Ångström: no favorites
With Ångström, we were thinking about a way to make the units you use most, accessible more easily.
The obvious idea would be to implement favorites. The user finds a unit he wants to convert, then taps a star. The starred units get into a special list. If a unit gets out of favour, you tap it again to remove it from the list.
But there is a problem. When you’ve got your result, you don’t want to think about adding the unit to a special list to simplify the task in the future. You want to get on with your life. Adding a unit to favorites would require discipline which most people don’t have: few people bother adding websites to Bookmarks, they just google them again and again. Nobody wants to manage their unit converter. User interface is evil.
We focused on the idea of maintaining conversion history and learning the user’s habits.
Here are the things we do:
- When you open the app, we use the units from the last time. If you always convert the same thing, you will never need to enter the units.
- If you press space after entering the value, we show the conversion history (see the screenshot above). If you always convert several of the same things, you will be able to see all the possible conversion results at once.
- If you last used some unit long ago and had to actually type it again, we at least remember what you converted it to and use that.
These features let us be as helpful as we can without making the user babysit the app.
