Doc Structure

Additional information for Coda DOCtorate fellows

Nina Kastenauer_Ledid

In this page, I’d like to share with you my approach for building this doc.

Why the doc?

This doc solves a personal problem I’m having. I’m very generous when it comes to expending energy and very stingy when it comes to recharging it. I realized that a big part of the problem was the fact that I never visualized all the “additional expenditures” I undertook. My assumption is that if I can make the energy- depleting tasks visible, then this will help me to see how my energy is thrown off balance. By visualizing this, it will (should?) become abundantly clear that unless I schedule in energy-recharging tasks, there is no way my balance will magically be restored by itself.

Doc’s Process

User selects their categories for depleting and recharging activities

Whenever user conducts an unforeseen depleting task (ie unscheduled work, errands, etc), they record the task, noting down its category and duration.

User’s energy balance will now shown the amount of the depleting activities as red blocks.

When the user schedules recharging activities, these show up as green blocks. Additionally, these recharging events will automatically be entered into user’s google calendar (via the pack).

The goal shall be for the red and green blocks to even each other out during the course of one week.

In order to achieve this, for as long as the user is it in debt, they will receive several notification during the week, prompting them to schedule recharging tasks.

Why the schema?

I intent to share this doc with some people who are not yet familiar with Coda (but who’ve heard me singing its praises for a while now ;-)). Because of that, I structured the document to have a very simple and easy-to-follow “flow”. I therefore tried to make the document as “unthreatening” as possible (in line with the “low threshold” approach), and hid all tables from the user’s view. All tables are hidden behind the subpage “Machine room”, and this Machine room thus powers all interactivity and interaction.

Database layer

The key component is the recording of depleting tasks (date, duration, category), which is matched to recharging tasks (date, duration, category). From this compiled table, we can then derive the analysis with regars to the energy imbalance from.

The categories for both depleting and recharging tasks can be adjusted by the user, so that only those that are specific to their own life show up as selectable categories.

Presentation Layer

There are three pages, one for adjusting the Admin settings, one for tracking one’s results and one “main” page titled “My energy levels”.

Only the page “My energy levels” has an image and a page icon, as this would be too distracting for the other two pages.

Interaction Layer

I primarily chose buttons, in order to make it abundantly clear for the user where to click. It was a conscious choice to have solely one main page, so as not to confuse any users on where they should go.

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