Suggestions from a Newbie

[juha]

Hi, I just switched over from a competing fuelup site... Yours is better :-) However, here's a couple of things I noticed from a newbie's perspective (and from the perspective of someone who's used someone else for a couple years)... More inside.

1. When I open the "fuelchart"/"All Fuel-ups" view, the graph does not begin at the zero-line like the others before. That makes the graph inconsistent and busier than it needs to, imo. I think it would be better if it started at 0.

2. The "avg. price" of everything (per litre, fuelup total, per kilometer) displayed on the vehicle page does not really make sense being current-year by default, since the price of fuel changes so rapidly. It would make more sense to be over the last 3 months, imo.

3. Not displaying fuel consumption for partial fuel-ups is a no-brainer, but not displaying it for the full fuelup that follows is puzzling. I don't understand why you don't display consumption there, the site I was at previously did. I would think, all you need for that calculation is the full fuelup, the odo reading from the last full fuelup and all the partial fuelups that happened between.

4. When adding a photo of a car, it might be nice to get a preview of the thumbnail displayed in the overall stat widget. It appears the hood and trunk of my car get cut off, and I only found that out after applying the photo

[pb]

Thanks for the suggestions, glad you like the site.

I'll try to answer your questions.

1. On the graph, understood. That's a personal preference. We've heard from folks on both sides—a zero makes all graphs consistent. The way we do makes the differences more pronounced so you can spot them easier.

2. True, that might be a reasonable default. It's easy to change. But we've had a lot of complaints from people who change the default to 3 months and then don't understand why the numbers aren't adding up as they expect them too. In my experience, the expectation is that those numbers include all fuel-ups—especially if you're starting from scratch.

3. We feel like it's misleading to do it any other way. Fuelly doesn't know your tank size, so it uses the difference from full for that calculation. Once you add one or two partial fuel-ups, the size of full is unknown. You could average them together, but that's going to give you a misleading number. That's our take on it, we've had a lot of people disagree.

4. Makes sense if you're primary goal of adding a photo is having it show up on a forum badge. It's easy to check on the badge page once you add a photo. It's an extra click or two, but it's not too bad.

[AgentMulders]

If fuelly struggles with not knowing your tank size, why not just add it as an optional parameter when creating your vehicle? It won't complicate the calculations, just allow you to see data for partial fillups if the size is specified.

Alternatively you could use an upper value for fillups as tank size by default.

Maybe it's time to have some "Beta" features for users to play with?

[AgentMulders]

Or even better, how about a "Premium" section of the site where users pay a small annual fee to access the extra features? There are definitely enough people requesting these features to warrant development time.

[MMUK]

> It won't complicate the calculations, just allow you to see data for partial fillups if the size is specified.

I can't see how fuelly can magically know your fuel economy if you haven't topped up to full. It doesn't help to know the tank size. The only way to get a reliable mpg figure is to fully top up.

[pb]

Yeah, let's say you have a 10 gallon tank that's almost empty. You put in two gallons and start driving. There's no way to know the distance you traveled with those two gallons even though we know the tank size is 10 gallons.

There's no way to know the amount of fuel in the tank when you add more unless there's a measuring point. Full is the only measuring point we have.

[Charon]

Handling partial fill-ups would require adding the quantities of fuel added in partial fill-ups until a complete fill-up, then calculating a total. It would have to do the same with mileages, whether trip or odometer. At that time it would have the total distance traveled and the total fuel used, and the calculation would be easy.