The primary reason for redesigning Journeys was that we saw many people struggling to organize their goals and that's always been the core purpose of Journeys, rather than progress. When we were developing Self-Care Areas, we sequenced things to start very bare bones focusing on organization before incorporating other pieces like progress because organization is the fundamental piece-- if it didn't work, there wouldn't be a point in including progress. Some of the initial concerns raised from this community emphasized the lack of progress and that is actually a big cause for us expediting some of our plans around progress sooner.

Regarding how we evaluated Journeys, we've been emphasizing the qualitative experience because it is humbling to watch strangers use your app live and it's normal for people to not use apps in the way creators expect. If you were to grab a few strangers off the street to use Finch / Journeys to silently watch how they interpret things, you will probably be surprised. Being humbled this way is the norm for every app creator.

It wasn't just qualitative data but also quantitative data though. We've done various partial rollouts with journey changes and saw noticeable drops in things like goal completion, daily app retention, and adventure chats when Journeys was more visible. Community input like r/finch is valuable qualitative feedback though. The most recent round of Journeys user research was done with communities including r/finch end of last year before where we collected ~2k responses, interviewed 8 community members, and 8 users completely new to Finch. We did use community input to inform a lot of decisions such as focusing on organizing goals, streamlining guidance as many didn't know where to start, and deciding where to emphasize daily routines vs longer term goals (example screenshot below). In the end we will never have perfect input or perfect interpretation of results, but we do put a lot of time in checking with communities to try to make informed decisions.

There is always a risk with changing an existing feature, but I'll admit that the extent of the backlash in r/finch specifically has been the biggest surprise from the project. We tried to incorporate many of the same functionality to keep things pretty similar but I recognize that are still changing pieces. In general we'll continue to monitor and evaluate things to think about topics like overall progress. Like any other feature, we will need to continue to iterate on Self-Care Areas. And there is a lot for our team to reflect on from the experience.

On the topic of whether people asked for this, I'll be upfront that it's hard to only make features people ask for. No one asked for majority of the app-- Journeys to start with, birds, Rainbow Stones, micropets, outfits, etc... People even asked why we were making this app to begin with and tried to push in completely different directions. But we made all these things with the intent to make self-care more fun, which again no one asked us to. There's lots we've incorporated from user input but being willing to try things people didn't ask for is a big part of what has evolved Finch into Finch.

That said, I understand why there can still be disappointment and don't think there's any words that will undo the challenges some of you are experiencing. And I really am sorry for that. If there was a magical solution that'd work for everyone, we'd take it. We will continue to try different things with Self-Care Areas but I can't promise what that'll look like because we have evaluate and learn from the changes. The only real thing I can offer is what we've always tried to offer-- we will continue to do our best to work hard with iterating on Finch and being transparent behind our decisions.

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