It’s been just a few weeks since we opened up Focusable to the world. Ever since the first of you registered, we’ve been hard at work figuring out what we can do better. In our last release, we launched the Progression, a unique experience that helps you quickly find focus and progress you all the way to an optimal state of flow. This time, the theme is to make focus more social and convenient.
Our user community has convinced us that building up the skill of focus and controlling it can have a major impact on work life and home life. When you’re hard at work building the essential skill of focus, it needs to be rewarded, it needs to be top of mind, it needs to be tracked. Today, we’re excited to share the following improvements.
1. Progression stats. If the progression is where you productively struggle on important tasks and make time for meaningful moments of rest, you’ll want to understand how you’ve approached these work sessions. And it’s equally valuable to get insights into the progress of your peers, students, or other group members as they work to progress their focus so that you know how and when to engage and help. Our goal here is to continue to provide more and more insights into the focusing process as you work, make time for meaningful rest, and scroll through TikTok (just kidding).
Progression stats, which can be seen right on the Progression Card, also open up opportunities for group members to learn from one another. Specific self regulation tactics are revealed to all members so that anyone can pick up on the processes that friends, classmates, or colleagues are employing.
And to give you even more insights, you’ll see that each progression card surfaces the last tag added by its creator, to give you a high level sense of where they are at in their journey.
2. Boosting. A Boost is the Focusable way to let someone know you think they’re doing great. Any member of a group on the group page can Boost any progression, and the creator of that progression will get a notification that they’ve been Boosted. It’s a way to show community members that you’re there, that you care, that you see how hard they are working to progress their focus.
Teachers and coaches can now easily encourage students when they need it. And students, who are limited in how they can engage with progressions, now have a way to engage, support, and reward each other’s efforts to progress their focus.
Our goal is to create a welcoming and encouraging environment, and to drum up some positive social reinforcement for building the skill of focus.
3. Faster Recording Experience. Recording needs to move at the speed of your awareness. Cognitive engagement and pushing forward is more important than a well-thought-out or detailed reflection recording.That’s why we set out to make the recording experience lighter. And, by the way, recording your surroundings sometimes is just as valuable as recording your thoughts about your focus verbally. We even made tagging faster by pairing the tag reflection experience after you record with the short deep breath exercise. Overall, we think you’ll find the recording experience is 2x as fast, and you can expect more improvements in this department very soon.
4. New Group Capability. You’ve let us know that the product is safer now that we block students from entering each other’s progressions, and this is why we’re building a rich experience with stats and Boosts. But there are situations that do require seeing everything. Any group member with the new “Coach” participation privileges gets access to all progressions within your group. We built this initially to allow co-teachers to get the insights they need about a given group, but this new coach user type opens up any use case where multiple or all group members need to engage deeply with one another in tagging, replying and watching reflection recordings.
5. Facelifts all over! You’ll notice minor improvements across the site. We’re excited for you to check out our sleeker breathing and visual exercise, the simplified notifications experience, and a larger playback circle inside the progression so you can better see what’s going on.
Each of these improvements uncover new directions for Focusable’s core experience. As always, there’s much more to come.
To preview that, we have a non-logged in experience coming to help students get started even easier in just a few weeks – and just in time to help them all close the semester knowing they are Focusable.
