Why a simple baby tracking app is all you need
Look at baby apps in an app store and what you mostly find is long feature lists. Growth curves, milestones with photos, sleep training programmes, a timeline to share, a subscription with extras. That makes sense: features are what sells an app. They are just not what makes one usable at night.
The moment you actually write something down
Think about how it really goes. It is quarter past three. You have one hand free, you are half in the dark, and there is a baby against you who has finally gone quiet. In that moment, logging a feed needs to be picking up the phone and tapping once.
Every step in between costs you the entry. If you have to sign in first, you skip it. If you have to choose from fourteen kinds of event you skip it too, and a screen asking for a category, a subcategory and a note has no chance at all. What you are left with is a log that is half filled in, and you cannot read a rhythm off something full of holes. Completeness is worth more than detail, which is the reason to leave things out.
What you almost never use
The features that stand out most in a product description are rarely the ones you still open after a fortnight:
- Growth curves and percentiles. Your baby is weighed at the clinic, and it is already recorded there.
- Milestones with photos. Nice, but it is a photo album, and you have one of those.
- Sleep advice and programmes. That is a conversation with a person, not a screen.
- A social timeline. There is exactly one other person who needs to see this.
Each of those costs room in the navigation, and that room comes out of the button you do need twenty times a day.
What simple actually means here
Leaving things out takes more work than adding them. The work just moves: from thinking up features to working out what can go. In this case that produced:
- Five kinds of entry: sleep, feed, crying, nappy and a note. You do not need more categories than that to read your day back.
- A timer you start and stop. Sleep and feeding run through time, so that is the shape that fits; you never have to work out an end time.
- The arithmetic happens on its own. Today’s total sleep, the time since the last feed, which breast was used last.
- One login per baby, shared by everybody helping out. No invitations, no roles, no admin screen.
- On your home screen, with your baby’s name under the icon. One tap, no browser and no app store.
What is left is an app you can work one-handed in the dark. That was the requirement, and everything else was fitted around it.
No email address, no subscription
There is a second reason to stay small. An app with no subscription has nothing to sell you, and an app that never asks for an email address has no way to come back to you later. The whole account is a name for your baby, a username and a password.
The practical effect: you have a working log inside half a minute, and you need nobody’s permission to share it with your partner. You pass on the same login details.
Where the line is
Simple is not the same as bare. There is an insights screen, with the days stacked up and a chart by hour, because that is exactly the kind of pattern you cannot hold in your head. Why that is worth having is in why keeping a log helps.
The difference is that those insights come out of what you were already filling in. You keep nothing extra to make them work.