You have to drag that slider to switch them back on. Beautiful background (changes every day) reminds you that there’s an alternative to that next dreary Facebook / Twitter / Buzzfeed browsing session.
2. Shows you visually when you are spending a long time on an addictive site
Each ring represents 5 minutes of time spent. You can hide this easily in a single click.
3. Hides parts of the internet that can suck you in
Hey @notemaster! There definitely is - getting Nudge onto Firefox is something I’m really keen to do but unfortunately the team is just me at the moment and so it’s a bit too difficult. Porting across isn’t insanely hard I think but there are a few core features I’d have to rework so they work with Firefox APIs.
If you or anyone you know would be able to help me get it onto Firefox, I’d be super keen to collaborate!
Sorry about that - but I’ll keep you posted on any developments.
@louisbarclay, thanks so much for Nudge. I’ve just installed it today, and am grateful for it. I’m a UX designer and usability researcher, and I noticed a few usability improvements that could be made, and I’d love to help out. How can we chat?
Hi @jfhector - I would love to talk to you about the potential improvements you’ve noticed and about helping out. I noticed you’re based in London - perhaps we could coordinate via email to chat in person about this next week? I’m on louis [dot] barclay [at] gmail [dot] com.
Thanks I really appreciate the work your doing. Unfortunately I don’t think I have any relevant skills to collaborate but please don’t be in any rush! Honestly, I’m just happy somebody is acting on these problems. Hope all goes well!
Thanks for making this! I’ve been trying this out. I turned off most of the site blocking and time notification features, since I personally find them kind of annoying and not that useful. I also turned it off on Gmail; I’m not sure it should be active there by default, but maybe that’s just me.
The main thing I like about this and find really useful is the content blocking. It hides all the clickbait and sidebar stuff. That’s great! There’s one major improvement you could make on Youtube however. It blocks the suggested content on the side, but it doesn’t block what comes up on the screen after the video is playing. A simple .ytp-endscreen-content { display: none; } should fix that right up.
Hi @wolverdude thanks a lot for this suggestion and apologies for taking so long to reply. That’s an awesome idea and I will implement with the next update.
I like your extension’s features. They are on-topic for this forum
However, I think you should make some other humane tech improvements to your product, and I feel obliged to mention some of them here.
Your site nudgeware.io and your bit.ly URL (which I edited) redirect to the Google Web Store. You have no website presence, the extension page offers no information about you, who you are, and how you monetize your extension. There is no privacy policy too, and unclear what personal information you collect. For european users this means you are in violation of GDPR and liable for a lawsuit (though that is a calculated risk, the chances of which are very small).
I consider these things core principles of humane design. A browser extension could be snooping on everything the user does online. Though not a guarantee for good behavior, a proper privacy policy at least makes an app provider more liable to act that way.
Having these things will also yield benefits to you. Transparency leads to trust and more users willing to install your extension. Currently you have 1500+ users that blindly trust you on their computer. They don’t care about privacy, obviously. But who knows how much more you could have, by attending to some of these basic provisions
Thanks very much for your feedback. I agree that there are many areas in which I could improve. There is some context to this, in that it’s just me working on Nudge with limited time to do so. Nudge is offered completely free and makes £2 a month via donations - roughly enough for me to buy myself a cup of tea every now and then (no sad violins please - I absolutely love working on Nudge!). Here are some notes to address the points that you very legitimately raise:
I have no website presence because I have always preferred to spend Nudge dev time working on improvements to the Chrome extension, mostly because I know I’ll end up spending hours and hours endlessly tweaking a landing page once I build one. I taught myself to code 2 years ago in order to develop Nudge so I am not very fast at JS and have to prioritise
Nudge is completely open-source, and always has been - here is the code on GitHub. This is something I did precisely in order to be transparent (something I care deeply about), and I believe it’s not the case of many apps in the humane tech space (e.g. Freedom, Siempo, Moment - not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that because those guys can’t exactly show all their code, wouldn’t be great for their business model)
Nudge collects completely anonymised data from each installation of the extension. This is something which is made 100% clear to everyone who downloads it on the first page they see - along with an option to immediately disable this feature. I believe I have been completely transparent about this. Anyone who wants to verify this can look at my code linked above
It’s true that you can’t find out who makes Nudge from the Chrome extension page. But I have never tried to keep this a secret - in fact I have written multiple articles on Medium explaining things like exactly what Nudge does, and anyone is welcome to check out my LinkedIn profile. I don’t agree that I need to put my name on the Chrome extension page. There is an email address there and anyone who wants to know who I am has always been welcome to get in touch. No one has ever asked about this, or about how I monetise (donations, as mentioned)
It’s possible I am in violation of GDPR - thank you for pointing this out. My understanding was that since I cannot tie data back to any particular person, it does not apply to Nudge. But on reading further, it’s possible that it does, in which case I need to work on this - and a more general privacy policy - urgently
I disagree with your statement that my users blindly trust me and don’t care about their privacy. They have mostly found out about Nudge via my Medium articles and posts on places like here, so they know who I am and why I’m working on Nudge. And again, I make incredibly clear to my users that I am treating their data with the utmost care, and that in addition to their data being completely anonymised, I collect absolutely no information about any sites they browse apart from the sites that are included in their Nudge sites. I have many friends who care deeply about privacy who use Nudge.
But in the end, you’re completely right. If you got the impression that I’m not being transparent, then I’m definitely not being transparent enough - and / or not communicating well enough. Right now I’ve started a full-time role so it may be hard for me to immediately rectify the issues you raised, but I’m going to make them my priority next time I can work on Nudge.
Cool! I like how you are open to feedback @louisbarclay
Great that you are OSS, I didn’t notice that before. I took some points from your response and created a Github issue. I think creating a web presence will not cost you much time at all:
The issue includes information on how you could generate a Privacy Policy with standard GDPR-compliant legalise (I mentioned Termly as an example, but haven’t vetted it yet for Humane Tech compliance, i,e, what they do with the information you provide, privacy-wise).
Fair enough, but this only applies to people that found your Medium articles. Being in the Chrome Web Store means at least some users found you via ‘Related extensions’ without reference to the Medium articles. The website and hyperlink to it in the web store solves this once and for all.
Thanks a lot @aschrijver! That is awesome of you to create the issue and give me the info on generating a Privacy Policy, I hugely appreciate it. It’s also pretty cool to have some more outside input on what’s been a pretty quiet GitHub page!
And I definitely take your point about users who have found Nudge not via things that I’ve done.
