Maximum daily limit progress bars

RogerMoxswana

So I've just started using Cronometer, having never tracked my nutrition or calories before. I'm pretty much on the verge of buying premium, but the one thing holding me back right now is that for the nutrient summary section (the section under the diary with the progress bars) and for the highlighted nutrients and macronutrients, there is currently no way of displaying the percentage of maximum daily goals instead of percentage of minimum (this of course applies to the fixed values setting). Searching through the forums this seems to've been brought up a few times in the past, but judging from the responses from Cronometer reps I'm not sure they were convinced of why it's important or indicated that it's a feature they might consider in the future. If this is something that's already on your radar, apologies. I also think there's a very easy to implement solution (see below).

At least for a newbie like me, half of the reason for using an app like this is to make sure that I'm not consuming too much of certain nutrients and tracking how much room I have left to work with throughout the day. For some nutrients like Added Sugar and Saturated Fat, we don't need a minimum, so the workaround is easy enough (enter the max value as both the min and max). But for other nutrients like sodium, while the primary concern of most people is staying under a certain threshold, we still need to make sure we are hitting our minimums. Using the workaround for a particular nutrient means that there is no way to track the minimum goal for that nutrient at all.

So we have to make a choice between not being able to see those nutrients at a glance throughout the day (being able to glance at that section throughout the day and instantly identify anomalies and progress is probably the best feature of your product imo) or deleting the minimum intake goal entirely from the app. For example, I know for me, I have no trouble hitting my minimum Fat intake on most days, so I usually like to see Fat % at a glance relative to my maximum, not my minimum. But there are days where I'm not having enough fat, so I don't want to have to delete my minimum number entirely.

My guess is that as I dial in on micronutrient levels, this is going to end up being a common problem. I can imagine this also being particularly important for those with certain health conditions/dietary restrictions or those with diets that are naturally high in certain nutrients.

I do understand that we can click on each item to see the max value--which is awesome; I'm a big fan of that progress bar (the one with the orange arrow) since it shows both min and max at the same time--but I'd argue that the entire point of the progress bars section is undermined when you have to remember and individually click on various nutrients that you're trying to decrease your intake for.

The same is true of the Highlighted Nutrients section and the Macronutrients. There is no way to adjust those to display your progress toward a maximum value.

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I know others have offered ideas in the forums--some of them pretty good unique ideas, but I think the easiest and simplest thing to implement (for the Web App version) would be to just add a button or link at the top of the nutrients summary that says "max" and "min" that would allow us to toggle between a page displaying ALL minimum value progress bars (as it does now) or a page/element displaying ALL max progress bars. I did a 2 second mock up (see the part circled in red) just to make sure I'm not confusing anyone lol:

This should be really easy since you wouldn't have to make any design changes or develop anything really. There would just be two identical pages, except that one page has the min progress bars and the other has the max. For the mobile version, just throwing an expandable element in the Daily Report directly below "Complete Nutrition Summary" labelled "Complete Nutrition Summary (Maximum values)" would go a long way for a lot of people I think.

Having similar options to toggle the 8 Highlighted Nutrients and Macronutrients would be great as well, although I think it makes most sense to have the ability to choose how the highlighted ones display individually.

Anyway, if this was made a feature, free or not, I think I'd be all-in on the premium. Again I'm new to this whole concept but thanks for what seems like an incredibly useful program that I'll hopefully be using for a long time. And apologies this turned out to be a novel of a post!

RogerMoxswana

sorry, the picture didn't show up. Here it is:

Karen_Cronometer

Hi RogerMoxswana,

Thanks for your novel! We love hearing the details. It helps so much to hear how you are using the app to design features and improvements.

We have relied on the colours of your targets to convey some of the information you are looking for: yellow - not yet hit the daily target, green - daily target achieved, red - over maximum target. Though it doesn't give you the same detail as showing a percentage value based on the maximum value entered.

RogerMoxswana

Right, so definitely when the progress bars are yellow, they convey relevant info about every nutrient instantly. Right up until midday they're all yellow for me, so I can glance at that nutrition summary and know exactly where I stand on everything in about two seconds, which is fantastic phenomenal amazing. I love it.

But as soon as a bar turns green, it stops conveying useful information for the rest of the day. I know I've hit the min, but I have no idea how much room I have left. Can I double my intake? Go 50x my intake? And if it goes red I have no idea if I'm over by 1% or 300%.

My inner dialogue looking at that page in the middle of day is like:
"Woah I've got 169% Vitamin C. That sounds high. No more vitamin C for me today. Oh wait [click click], I can actually have 10x that and still be in the green.... B6 is at 102%, I think that's one of those that won't go red until about 1000% too [click click]. Yup.... So probably no reason to worry about my B3 being at 107%, let me just down this giant tuna filet for dinner [eat eat]--ahhhh that one goes into the red at 200%! And wait, what was my fat max again?."

Obviously I'm exaggerating for comedic effect but the process definitely goes from one that takes under 10 seconds, to one that can take a few of minutes of randomly clicking around. If I managed to get out of the yellow for every nutrient, I would have to individually click into every single green and red nutrient to gain any useful insight. Same goes for the long term reports, which is one of the main reasons to go prime. They're just significantly less useful when you have to go in and click through everything.

I think another user suggested having the bar switch to max % after it turns green (or giving us an option to have it display this way) which might actually be the most elegant solution for the user. But again, just a separate page of max values would suffice I think.

Anyway sorry I'm repeating myself at this point. Just trying to be clear. Thanks for hearing my input!

Mike2023

Thank you for explaining this so well! This constantly bothers me and I don't understand why the team doesn't see why this fix is needed. Many, many people track things like added sugars which are all about maximum value, not minimum. If you have your minimum value set to 0, there is currently NOTHING on the mobile app that will show when you've gone over. Even clicking on the daily report and then clicking on the individual nutrient doesn't do it. You have to manually look at your max threshold setting and compare it to your actual consumed amount, there's nothing that actually shows it visually or gives you a percentage. This might be a bug because when you click on the nutrient to show the line with the orange triangle, the triangle is always at 0 no matter how much I've consumed that day. Either way, it's a massive oversight!
The web app at least shows you visually, by the red bar and and then, when you click on it, the orange triangle. But percentages would be more helpful.