Beta bugs/feedback

[cweagans]

Hi there! I'm playing with the Monica beta and I noticed a handful of small things. Opening multiple bug reports didn't feel great to me - I didn't want to dampen the excitement for the new beta! Overall, this is a really incredible next step for Monica and I'm excited to start using it. Hopefully this list is helpful to you:

I'm using Safari 16.3 (18614.4.6.1.6) on macOS 13.2.1 if it helps with any testing. Also, the main vault I was testing with is 995cddf0-6453-468e-a723-44b471b20e60 if you'd like to go poke around.

• The first contact that I added to a new vault is my wife. When I tried to add a new relationship (to myself), I ran into multiple problems:

  • I choose "spouse <-> spouse" in the relationship type. Occasionally, if I choose "significant other <-> significant other" after reloading the page, I get an error about an invalid relationship type id. I neglected to copy the exact error message, but changing the relationship type dropdown and changing it back makes the error go away.
  • On the same page with "spouse <-> spouse" chosen as the relationship type, I can click on the text for "I don't know the name" or "I know the name" to select the related radio button, but if I click on the text for "Choose an existing contact", the radio button isn't selected. The radio button is selected if I click the text a second time.
  • When I select the "Choose an existing contact", I'd expect some kind of contact picker to appear, but it does not. I cannot create a relationship at all because of the missing field.

• Dashboard:

  • Record your mood: I can record my mood, refresh the page, and record it again. This is nice. It would be nicer if I didn't have to refresh the page. Maybe a "Record another mood" link after submitting the first one?

• Profiles (using the default layout):

  • It might be a good idea to visually indicate which tab is selected (Activity feed, ways to connect, etc). An easy fix would be to simply re-use the hover state as an active state.
  • Sidebar: I know several people who have more than one job, but the fields on this form don't allow for that. Would it make more sense to remove Job Information from the sidebar, move it to Information, and make it more like the current "Address" entry? That is, you can have multiple, some are inactive, maybe start date/end date, etc?
  • Activity feed: if a contact is added to a journal entry, the activity log should also say "journal entry" instead of "post". I would also recommend linking to the entry from the activity log.
  • Ways to connect -> Addresses: It might make sense to make the address type required and default it to "Home" or something. If I don't select an address type, it defaults to Home anyway.
  • Ways to connect -> Addresses: Marking an address as inactive doesn't actually do anything to the UI until I refresh the page. Ditto with unchecking that box.
  • Ways to connect -> Addresses: the way that the address is formatted looks very strange to me. It might be worth looking into an address formatting library. https://github.com/predicthq/address-formatter-php is abandoned, but you might be able to use their templates.
  • Ways to connect -> Contact information: For phone numbers, I recommend something like https://packagist.org/packages/giggsey/libphonenumber-for-php for formatting the number, and outputting the tel link without any punctuation. IIRC, some versions of Android are picky about the specific content of the href attribute if it's a tel link.
  • Ways to connect -> Contact information: If I add e.g. a phone number, the "Content" field is required. If I then edit it, the field is marked optional.
  • Ways to connect -> Contact information: "Add a contact information" is a strange button label. Maybe "Add contact information" instead?
  • Social: I expected this to be e.g. a list of social media accounts or something. Maybe "Relationships" would be a better default label?
  • Social: "Add a pet" and "Add to group" both show a form inline on the same page, but "Add a relationship" takes me to a different page. This felt a little strange. Is it because of the potential complexity of the relationship form?
  • Social: "Add to group" shows a form that has a "Select a group or create a new one dropdown". In a new vault, I have no groups and the "Create a group" option doesn't let me actually create a group, so I can't test this functionality. (I also cannot create a group if I navigate to Groups in the main nav, nor is the option available on the Vault Settings page)
  • Life & goals->Life events: The default life event list seems like a lot of relatively inconsequential things. "Rode a bike" doesn't seem worthy of logging. I'd expect this list to have things like "Started dating somebody" or "Married somebody" or "Got a job" or "Bought a house" or "Found out they were pregnant" -- things along those lines.
  • Life & goals->Goals: Saving a new goal doesn't seem to do anything until I refresh the page.
  • Life & goals->Goals: Clicking the smiley face on a given goal doesn't seem to do anything until I refresh the page.
  • Information -> Loans: One of the primary use-cases for this section for me would be to track who I've loaned money to + who has loaned money to me. In a brand new, empty vault, if I create a contact and immediately to try to record a loan to myself, my name doesn't show up in either contact picker. If I go edit my own contact profile in that same vault, then go back to the contact to record a loan, I can do it. Maybe my contact entry doesn't actually exist until I go make a change that causes it to be saved to the database? (Or maybe editing a contact sets some field that the initial creation of my contact doesn't have)
  • Information -> Tasks: In dark mode, task entries are unreadable.
  • Information -> Calls: In dark mode, the "add description" and adjacent buttons are unreadable.

• Calendar:

  • I was surprised to see that "Life metrics" weren't reflected on the calendar. Not a bug, but maybe this feedback is helpful.

• Journals:

  • It seems weird to have more than one journal in a vault, but I'm not sure why I think that. Why would somebody want multiple journals if each entry can be segmented by the "Slice of life", attached to various people, etc?
  • It might make sense to automatically create a default journal when the vault is created (in the same way that you create default contact)
  • "Create a post" should maybe be "Create a new entry" or something along those lines. The tab at the top of this page is titled "Journal entries", so it probably makes sense to standardize your verbiage here.
  • On the "Create a post" page, the title field default value is "Undefined". This is probably a JS error, but I think it makes sense (and is more consistent with the rest of the UI) to leave this blank.
  • Additionally, if I just visit the create a post page, a blank entry is saved in my journal. This is extremely annoying.
  • If I have a contact like so: and I create a new journal entry and add that contact by searching for "Jon", the result looks like this: I'd expect the output to be just "Jonathan Doe" or "Jon Doe" instead of outputting all of this extra information. It should probably just respect the name formatting settings in Settings -> User Preferences.
  • In a new vault, if I navigate to Journals -> Create a journal (and then create it), then go to "View all" under "Slices of life" and create a new Slice of Life called "Personal", then click "Personal" on the "All the slices of life in the journal" page, I get a Laravel error that does not go away until I refresh the page (no matter what UI element I click) (same behavior if I then go to Journals -> My Journal -> Personal (in the sidebar)):
  • The idea of journal metrics is really cool. It might make sense to add a bit of help text on the "edit journal metrics" page to clarify that these are numeric metrics that can be tracked on each journal entry. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to actually view the aggregated journal metrics. I currently have to go look at each journal entry.

• Settings->User Preferences

  • All of the headings have a little "?" icon next to them. Hovering over the icon shows a tooltip that says "This link will open in a new tab". Clicking the icon does nothing and there is no obvious link that would open in a new tab.
  • It might be a nice thing to set the default timezone for a user to their local timezone. This is something that you can infer on signup by getting the local time in your JS and including the time in the signup form submission. No geolocation necessary - you can just set the timezone to a matching GMT/UTC offset and call it a day.

• Settings->Profile and security

  • The breadcrumb on this page says "Account and security" instead of "Profile and security"
  • Given the amount of personal information stored in Monica, it seems like setting up two-factor auth should be a mandatory part of the signup process unless explicitly disabled in a config file or something.

• Settings->API tokens

  • The blog post about Chandler being in beta says that there is no API, but the API tokens page still exists in the beta site. Unintentional?

[jxtxzzw]

+1 on the loan issue (not able to select myself). Two more comments on the loan feature:

1. Once I click "Settled", I am not able to see the history. Will you consider adding something like "history loans" just like how you did in "history address"?
2. What if I lend 100 to user A and A gives me 10 back today and 90 back next week? Can we settle a partial loan? I can click "edit" and add comments, but I would like to have the comments "appended" rather than "overwritten".

And when I try to search by names, it asks me to have at least 3 characters. I think it is not friendly to C/J/K names, for example, 张三 in Chinese (FirstName/GivenName 三, LastName/SurName 张) has only two characters but it is enough to represent a person.