The features we refuse to build

A product is defined as much by what it declines as by what it does. Feature pages list the things an app does and leave out the things it won’t, which is a pity, because the refusals are where you learn how an app will treat you in month three, once the novelty has worn off and someone on the team has been asked to make a chart go up.

We make ogoria, an app for tasks, habits and projects, and these are the features we’ve decided it won’t have. Each of them would move a number we could show in a meeting. Each would cost the person using the app something no meeting measures: the sense that opening it is safe. Every claim below is checked against the app as it ships, on phones and on the web. Where the truth is narrower than the slogan, we say the narrower thing.

Leaderboards

A leaderboard is the cheapest retention feature going. Put people’s numbers side by side and you’ve handed them a reason to come back that has nothing to do with their own week: a rank to defend.

The price is the reason they came. You opened a planner to put the dentist and the Thursday run somewhere you could see them. A ranking turns that into a contest with strangers whose Tuesdays look nothing like yours. Comparison is the fastest way to make a calm tool anxious.

So ogoria has nobody else in it. There’s no feed, no friends list and no profile anyone else can see, and none of your numbers sits next to anyone else’s. The only record a habit is held up against is its own best run. Your Tuesday doesn’t need an opponent.

Red badge counts

A number in a red circle on an app’s icon is a bill. It arrives before you’ve decided to open anything, it grows while you aren’t looking, and the only way to clear it is to go in and pay. For a chart of daily visits that’s ideal, since the icon does the asking. For you, it’s interest charged on your attention, compounding on the home screen.

ogoria never sets a count on its icon, and nothing it sends carries one. Inside the app, none of the tabs shows a count of what’s waiting. In a browser, the page title reads ogoria and never grows a number in brackets.

That’s narrower than a promise of no red at all, and it’s narrower on purpose. A task that is genuinely late says so on its own row: Overdue · 2d. It’s set in clay, the one red in our palette, and the word always sits beside the colour, so the colour never has to carry the meaning alone. On the Tasks list, late work is filed under Today rather than in a section called Overdue, because a list whose only theme is failure is one nobody opens willingly. The difference is where the number lives. A late task tells you about itself when you go to look. A badge adds up everything you haven’t looked at and pins the total where you can’t miss it.

Streak-loss warnings

Your streak ends at midnight is a threat wearing a notification’s clothes. It gets tapped, which is all it’s for.

What it costs is the habit. A warning like that teaches you that the point of a run is not losing it, so on the night you can’t make it, the app has already told you what the miss means. The run that ended becomes the reason to stop, instead of one bad night in a good month. We make that case at length in why streaks make you quit.

ogoria has no notification about streaks, and no setting that would turn one on. Nothing it can send mentions a habit you missed. Our privacy policy puts it in a sentence: “We never send streak-guilt messages, and we never use a notification to advertise.”

When a daily run does end, the row changes without comment. The marigold chip counting days in a row goes, and a plain grey one shows the best run you’ve had, Best: 23. Nothing turns red, because a missed habit is never overdue. A habit can also be paused for illness or travel, and the paused days aren’t counted against the run.

Confetti

If finishing a task sets off a burst of colour, the app has decided your progress is a slot machine and you’ve just hit the jackpot. The point of a jackpot is the next pull. The cost arrives later, when the 11th task of the day feels like a lever that didn’t pay out, and something you did for yourself has become a show put on at you.

Our motion rules open with this: movement is confirmation, never applause. Ticking something off fills the box and draws the check in 180 milliseconds, with a light tap of haptic feedback on a phone. The count inside the day’s ring changes from 3/7 to 4/7 in a single frame, without rolling like an odometer, because a count is a fact.

When everything on Today is done, the ring closes and the screen says “That’s everything for today.” Then: “Your evening is yours.” If you’re keeping a run, a small marigold chip names it, Day 15 of your longest rhythm yet. No modal, no sound, no confetti. Progress isn’t a slot machine. It’s your Tuesday, finished.

Every no is part of the product

A refusal is the one feature that can’t ship broken, as long as somebody keeps checking it. So we check this list against the app whenever the app changes, and a refusal that stops being true comes off the list instead of staying up as a slogan.

None of these is free. Each is a number we’ve chosen not to move, and the list stays open as we find more. There’s a quieter trap on the other side of the screen, the hours a tool can soak up while feeling like work, and we wrote about that one in Your productivity system is procrastinating.

A question worth keeping, for the apps already on your phone: what is each one doing to you that you’d have refused, if it had asked?