Background
I am making a mobile app, where users need to perform some task N times a day. The target audience is women, with interest in healthy lifestyle (so not engineers who are comfortable with a lot of data, charts, etc).
Every day can be classified either as successful (the task was completed at least N times), almost successful (e.g. the task was completed between N-1 and N-3 times), or unsuccessful (everything else). Although, I don't want it to carry any negativity with unsuccessful days (so bright red things screaming FAIL is a no).
The Problem
What I am struggling with is displaying the progress over the last 7 and 30 days. I am trying to come up with something simple to understand over a glance and high precision is not really important. Meaning the end user doesn't really care if she succeeded 10 days out of 30 or 11. So color coding is a potential solution because it gives a good idea, briefly, not emphasizing accuracy.
Solutions I came up with
- Textual information. For example: you completed your goal 10 days in a row! This could be an addition to other solutions, rather than the sole solution. Pro: unambiguous. Con: provides plenty of text and is not clearly obvious whether it's good or bad. The user has to read it every time.
- Color coded calendar. Similar to github:
Pros: color coding makes it easy to understand quickly, simple for 7 days tracking because only 7 squares. Cons: tricky for longer period of time (30 days), not obvious at first glance that it's a calendar.
- Charts. Feels like it's a wrong solution as it emphasizes accuracy and absolute values rather than one of the 3 states. The users might not be very comfortable with charts.
I am seeking to use the same solution for both 7 and 30 days visualization to keep the consistency. But maybe the difference between 7 and 30 states is too big to use the same solution (e.g. color coded calendar is less user friendly for 30 states compared to 7).