5 design details I ❤ about DayOne
On why I’ve been able to journal everyday
I bought DayOne when Apple named it one of its most beautiful, well-designed apps of the year. I’ve since become obsessed.
It is one of a million journaling apps on the App Store, but incredibly, it makes me actually want to record my life. The most beloved apps are the ones that help people accomplish something that they already badly want to do.
Since 2011, I’ve on and off kept a chronological list of happy moments that I want to remember. More effectively than any other apps I have used (Sorted, Evernote, iDoneThis), DayOne has made updating this list a many-times-a-day ritual for me.
Here, some of the mobile version’s more subtle design details that have contributed to making journaling so habitual for me:
1—Everything in DayOne triggers a mini sound effect.
Opening a new entry. Adding a photo. Saving a tag. Flipping from entry to entry. Every interaction with the app triggers a subtle and pleasant sound effect. They are actually so rewarding that when I first downloaded DayOne, I spent hours manually porting over more than 100 items from Evernote to it. I have not seen sound used in quite such an effective way anywhere else. In fact, I rarely notice sound being used at all (let me know if you know any good examples!).
So, note to self: don’t forget hearing is also a sense you can design for. A multi-sensory app experience can be quite powerful.
2—It background syncs.
I love DayOne for the feeling of accomplishment I get when I finish an entry. I love DayOne also for what it doesn’t make me feel: dread.
I use the app on both my phone and my desktop, so my entries are sometimes out of sync. But instead of serving me a “syncing” screen every time I open the app, it merely updates in the background while allowing me full access to the entries that had already been downloaded.
Compare to Asana (which I also use every day). I love and rely on the web version heavily, but its mobile app frequently frustrates me. Whenever I open it, I am greeted by these impenetrable loading screens for anywhere up to 30 seconds (before the app then fails to sync half the time).
Granted, Asana is a to do list app, and it is vitally more important for a to do list app to be synced properly before work is done to it. (And sometimes, my internet connection is the problem.) But I have a feeling there has got to be an approach to syncing that will not make me dread having to open up the app every time. Because I want to love it. And I would gladly trade battery life to experience happy anticipation whenever I need to tackle my to do list.
3—DayOne obscures all advanced functionality.
Just like with Medium, DayOne hides all of its advanced controls.
Obscuring advanced functionality has the effect of communicating that not much is needed to create an entry. The barebones editing screen seems to be saying, see, this is simple: all you need, really, is a line of text.
4—Only one photo per entry is allowed.
Keeping with its bent toward simplicity, the app allows only one photo to be attached to each entry. Originally I found this to be quite annoying, but I now appreciate the genius of it. If I’m allowed only one photo, by necessity I need to focus on one thought, really, per entry. Which makes it so that I’m never intimidated by something that has prevented me from regular journaling in the past: the prospect of writing about everything that happened to me over the course of an entire day.
5—A single click changes the timestamp of an entry to match the timestamp of the attached photo.
When I discovered this feature, I’m pretty sure I mentally skipped for joy. I sometimes write about multiple days at once (and try to always include a photo). This makes updating the timestamp of my entries to its appropriate date incredibly painless. Even when I accumulate a week’s worth of posts, it never becomes overwhelming to backfill them.
Lesson learned: plan for failure (in this case—DayOne planned for my failure to journal every day ☺).
