stevehaz

It sounds like you're saying the information might as well be able to come in the back door (via API) as well as the front door (via direct input like buttons), and let users choose their balance. That way early adopters or innovators can benefit without having to change their workflow, such as in your example.

I'll add it to my big list, though there's several prerequisites to take care of first.

I can't speak to ECG's, but rather like an animated time series except in the reverse direction.

As you say, the norm is right to left, highest priority (now) on the far right, like this: https://square.github.io/cubism/

It must be an acquired taste, or contextually dependent, because even though I do plenty of metrics visualization which is right-to-left, left-to-right for a high-level view of behavior feels fine to me.

In these behavior-quality graphs, "now" is on the far left. In my experience, how I'm doing right now is the top priority because then I can make a good choice -- I can do something aligned with my goals -- and the graph will immediately thicken.

Being "now", it's always changing and thus everything on the graph - one's past behavior - gradually moves to the right.

Check it out here: https://benome.ca/Intro

You make a fine point, an API would definitely have a place. Right now because this is only a one-man side project, I'm focusing on behavior that isn't already digitized and wouldn't be without something like Benome.

My view is that the vast majority of goal-relevant behavior is not available to individuals in digital form and so it isn't visualized and there's no insight to be gained or value extracted. While data-aggregators or ad networks may have a lot of digitized behavior data, people themselves tend not to. I'm hoping that Benome (or the ideas behind it) can help improve that situation.

I'll have to do some A-B testing.

The key here is that I've integrated this particular type of graph as part of a larger interactive visualization or UI. Within that larger system, the graph is generated in real-time in direct response to your input about your own behavior.

I put up an interactive demo here: https://benome.ca/Intro/

So in the intended context, graph's meaning is more clear than it appears at first glance. But in any case, it's easy enough to switch a graph's direction.

I appreciate that you've taken a deeper look into my work. I'm doing it all out in the open, including open source, which I think many people on HN appreciate.

For others wondering what this comment is referring to, the article in question is https://medium.com/@SteveHazel/we-re-drowning-in-low-quality.... In it I lay out a lot of the concepts behind the graph-like visualization of human behavior that is the current topic.

Author here, thanks for your comment.

I think left-to-right works in this case because my target audience is the everyman, not only technical or highly-educated folks. In my experience, people care mostly about the meaning of the information and don't care much about graphs or data in themselves. In that sense, I think of this kind of graph as more of a word or a sentence than a traditional graph, and mostly we read words left-to-right.