Wonderful Day is a different sort of one-dollar reminders app. It’s there to remind you of the things you’d like to get done, not the things you have to do. Although it sports an attractive visual design, it suffers from a handful of crucial failings that make it less useful than it could be.
Let’s say you want to go out running every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. You add a new task in Wonderful Day (which I’ll call WD from now on). This takes moments. There might be other things you’d like to do on specific days. Reticulate splines, reverse polarity of neutron flow, practice your French, whatever. Setting each one up is simple and clear. So far, so good.
Now, WD will send you a reminder on each day that there’s something for you to do. If running was set to happen on a Friday, you’ll get the reminder on Friday. At 8am by default (a sensible default), but it’s changeable.
WD is trying to be helpful here: if there’s only one reminder, your day suffers fewer interruptions, and you can spend more time actually doing stuff. Makes sense.
But it’s not helpful, because WD doesn’t tell you which tasks are due on a given day.
Say you set up a dozen or so things to track, and five of them are supposed to happen on Friday. Come 8am Friday morning, you get your reminder: ping! You have things to do today! But which things? Am I running or learning French today? Or both?
You’d think that today’s tasks might be highlighted in some way once you dive into the app to check, but no, they’re not. There’s no quick, easy way to check which things are due on which day, which means you have to remember. That’s not helpful – that’s asking me to do more work.
And it’s not the only thing I have to remember. If I want to make use of WD’s tracking feature – which lets me see how successful I’ve been at running, spline reticulating, learning French, whatever – I also have to remember to go back to the app later in the day and manually tick off each task. If I forget to do this, I can go into it at a later date and check off dates in the past, but then I have to remember whether or not I actually did those tasks on those days. And my memory isn’t that good, I’m afraid. Perhaps I could set up another WD task reminding me to check off my WD tasks.
I can see what WD is trying to do, and it’s a good idea. Minimising interruptions is a good thing, because most of us are bothered by too many of them, too often. But the present design of this app simply puts too many barriers between writing your tasks down and actually doing them.
Source: App Store
