That's a great point! I vaguely tried to go in that direction by plotting the average over the past 7 days, the average over the 7 days before and the average over the year to date. Yet, I fully agree one might want to push this a little further and do as you describe. Thanks for the suggestion!
It's a common technique in stock market analysis:
This is quite insightful. It applies even more so to groups of people collectively (I'm sure I need not point out specific instances). All the more so when the data is noisy, and a bit of selectivity in setting the date range for analysis can result in the trend being minimized or reversed.
A moving average graph can help dispell this illusion, but the more aggressive the averaging the more it becomes a trailing indicator. One way to adjust for this is to use two moving averages (one longer one shorter) and plotting the difference between them. That will give you a fairly clear idea of whether the trend you're looking at is getting stronger, weaker, or reversing. It is still a trailing indicator but the trend-of-the-trend knowledge helps adjust for that.