2021-09-05
Software and services I wish existed but don’t.
Duolingo has excellent leaderboards. Instead of throwing everyone into the same global leaderboard, users are clustered into leagues and move up/down depending on how well they were doing that week. The entire system is designed to reward practicing more. Progress is a lot more tangible and therefore more engaging than on a global leaderboard.
StarCraft II has a very similar system with fewer leagues and bigger divisions. However, scoring is based on MMR and the entire system is designed to maximize fair matchmaking.
I wish there was a cloud service and app with an API for league based leaderboards. Not just the storage, also the roll-ups, and the visualization.
Histograms are great for visualizing distributions, however the results are highly dependent on the size of the bins. Instead of fixed size bins I wish quantile based bins would be the norm.
I wish there was a way to ask an analytics service which one of two events appears first. I wish I could track events not only by user and session but also across sessions. I wish the service could visualize the flow of events.
There are countless node graph editors and none of them are great. For over 30 years the gold standard for automatic layout has been and still is Graphviz. I wish there was a way to move nodes around manually while still retaining reasonable a layout.