Logging a feed with one thumb

At the moment you most need to log a feed, you have one hand. The other is holding a baby, or a bottle, or both, and it is not coming back any time soon. Whatever you do with the phone, you will do it with a thumb, at an awkward angle, while something more important is going on a few inches away.

That is the constraint Wriggler was built around first. Not the dashboard. The mighty thumb.

The brief was the situation, not the screen

Most apps quietly assume a user who can give it their attention. Two hands, a settled posture, enough patience for a form with a few fields in it. A feed offers none of that. You are half sitting and half braced, you are watching the time without meaning to, and the phone is doing well to still be in your hand at all if we're honest.

So the feed log is built for the situation as it actually is. Larger targets rather than small ones. Taps and sliders rather than typing. Everything the log needs kept inside the arc a thumb can draw without you shifting your grip and disturbing whatever fragile arrangement you have going.

It sounds like a modest thing to organise a product around. It is also the difference between a tracker you still use at three in the morning and one you quietly stop opening in week three.

Four types, an amount, a length

What the log records is deliberately short.

A feed in Wriggler is one of four things: breast, bottle, formula, or solids. That is the first tap, and for a lot of feeds it is very nearly the last one. There is room for an amount, in millilitres or ounces, and room for how long the feed went on, for the times when those are the numbers you want written down rather than trusted to a night's worth of memory.

You do not have to fill all of it in. A type and a time is a complete record, and the log is content with that. On the days you want the detail, the detail is there. All of it is free, the same as the sleep timer and the nappy log and the rest of the tracking.

Wriggler has no view on which of the four you use, or in what combination, or how that shifts across the months. Breast, bottle, formula, solids, some blend that changes week to week: they are four things the app records, not four things it ranks. It is a notebook. Notebooks do not have opinions about this.

What it does not ask

There is no field for how the feed went. Nothing asks you to rate it, and nothing tells you whether the number you just entered was a good one. The log takes what happened and stops.

That restraint is doing real work, because the amount a baby takes is one of the easiest things in the early months to lie awake about, and an app is the wrong voice to weigh in. What a particular amount means for your particular baby is a conversation for you and your midwife, your child health nurse, your GP. Wriggler's job is to make sure you arrive at that conversation with an accurate record instead of a guess. It is not to have the conversation for you.

So the feed goes into the day beside the sleeps and the nappies, plainly, as you logged it. No verdict attached.

The count you did not have to hold in your head

The quiet benefit shows up later, usually when someone asks you a question you cannot answer. How many feeds were there yesterday. Was that the long one or the short one. Did the two-hourly stretch actually happen or did it only feel that way at the time.

Days with a newborn blur, and they blur most for the person doing most of the work. The log is not there to impress you with what it knows. It is there so that the answer exists somewhere other than in a tired memory, put there by a thumb, in a second and a half, at an hour you will not remember clearly.

That is the wombat's kind of usefulness. Nothing showy, present when it is needed, undemanding about the credit. You did the feed. The app just wrote it down.