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.
