Simple Reminders App for Busy People

here’s a video of a prototype reminders app I’m developing: http://CueframeApp.com/blog/2011/07/july-video/

The goal is to minimize the amount of time and cognitive effort the end user has to put in. The app does this by making everything visible all the time so there’s no need to scroll or navigate for something you already can’t quite remember. What do you all think? Would you use an app like this as an alternative to a traditional list based app, or pen & paper?

You can find our more at http://www.CueframeApp.com. If you’re really interested, I’m currently running a small beta program, drop me a line at Ben@CueframeApp.com

Cheers
Ben

ps. I promise this is not spam

Interesting. I’ve always been fascinated by increasing efficiency in humans. I have never found a GTD app that works for me. Unfortunately, yours still doesn’t do it for me. Why? To be very blunt: it’s not very visually appealing. I have no desire to install that app on my nice, shiny Apple product. I’d really recommend hiring a talented visual designer to redo your visuals.

I really like the idea of scaling individual items to make them more important.

From a quick look of it, I think you are achieving the exact opposite of what you are trying to do. Your app and single page of cluttered items is a lot more visually overloading and requires a lot more processing to get any usable info out of it. A list is easy as you know where to look for the top item and where the next one (below) will be. Here I’m looking all over the place and distracted by different sizes, alignments, fonts, colors, etc. The overall effect is you just ignore it all.

Also second the mention of it being not very nice to look at. Terrible font and typography use.

The basic idea perhaps has some merit, but there needs to be a better organization. Perhaps handling all the cues (that are the same size) like photos on an iPad, so you could easily see in album/project lists, or spread them out could work.

R

Hi Richard, Julius

thanks for the feedback. I agree the visuals need work - unfortunately I can’t afford a graphic designer. So firstly the font - good old Helvetica… not so good eh? Any suggestions would be welcome. Also, I’ve added some embossing and glass effects in later version to spruce it up (you can see these on a screen shot on the front page of http://www.CueframeApp.com) any better?

Richard - I agree with you that a screen full of Cues would be overwhelming to someone that had never seen them before. It would be disastrous if you tried to design a web-site or a newspaper advert in a similarly unstructured way. The difference here is that it’s user generated content. Every Cue that you create remains pretty much where you left it. Kind of like someone’s messy desk of random papers - confusing to everyone but the person who’s desk it is. The app is looking to take advantage of that visual memory part of the brain that unconsciously remembers where in a mess of items you left something. That’s my theory anyway - but I’m happy to be proved wrong so why not give the beta a try?

Kind Regards
Ben

Just because you use Helvetica doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good. This is true especially when you mess around with Helvetica and stretch it in ways it wasn’t designed to be stretched in. The best way to get better at visual design is to look at good examples of visual design. Try http://dribbble.com for doses of inspiration. Look at how they handle type: nice spacing in between letters, words, and lines (whitespace). Type is not about the letters, but about the space in between the letters. Your colors are also really terrible. Try http://kuler.adobe.com for inspiring color palettes: what mood do you want to evoke? Hurried? Relaxed? Professional? Dark and techy?

And get rid of those awful finger print touchpoints. Transparent circles will suffice.