Fitbit - Great activity tracker but can do a lot more with the sleep tracker

I first started using the Fitbit in March of this year. In 7 months of using the device, I have had a great experience. The goals that Fitbit sets for you definitely works from a motivation standpoint. As someone who tries to work out 3 to 4 times a week, getting those 10,000 steps on days I work out is not the biggest challenge. But it definitely helps on those off days, the lazy days, the football sundays when I look down on my fitbit at 4pm and realize I've done 1200 steps for the day! Knowing that I am going to look at my fitbit account the next day and see a big red for my sunday activity pushes me to do something extra to get to the daily goal. In some ways, this is another implementation fo gamification - and it works wonders! According to Fitbit's data as well, looks like users do take more steps when using the device (43% more according to their company page - http://www.fitbit.com/company)

Another thing that made me love the product/company even more recently was their customer service. I was disappointed when my fitbit stopped working in slightly wet conditions. I tried drying it out, kept it in a rice container and it still didn't work. I decided to write an email to their support team to see what can be done without really getting my hopes up. But, the response of the support team was absolutely brilliant. I got a reply in less than a day and it simply asked for the name under which I registered the fitbit and said a new Fitbit One was on its way as the replacement. They didn't ask me to ship back the old one, ask for any details on the order (I was actually worried they wouldn't send it to me because it wasn't purchased under my name, but was instead gifted to me) and even paid for the shipping themselves. Nothing feels better than top notch customer service and it was great to be on the receiving end of Fitbit's awesome customer service. One of the first few internet companies that I got great service from was Zappos and I am glad to see other companies following a good tred. So, Thank you guys!!

When I think about the Fitbit product, its not just about working out and having many "active minutes" and 10,000 steps a day, but just to have an improved lifestyle. I believe Fitbit has the same vision and that's why has the calorie counter in their devices to see how many calories you burned in a day. They also give the user the option to track the number of calories they ingested. I believe the sleep tracker is just another way to improve your lifestyle by sleeping better and healthier. This is one area where they can really enhance the product to give a much stronger indication of healthy sleep to the user. 

The Fitbit One tracks all motion through the use of an accelerometer, similar to the accelerometer available in the iPhone. The sleep cycle app on the apple store achieves a lot more in telling the user about the quality of sleep they are achieving by using that accelerometer. By charting out your sleep cycles and waking you up in a 30 minute timeframe when you are under light sleep, they provide a much more stressfree and refreshing wake up than a traditional alarm clock or even the vibrating alarm that the Fitbit One implements. Implementing a similar design can achieve a much better result in terms of quality of sleep than the existing implementation which only tells me how long I slept, and how many times I woke up in my sleep. I don't know how many times the average person wakes up in the middle of the night. That information doesn't really tell me a whole lot about my sleep quality. But by seeing a chart of my sleep quality throughout the night, like sleep cycle does below, I can really tell how healthy my sleep cycle is. 

Besides the sleep activity tracker, I think ways in which they can improve on the logging of food to calculate calories ingested can really improve the overall experience of the product. While I know that users have the ability to log the food they eat manually, developing a software that can determine calories ingested in a more automated or seamless manner would improve that feature tremendously. This is a much stiffer problem to tackle but is one that can be done over time through high quality photo recognition. Allowing the user to take photos of the food they are eating on their mobile device and then recognizing the food items to determine calorie count can make for a much more seamless logging of calories ingested than the current manual method of adding each item eaten throughout a day. The likeliness of a user taking a photo of the plate of food before eating is much higher than them logging in all the food they consume - it also is just more efficient :)

One of the things in their webapp that is a nuisance to the user is their date picker. When you log into your account on the website, the page directly goes to your activity summary for the current date with a date picker to the top left corner:

The date picker only allows you to go back (or forward) one day at a time. This can be a nuisance for a user who wants to check their activity from a certain day last week or generally get to their activity pattern from last month. I can also see users wanting to compare their activity on any given day of the week for a few weeks. Say, for example, I have a routine to go on a long run every Monday morning. I may want to compare my activity across several Mondays for this month. There is no easy way for me to do that besides clicking on the left arrow to go back each day. Allowing the user to click on a date through the date picker can help them get to a different date more easily. 

Overall, my fitbit experience has been great so far; and their customer service makes me want to continue using their products! I am confident that fitbit will continue to keep pushing out new features and new products to improve the overall lifestyle of their customers. 

Could this be a better Yahoo! Sports homepage?

I realized after I posted about Yahoo! Sports that I need to provide a more concrete solution to the design shortcomings that I feel about the new layout. So I decided, why not mock up a little design myself about what could be a cleaner look. I haven't made drastic changes to the home page, but just enough changes that I think a user would like to see. Below is the current home page of Yahoo! Sports. I have highlighted the parts of the Home page that I would make changes to:

Below are the changes that I would make in the new look of the Yahoo! Sports page. Again, I have highlighted the affected portions in red:

As you can see, I placed the ribbon with the different sports back on top as opposed to having a left menu for it. Navigating between different sports scores/stories is one of the big features of a sports website. The current layout of Yahoo Sports has the sports on the left menu below a favorite teams section. Navigating between sports almost always requires me to scroll down and find the sport. Customizing the ribbon also allows for the user to prioritize their favorite sports in the ribbon over the general 'popular sports'. For example, baseball may be huge in certain parts of the US, but I may not care for it to be part of my ribbon. I would want to insert tennis over baseball and as a user, I should be able to have that option.

I strongly think that scores and recaps of games is a big part of the readability of sports websites that users crave for. Having a 3 tabbed right pane that shows you games and their recaps allows for the user to navigate to that easily. Similarly, if you want to see major headlines or headlines only of your favorite teams, you can click on those tabs to view that information.

This look feels cleaner, less cluttered and easy to navigate to than the current look where I find myself scrolling up and down constantly to get to the more important features of sports. This look also allows everything to be centered in the middle (with the absence of a left menu) which could leave room for more advertising if need be. The baseball field background that Yahoo has deployed can also be more visible and add to the aesthetic look of the site with that extra room on the 2 sides. However, I still feel that background needs to be replaced with a lighter background for easy readability.

I have other ideas for some of the other pages on Yahoo! Sports but these would be some of the changes I would start with for the home page. Feel free to comment on what you think the Yahoo! Sports page should look like. 

Spotify - the future of music!

Is that statement a year too late? Spotify is slowing becoming a household name - at least from what I see around me. Everyone at least knows about the service and most people use it. 24 million active users is a lot of users! I still think its great to see an online music streaming business doing well. It gives us hope that there is room for money to be made in that business, as we've seen so many other players start strong and fiddle away to their death, unable to sustain the business end of it.

What makes it really hard for an online music streaming service to survive, unfortunately, is not the technical aspect of making the product itself. As an engineer myself, knowing that truth is a hard pill to swallow. The large amount of licensing fees that Spotify and other services have to pay to stream music is a big chunk of their cost. Pandora and Spotify reportedly pay more than 60% of its cost in licensing fees. With the additional cost of running the service itself, the hardware needed for their servers and the manpower needed to continue refining their product, it makes it incredibly hard to sustain this business model. The fact that Pandora almost went bankrupt a couple of years ago with their large user base, shows the difficulty of this business model.

Besides the licensing fees, there are other factors that make it really hard for a new company to emerge in this market. Big players like Amazon, Google and Apple have recognized the number of users they can attract through online music streaming and given their other sources of revenue, can sacrifice money to attract users with a standout product. Despite all this, Spotify has managed to be a leader in user base and can really take advantage of that towards creating a more sound business model and creating a great product that stands the test of time.....hopefully!

But......this blog post is more about the product itself and not about the business. When I first started using Spotify, I loved many things about the product right away. Sharing music was my favorite feature. I am the kind of person who shares anything I find remotely interesting with my friends. In college, I was notorious for sending youtube links and articles to all my friends and they would always poke fun at how they mark my emails as read (sob). So when I saw the ability to share music directly from Spotify, you can only imagine my excitement about the product (and my friends' disappointment)! I also loved how you could collaborate on playlists. One of my friends and I share a similar taste in electronic music and the fact that we could put a shared playlist of our favorite electronic songs was a great feature!

The best feature about Spotify really was the online streaming of course. From a user's standpoint, the idea of online streaming is so hassle free its beautiful. I don't have to look for songs online. I don't have to buy entire cd albums for one song that I like. Wait a minute, I don't have to buy anything! People hate to pay for stuff. I now did not have to pay for individual songs on iTunes. Sure the ads were annoying after a while, and really its a great business model to have us listen to free interrupted music, so that we can pay for uninterrupted music. Works like a charm - worked on me at least. Additionally, having the ability to listen to music on your cell phone and make music available offline completed the essential elements needed to enjoy the music experience. Everything was spot on from the beginning.

But.....I cannot help but feel that there hasn't been much done since that wonderful beginning. I started using Spotify more than 2 years ago. Nothing much has really happened since that time. More music has been made available, which is essential to the overall experience. But product features have not improved much since then. Yes, they did launch Spotify Radio - but my experience of Spotify Radio has honestly not been good. When I am in the mood to switch from playlists to radio, I end up going back to Pandora because Spotify's radio just does not compare. Listening to Pandora is truly an amazing experience. When I start the radio session on Pandora, I truly feel that Pandora knows my music taste and my mood better than I do. Rarely do I have to skip songs. Spotify is nowhere close to that right now.

Then there are other little improvements that I am surprised have not been made. The ability to share music means you have an inbox of songs sent to you. However, there isn't a sent folder? Don't Inbox and Sent messages go hand in hand? If I can see the songs sent to me, surely  I should be able to see the songs I send to people so that I don't flood their inbox with the same song (not that I mind, but they might!).

The collaborative playlist idea is great, but collaborative on Spotify means that everyone who follows the playlist can collaborate on it. What if I only want to collaborate on the playlist with one of two other people but have anyone follow it? Maybe there is a way to do it, but if its not obvious to the user, then the feature isn't well designed, is it? Besides songs, having a podcast section to listen to, would bring in more users and expand to their experience as well. Whenever I am in the mood for podcasts, I have to go back to iTunes for them.

There is an interesting website called turntable.fm where you can enter a music room and multiple 'djs' take turns playing songs. Having a similar feature to go to can help broaden the user's Spotify friends and connect with more people who have similar taste in music as well.

I still love Spotify and use it for almost 8 hours during the day when I work. However, the honeymoon phase of this relationship is long past and I am looking for a little more from them now. Hopefully, Spotify won't remain stagnant and will keep adding more to an awesome product!

What happened to Yahoo Sports?!?

I am a big sports buff. When fall comes around, and my friends are gearing up for the new season of Big Bang Theory, How I met your Mother or some other TV show, I get giddy about watching Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers air it out on Sunday afternoon. As an avid sports fan and a habitual internet surfer, I used to spend a lot of my spare time going through scores, fantasy and articles on Yahoo Sports.

But the new layout of the Yahoo Sports page hasn't made me a happy camper. As a software engineer myself, I do realize user's tendencies to resist change - especially on websites they frequent. I remember whenever Facebook would go through a layout change, everyone would complain about how much Facebook sucked - on Facebook! I gave myself time to get used to the new layout, get adjusted to it and then pass my judgement.

1. One of the first few things that jumps out to me is the black background they are using in all their pages. In general, text/content on black background just does not work for me. Dark background works well in many cases, as can be seen in the web images search of google images - specifically when you enlarge an image and black takes the center. Black background also works well when there is less text/written content on a page that just serves as a little footnote or side note to the larger image that makes up the bulk of the page - as in cnnsi.com's top images. However, when a large part of your page is just content, headlines, articles, scores - all readable content that the user is interested in, the black background just does not appeal to the user's eyes. Just look at how much easier it is to navigate through the website in the image below, compared to the new website (further below):

2. If you go to any page on Yahoo Sports and scroll down to the stories, there are sponsored ads that appear from time to time (I have highlighted one in red in the image above). I don't really have an issue with ads. As a user, I don't enjoy seeing them, but they are essential to the revenue stream for most commercial use websites. However, making them relevant to the user does do minimal damage to the user experience and in some cases, also enhances it - after all, personalized advertisement would lead users to click these ads right? Isn't that the user enhancing their own experience by checking out a new product? I suppose that can be debated, but I digress...

Either way, product placement is critical to the users actually finding these advertisements useful. How can a website find out more about their users? Well, they can monitor their internet surfing, their web searches to find out their interests and cater ads accordingly. An ad for the "Real Age Test" on the home page of Yahoo Sports shown above in red isn't really catering to my sports interests.

When I am visiting a sports website, I am really just thinking sports. Yahoo Sports infact knows my favorite teams as well! Advertising accordingly will make me take a second glance at that advertisement. Something completely unrelated to the content of the website, however, will not.

3. One last major thing I don't like about the Sports pages are the layout of the headlines and scores. This was something that bothered me a little even in the old format, and I thought it might be an improvement they would cover in the new layout. Check out the image below to see how the headlines, the articles, content are all displayed more heavily than the scoreboard itself.

The right side of the Yahoo Sports page (whether its the home page or something specific like NFL) contains top headlines regarding sports (or NFL if I'm on that page). Below the cover news, however, there are more headlines. And the cover news also circulates 4 top stories! That's a lot of headlines and stories hitting you as soon as you go to the site. However, if you want to take a look at the scores or the recap of the games from this week, you have to navigate down below the right side headlines and the ad that follows to see them. The scoreboard up top exists but it doesn't give me the analysis or recap of the game unless I go to the scoreboard below the articles on the right side of the page. The redundancy of articles really doesn't enhance the user experience as a lot of sports fans are going to the website to check the scores!

I haven't given up on Yahoo Sports as my primary sports website for all things related to sports yet. However, I do hope that Yahoo takes feedback from its users seriously and considers tweaking their layout a little (as I have heard similar complaints from many other users). The above are just my 2 cents on some of the improvements that can be made.