Entire.Life can’t tell your future, but you can tell ours

User feedback & getting intentional about an intentional living app

There is something inherently messy about building a website that intends to make order out of people’s lives. That makes it interesting for us, but it also leads to a never-ending stack of possibilities. This is further complicated by the limited time we have to spend on this project. We have so many ideas that we could keep ourselves busy, full-time, for at least six months — even if we didn’t come up with anything new during that whole time. (We would. We have a lot of new, fascinating, time-consuming ideas.) Clearly, we’re not great prioritizers.

So, we turned to you. You, our wonderful, enthusiastic, helpful bunch of Entire.Life users. We’ve told you before that we really want Entire.Life to stick around a while. Part of making that happen is ensuring that you want to keep using it. We needed your help, and you delivered.

ASK MORE QUESTIONS, says this sign captured by Jonathan Simcoe. So we did!

It was a challenge to condense everything we might want to know into a single, short survey. Simplicity is always harder than it looks. Eventually, we managed. We thought and edited and thought and edited some more. Then we sent out our very first user survey, and crossed our fingers. We didn’t know if anyone would respond, but 53 of you did! Thanks, everybody!

What did you tell us?

Here are the highlights from your responses:

• Over half of you (56%) don’t journal regularly.
• Most of you want to use Entire.Life more than you do. Only 7 out of 53 of you use Entire.Life as much as you’d like. Right now, 67% of you are using the app every three months or less, but nearly half (49%) of you would like to use the app weekly. (Aww, thanks! 😊 ) Another 22% of you would like to use it monthly.
• You’re visual people. If you’re willing to pay for a feature, there’s a good chance it involves photos — Instagram, Google Photos, and direct photo uploading were all popular requests. (Did you know we already have that nifty Instagram add-on? Wish granted! Check it out here.)
• We offered a list of words that we associate with Entire.Life and asked everyone to pick their favorite. We were hoping that this would help us understand what you were most drawn to. The top result was perspective, followed by gratitude.

The full results from the “pick your favorite word” question

• There is absolutely no pattern to the time of day you like to use Entire.Life.
• 24% of you like Entire.Life enough to pay for the basic functionality. (A note: we don’t have any plans to do this, but it’s cool to hear you think the site is that useful.)
• You also gave us some fantastic individual feedback. Some of you just wanted to let us know that you’re fans of the app. (We ❤ you too!) We also had a few requests: an improved emoji set, CSV exporting, habit tracking, and health-related functionality.

So now what?

First, we thank you again. You’re extremely helpful. We’ve discussed every single answer you’ve given us, and used each one to guide our work plan for the foreseeable future. (We do this with the emails, tweets, and other comments you share with us too. Please keep them coming.)

• We’re sharing the survey results with you right now, so we get to check that off the ol’ Trello board.
• We’ve already made it easier to find the sign-in link on the landing page.
• We’re heeding your advice to share Entire.Life in more places around the internet.
• We’ve discussed, assessed, planned for, and added private photo uploading, Google Photos, data exporting, improved emojis, and better sign-in experiences to our upcoming to-do list.
• We’ve logged anything we can’t currently envision or don’t yet have the skills for, and we’ll come back to it when it makes sense.

Once again, THANK YOU. 🙏 We appreciate you, and we’re so grateful that you’ve shared your thoughts and advice with us. We’re excited to make Entire.Life even better.

So, there you have it. If you want to check out the full results (excluding the individual comments), you can do that here. If you’ve thought of any more brilliant ideas, reply to this story. And finally, if you missed your chance to take the survey, you can do that here.