the loss of configurability. Also I literally don’t know how to make it simpler or more inviting beyond tossing out options. I don’t mean it can’t be done, I mean I’m terrible UI designer who literally can’t think of anything.
So I’d be really interested in:
arguments that microcovid is at the wrong place on the pareto frontier
ways to improve usability that don’t trade off against specificity for power users
other numerical tools that could be useful to your family that aren’t microcovid
For the last one: raemon has suggested a unitless assesment of “how risky is today compared to other days?” (and maybe location comparisons as well), created using microcovid, local prevalence numbers, and a single default human.
This will be a bit of a disappointing answer (sorry in advance), but I indeed think UI-space is pretty high-dimensional and that there are many things you can do that aren’t just “remove options for all users”. Sadly, the best I way I know of how to implement this is to just do it myself and show the result; and I cannot find the time for that this week.