OpenStrap · edge · v0.9.26+57 · UI/UX audit
-- The analytics engine returns six fields per metric. The interface renders one of them. - Every other problem in this audit is downstream of that. -
- -Verdict
-5.9 /10
-- Not bad — undifferentiated. The craft is well above the Flutter-health median: - real tokens, real null-honesty copy, a measured contrast test already in CI. What it is not - is this product's interface. It renders like a competent WHOOP clone sitting on top - of an engine that could beat WHOOP on the one axis WHOOP can't compete on: telling the truth - about what it doesn't know. -
-The finding
-
- Analytics hands the UI a Metric. It carries a value, a confidence, a tier
- (AUTH / HIGH / ESTIMATE / RELATIVE),
- the inputs it used, the drivers that moved it, and a note saying why it's absent. Five of those
- six survive the trip to a pixel almost nowhere.
-
- The band's whole claim is that it never guesses.
The interface renders that claim as a dash.
-
102
-bare — literals in lib/ui. 1 call site of needMessageFromNote, the function that turns need_baseline:have=3,need=14 into a sentence a human can act on. detail_cards.dart:818
1 of 13
-ArcGauge call sites pass confidence; it defaults to 1.0. Every sparkline, bar and time series has no confidence parameter at all. An ESTIMATE respiratory rate and an AUTH heart rate render as identical pixels. charts.dart:36
3
-reads of Metric.note across all 41,588 lines. The reason a number is missing is computed, stored, shipped to the device — and then dropped one layer before the eye.
0
-places where a drivers list is shown as an attribution. Oura's Contributors panel is the category baseline in 2026; this app computes something strictly better and never draws it.
-By discipline
-Design system — tokens, type, components
-6.5
- -UX craft — states, a11y, motion
-6.0
- -Information architecture — nav, screens, flows
-5.5
- -Data visualisation — charts, gauges, hypnogram
-5.5
- -
- The design system scores highest because it exists: a 4 pt spacing scale at 93% adoption,
- 753 AppColors and 615 AppText call sites, dark mode re-derived rather than
- inverted. The failure is not absence of a system — it is two systems, both re-exported
- from the same barrel, with 21 files importing both. design.dart:36
-
Ranked findings
-| Sev | Finding | Where | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| P0 | -Muted caption text fails WCAG AA — 2.71:1, 2.40:1 and 2.20:1 depending on surface. It is the app's caption and label voice, so it fails everywhere. | -theme.dart:159,165 223 uses |
- Two hex values. A contrast test harness already exists. | -
| P0 | -Zero reduced-motion support. 13 infinite .repeat() loops, including a 2.6 s breathing icon on every empty state that never stops. |
- motion.dart:32 state_card.dart:43 |
- One guard inside the DsMotion extension fixes all 34 caller files. |
-
| P0 | -A 958-line design gallery ships in release builds, routed from Settings under a "Developer" heading. | -profile_screen.dart:747 | -Wrap the route in kDebugMode. |
-
| P0 | -No downsampling anywhere. A night of 1 Hz HR is ~30,000 chart points per frame, with an O(n) linear scan on every drag pixel. | -charts.dart:381,624 | -Min/max bucketing to 2× pixel width. _bucketAvg already exists — promote it. |
-
| P0 | -The Insights screen returns SizedBox.shrink() while loading and when empty. Its content silently does not exist. |
- coach_cards.dart :176,365,436,534 |
- Skeleton, then StateCard with the have/need line. |
-
| P1 | -Today's tiles push Sleep/Heart/Body — the same classes that are already tabs 1/2/3. Two live instances with divergent scroll and drill state; "back" means two different things depending on how you arrived. | -today_screen.dart:441 vs app.dart:236 |
- Tiles switch tabs. Never push a destination that is also a tab. | -
| P1 | -The onboarding validator contradicts its own copy: the screen promises "leave a field blank and only that metric stays unknown — never guessed", then requires all four fields. | -profile_setup_screen .dart:139 vs :193 |
- Allow blanks. Gate Continue on sex alone. | -
| P1 | -No escape from pairing. Bond-refused and picker-cancelled both fall through to one generic "Couldn't pair". This is the drop-off cliff of a hardware app. | -pairing_screen.dart :178,190 |
- Distinct refused/cancelled states, plus a skip-to-shell path. | -
| P1 | -The app's most visible element ignores the type scale. BigStat and MetricCard override AppText.hero/display/metric; hero numbers render at 26, 27, 36, 40, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54, 64 and 72 px across screens, at 14 different letter-spacings. |
- big_stat.dart:66 metric_card.dart:112 |
- Promote metricXl…metricSm into AppText; delete the overrides. |
-
| P1 | -A shadow chart library. Five line-chart implementations, three gauges, two hypnograms, two sparklines — and coach_render.dart's copies interpolate straight across null gaps, which is a lie in a null-honest app. |
- coach_render.dart coach_chart.dart |
- One engine each. ~400 lines net deletion. | -
| P1 | -A dual-axis chart normalises each series to its own min/max on a shared grid. Every crossing and convergence it draws is an artifact. | -coach_render.dart:234 | -Delete. Two stacked charts, or index to a common base. | -
| P1 | -Journey — the richest view in the app at 1,300+ lines — is reachable through exactly one card that hides itself for the first 24 hours. New users never learn it exists. | -today_screen.dart:416 | -Promote to a tab. | -
| P2 | -23 Semantics against 236 onTap:. Charts are blanket-ExcludeSemantics. Confidence is a 7 px hue-only dot with no label. |
- kit.dart:498 charts.dart:437 |
- Semantic labels on every interactive surface; colour + word + shape for status. | -
| P2 | -Sub-44 pt tap targets on primary controls (34 pt segmented controls, 40 pt back button); 68 candidate sites. | -controls.dart:70 app_scaffold.dart:43 |
- Enforce the floor inside Pressable so no call site can opt out. |
-
| P2 | -Unbounded workout history built into a non-lazy ListView(children:), each row wrapped in its own animation ticker. One ListView.builder exists in the entire UI. |
- workouts_screen.dart :354,461 |
- ListView.builder; stagger only the first viewport. |
-
| P2 | -Hypnogram — the signature visual of any sleep app — has no minimum segment width (a 30 s wake epoch is sub-pixel on an 8 h night), no time axis, no scrub, and shouldRepaint => true. |
- hypnogram.dart:99,123 | -Clamp to ≥1.5 px, add hour ticks and scrub-to-read. | -
| P2 | -Four god-screens: 2,728 / 2,208 / 2,113 / 1,700 lines. Meanwhile ~5,300 bespoke day-view lines sit beside a 489-line generic one that already works. | -live_session · workouts profile · today |
- Split by responsibility; route the rest through MetricScreen. |
-
| P2 | -The app calls itself "OpenStrap" during onboarding and "Edge" once you're inside. Jargon leaks as primary labels: MS RMSSD, pNN50, SD1/SD2. |
- welcome_screen.dart:365 spot_check_screen.dart:186 |
- One name. Method notes hold the method names, not stat captions. | -
Ship blockers
-2.20:1 at worst against a 4.5:1 requirement, across 223 call sites. Two hex values in theme.dart.
Users with vestibular disorders get a permanently pulsing empty state and a shimmer that never stops. Also a ticker burning battery on an idle screen.
-A design gallery and a fake-route fixture reachable from user-facing Settings.
-Every sleep detail view rebuilds a 30k-segment path per frame and scans it linearly on each drag pixel. This is the jank users will describe as "the app feels cheap".
-Target
-- Not "more polish". The target is an interface whose structure is the honesty guarantee, - where a fabricated number is unrepresentable rather than merely avoided. -
- -1
-A dash is a bug. One MetricValue widget: value → note-derived reason ("4 of 14 nights") → device reason ("not synced since 2 pm") → a dash only as an assertion failure. Target: ≤5 literal dashes in lib/ui, down from 102.
2
-Tier is an encoding, not a badge. ESTIMATE renders in lighter weight with a hatched band; RELATIVE plots against a zero-line that means "your normal"; confidence below 0.4 dashes the stroke. Enforced in the one chart engine so no call site can regress it. No yellow, no warning triangle — the way Apple Weather greys distant forecast days.
3
-Drivers are the hero, not a tap-through. Three signed attributions under the score, always expanded — "HRV −18% vs baseline · sleep debt 1 h 40 m · late alcohol logged". This is Oura's Contributors panel, except causal, and the engine already computes it.
-4
-Day 0 shows a contract, not a skeleton. No zeros, no shimmer implying a number is imminent: "Readiness needs 3 nights. 1 done. First score Thursday morning" — alongside live raw HR, the only thing that is real on day 0 and the proof the band is talking.
-5
-One hero, not three dials. WHOOP's three-dial home forces the user to arbitrate. Readiness alone above the fold in the morning; strain-so-far against today's ceiling in the evening; everything else earns its way below. The AI briefing is not a co-hero — an LLM paragraph at the top makes a local-first app look like a wrapper.
-6
-The receipt. Every score links to its inputs: which records, which gaps, coverage in real units ("6 h 12 m of 7 h 40 m in bed"), which algo version. When a version change re-scores a past day, say so on the card instead of silently mutating history.
-7
-Lead with what WHOOP cannot do. A smart alarm that wakes you in light sleep, using live per-second staging, with a morning receipt — "woke you at 06:31, 4 minutes into light sleep". Plus a raw 1 Hz viewer and one-tap export. No subscription product can offer either.
-Sequence
-1
-Roughly a day. Almost entirely mechanical.
-theme.dart fix contrast across 223 call sites — then assert it in CI, which the palette already supports.DsMotion extension gives 34 files reduced-motion; kill the 13 infinite loops.kDebugMode wrapper removes the gallery from release.Pressable, so no future call site can opt out.timeline_screen.2
-The phase that changes what the product is.
-MetricValue replaces all 102 dashes with reasons.confidence and tier become required parameters on every series-bearing widget.3
-Net deletion. The diff should be negative.
-kit/design pair, codemod, delete the loser, drop the re-export.fontSize:, Color(0x, Colors.white and literal dashes — the harness already exists in dart_source_test.dart, and it is the only fix in this document that is permanent.4
-Where it stops looking like a hobby build.
-- The uncomfortable summary: the hard part is already built. On-device staging, corrected RR - intervals, personal baselines, per-metric confidence, honest nulls — years of work that no - competitor ships. The interface throws away five of the six fields that work produces, and - then looks like every other recovery app. -
-- Phase 1 is a day. Phase 2 is what makes it this app. -
-