Custom lenses

Create dynamic lists of related pings.

Experience

Loose

• July 18

  • What if the button for saving a search as a lens is a camera button…either literal or similar to current capture?

  • I’d like to be able to open ping practice and see what lenses have new / unread pings within them

  • Meta: it's notable to me how many thoughts/idea this exploration has "invited" out of me. I think a core part of validating an idea is observing how many other thoughts it invites.

• July 15

  • I can see custom lenses drawing on the iOS Weather app experience...

    • Different places (lenses) feel different well, because, the condiitons and locations of each are different (time of day, temperature, participation, air quality, etc.). I can see the same for each lenses (places, people, etc.)

    • I can also see each lenses holding different abstractions/artifacts

      • The weather app offers things like 10-day forecast, news, air quality, participation, UV index, sunrise, humidity, visibility, etc.

      • Might lenses offer things like most revisited ping, a timer of some sort, patterns in when / what you tend to ping about this lens, etc.

    • And more abstractly, i feel drawn to the idea of revisiting a custom lens being as light and consistent as checking the weather. a quick glance offers the information you need to prepare for the day/moment.

• July 14

  • I could see opening Ping Practice to check lenses being as light as checking the weather in the morning...a glance offers orientation and clarity.

• July 13

  • Thinking about lenses more intently has me wondering whether the experience might be lighter if the UI only showed the lens you were currently viewing rather than the carousel that we currently present.

  • I'd love for lenses to be more place-like, distinct...

• July 7

  • I can see a future where different lenses behave differently

    • Maybe the lens in which the pings I currently "placed" in capture enables me to manage those things (e.g. remove, re-order, etc.)?

• July 3

  • I’d like to be able to configure the order in which lenses are shown

• June 30

  • What might it look like to customize the look and feel of a lens…to make the space feel more embodied…

  • I’d love some suggestions I could consider creating lenses for upon landing in search

• June 29

  • Would it make sense to pre-fill capture with lens query if you tap capture from within lens?

  • Kinda nice to swipe through saved lenses and remember - at a high level - what’s been on my mind

• June 22 (Day 0)

  • I’d like to see how many pings a search returns so that I can get a sense for how big/durable/meaningful the search query is.

    • Read: am I likely to use this? Do I talk about this often?

  • Wow: @daughter search brought me back to the ping about the bike seat…

  • I’d love for the search page to offer some kind of suggestions so that I can think of lenses I might considering saving…

Background

As of mid-July (2025), I've been using the 6 default lenses we seeded the app with:

1. all pings

2. re-pings

3. period of day (nights, evenings, afternoons, mornings)

4. day of week

5. last week

6. hidden

In this time, a few things have surfaced:

1. I (and other Practitioners) noticed themselves wanting to see "all pings" immediately rather than "re-pings" as we initially configured to show first upon navigating to browse from capture

2. Practitioners have expressed curiosity/uncertainty about when/why to revisit Pings

3. .

In response to "1."