Debrief UX Audit

“Protect 09:44-11:59, that was your longest good stretch, 2 hr 15 min of it.” That’s the best thing on the page: specific, actionable, in plain words, and it needs no EEG knowledge. It should be near the top, not two thirds of the way down.

Keep

First launch lands on Live: two decimal numbers, five unlabelled bars, and eight electrode codes. Nothing on that screen answers a question a person has. It is the most technical view in the app and it is the first impression.

Fix The app opens on your most recent session’s debrief. If there are no sessions, it opens on a single instruction telling you how to record one.

Critical

“Focus median 0.385.” “Your usual range 0.26-0.58.” “Calm median 0.479.” A person cannot act on any of these, and the entire justification for building this app rather than using the Neurosity console was that raw numbers need interpreting.

“Your usual range” is the worst offender, it’s a statistical concept wearing a friendly label.

Fix Every number gets a plain sentence attached: “0.385, a fairly typical day for you” or “higher than your last four sessions”. The number stays; it stops being the headline.

Critical

CP3 C3 F5 PO3 PO4 F6 C4 CP4 means nothing to anyone who hasn’t read a 10-20 montage diagram. The five band bars are an instrument readout, a person cannot do anything differently because delta is taller than gamma.

Fix Both move to a developer view. The consumer sees one line: “All sensors have good contact” or “One sensor isn’t reading, nudge the headset.”

Critical

Tabs suggest five equally valid destinations. Four of them are for you, the builder. Putting “Diagnostics” in a consumer’s navigation tells them the tool isn’t for them.

Fix One scrolling page for the person. A quiet “Developer view” link that opens Live, Diagnostics, bands, and electrodes.

Major

Teal blocks and pink blocks appear behind the lines with no key. Those are the peaks and slumps, the two most important things in the session, and they’re rendered as anonymous background colour. You cannot tell which is which, when they were, or how long they lasted without cross-referencing two tables further down.

Fix Every event gets a label drawn on it: “Best stretch · 2h 15m” and “Dip · 47m”, with times. See section 4.

Major

A real answer from the screenshot: “Sources: A plain-English EEG primer § Brainwave bands, delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma · A plain-English EEG primer § The eyes-closed test, checking the data is real · A plain-English EEG primer § Focus and calm scores”. That citation is longer than some answers and uses a typographic symbol most people have never seen.

Worse, the answer to “what is alpha” opens with “The wobbles have rhythms…”, a mid-paragraph excerpt from a document, not a reply to the question.

Fix One source, shown as “From: the EEG primer”, expandable. And each knowledge section gets a one-sentence direct answer at the top, so retrieval returns a reply rather than a passage.

Major

The notes box sits at the bottom of a long page, behind a dropdown reading “peak at 09:44 AM”. You have to scroll past everything, understand the dropdown, and mentally connect it back to a shaded region on a chart you’ve stopped looking at.

Fix The note lives on the event. Click the dip on the timeline, or the dip’s card, and type into it there.

Major

Six identical boxes at identical weight means nothing tells you where to look, so you read all six or none.

Fix Two numbers at the top that matter to a person, how long you recorded, how much of it was good, and the rest folded into a “the numbers behind this” section.

Major

The state badge says “calm” with no explanation of what that means or where it came from. The chat was scrolled into the middle of a previous message on load. “mock source” is developer wording on a consumer chip. And the narrative repeats figures already shown in the cards directly above it.

Each peak and slump is drawn with its own label, a name, a clock range, and a duration, directly on the timeline. The date sits in the header. Hovering anywhere on the chart shows the exact time and the reading at that moment. Axis ticks go from five to one per hour.

Build

Three preset buttons, whole day, morning, afternoon, plus dragging across the chart to select any window. Selecting recomputes everything: the stats, the events, the written summary. “What happened between two and four” becomes a two-second action rather than a question you can’t ask.

Build

Every event card carries an open prompt, “What were you working on?”, that you type into in place. No dropdown, no scrolling, no separate form. The storage format already exists and already works; only the way you reach it changes.

Build

This is a different thing from a note, and worth separating: a note explains a moment; an activity covers a stretch of time. “Writing the parser, 9:30 to 12” is an activity. “The build broke” is a note.

Activities are what eventually make the debrief say something genuinely useful, “your focus runs about 40% lower in meeting blocks than in solo work”, which needs the same label applied across many sessions. So activities get a small reusable set of tags you build up over time, not free text every session.