

Ask HN: Please review my new site - sarasioux
http://janeme.com

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zavulon
I'm currently using some products by your competitors ("Lose it!" iPhone app
and "LiveStong") so I can definitely provide some feedback. First, it looks
VERY nice, but as some others noted - a "for guys" interface option would be
good.

1) This is big - needs to recognize the food and automatically enter the
number of calories. I don't really know how many calories the food I'm eating
has at all times.

2) Same with exercise - the site should ask me what exercise I did, and for
how long.. and then based on that, plus my weight, etc, figure out how many
calories I lost.

3) Autocomplete would be great for those two.

4) I think iPhone app, or a iPhone-compatible website needs to be an essential
component of this for me to use. I can't wait until I get to a computer to
record this stuff - I need the functionality to record this on the run.

Hope that helps!

~~~
gridspy
You should also remember the choices made in the past and offer them with one-
click actions. I cycle every morning and night and I often eat the same things
over the course of each fortnight.

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emmett
This is a good idea, but the execution is lacking. In particular, the data
entry is really painful. There are two big problems:

1\. I have to somehow know the calorie counts for every exercise I do and
every food I eat. You should let me input the activity/food and calculate the
calories.

2\. I am not in front of my computer all day. In particular, when I'm
exercising and eating I'm not. And that's exactly when I want to add data to a
service like this. You need an iPhone app, not a web app.

------
cullenking
I like the idea! Looks like most of your reviews are from men, and their style
advice is to lose the pink for a guy version. I agree this is a good idea, but
I'd like to give a woman's perspective (even though I am not a woman). My
girlfriend, her sister and my mom all recently vetoed the dark gray from my
website. The male audience seems to respond to it, but the females find it
dreary/oppressive. They recommended going lighter, if grey at all.

Anyway, I like the site and linked to it from the company blog. It's not much
traffic at this point, however some of our cyclists will probably enjoy
checking it out!

------
sarasioux
You're all so completely right about providing default food & exercise calorie
totals for people, it's not acceptable to have to Google for that. But it's a
lot of data to scrape and organize so I saved it for a later release. I love
all of your feedback, thank you so much, I'll probably implement most of these
things.

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judofyr
My first thought: What should I do here? Ooooh, two shiny buttons! _tries
one_. Huh? Oh, I should probably start in that tiny, tiny bar…

~~~
levirosol
pretty much how my first interaction went too.

I also thought it was odd that the "you should upgrade here" balloon pointed
at my status bar.

before i would sign up (and 2.99 seems fair. doubt i would pay more) i would
want to see some reports, and i would want an android app that is equally as
easy to use.

------
cnlwsu
With chrome I can only use 1 digit for the inches in height (could not enter
5'11")

~~~
nzmsv
Same in Firefox

------
tynman
I'd recommend an intermediary step between free and subscription. Today I'll
go there once to check it out and provide a review, but unless you sell me
RIGHT NOW I'm gone as a customer.

Maybe it keeps track of my profile (height, weight, age, etc.), but doesn't
keep a history of what I eat or what I do. That way I keep coming back to it,
and it gets me hooked on using your site.

Or maybe you track my history, but doesn't let me see the reports. Until I'm
invested it your site, it's Yet Another diet and exercise tracking tool. With
a slick purple interface for setting up my profile.

The easy profile setup is a good way to introduce yourself. As others have
pointed out, though, the food and exercise entry is the weak at best. That's
the part people will be using daily, and until you have me sold on that
feature I can't see myself signing up for a trial account, let committing to a
subscription.

[edit] On a side note, at least have a cookie to save the user's profile for
20 minutes. I clicked on the bar graph icon to see what it does, and it
promptly erased all the work I'd put in. You're not selling me on the security
of my data! :-)

------
aantix
I like the idea, but the nutritional/exercise guidelines should be re-
evaluated.

Caloric deficits don't work well for long term weight loss because the body
has a tendency to move towards homeostasis.

It'd be nice to see something that tracks carbs closer and with an emphasis on
hit intensity interval training (to promote GH release) with less emphasis on
steady state cardio.

~~~
blhack
>Caloric deficits don't work well for long term weight loss because the body
has a tendency to move towards homeostasis.

Can you cite this? I've lost a lot of weight and kept all of it off by really
really drastically cutting my caloric intake.

This is something that I've never gotten: if your body could do the same work
as it does with 3000 calories but only use 500, why wouldn't it do that all
the time?

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martian
Not sure why I should upgrade...? I clicked the button and it took me to a
PayPal checkout link. There should be some intermediate step describing the
benefits. Sell me!

------
allenp
I know this feedback isn't very critical - but I really like it a lot. I like
the design. It is really nice to have the sliders for the goals rather than
putting in numbers. There is a more malleable feel to it than just crunching
numbers in a spreadsheet. It does feel like it would fit a wide variety of
lifestyles/goals which I think is encouraging to new users. I thought the
tooltips were great for exploring the different components of the page and
what they did.

I'm assuming that you will do some work to make the input for food and
exercise more automated?

------
kevinholesh
Go easy on the help tooltip pop-up things. It's unexpected and does more to
startle me than help me.

The text is too long. Shorten the tooltips to a sentence.

Also, add a slight delay to the tooltips:
[http://snipplr.com/view/4163/highlight-menu-on-hover-with-
de...](http://snipplr.com/view/4163/highlight-menu-on-hover-with-delay-and-
display-submenu/)

------
davidw
The color scheme screams "for women", but I think there are plenty of men who
would like to lose weight.

I guess you could look at that two ways:

* The site is 'opinionated' and has decided to focus on female users.

* You're tossing half of your potential user base out the window.

------
pmsaue0
Cool idea and neat sliders and calculation execution! I agree with most others
who say that it's not clear in the first 2 seconds what to do. Perhaps in the
header:

h1: weight loss calculator h2: easily plan your diet and exercise routine

I would recommend a numbered-list / stepwise approach for user input (all on
the same page still), instead of the all-at-once approach (which is convenient
if you know how to use it, but confusing otherwise)

Perhaps have a time indicator that says something like, "it will take 2 months
for you to lose 20 lbs at this rate"

------
zitterbewegung
Is there a guy version which just black and white and not pink?

------
almost
Very confusing, needs something telling me what to do! Us technical types can
probably work it out but what about non-technical people? Not a chance I'd
say.

Also, the "You should upgrade here" bubble just takes me to PayPal to give you
$2.99/month without describing why I'd want to do that. The fact that it's the
only bit of instruction on the page probably means it will be the first thing
clicked on for a lot of people!

------
guiseppecalzone
The moderate and diet sliding scales aren't totally clear to me. But, I
really, really like the "I ate something" / "I did something" buttons.

I'd also make it more clear that you can edit the weight, goal weight, and
age.

The question marks with text are helpful. But, ideally, no text explanation
would be necessary.

Anyway, interesting app!

------
apsurd
Does this work the same if I want to gain weight?

Maybe you should be more specific as to what exactly your application does.
"Body management" may not be enough for some people. It might be a better
marketing approach to explicitly say what your app can do. i.e. "we help you
lose weight", or "gain more mass" , etc.

------
icey
This is a project made by a friend of mine - she was looking for feedback so I
asked her to post it here.

~~~
slug
if I type "milk" in the "food and drink" and press save, I get "NaN". It also
asks for calories: shouldn't the website provide this information
automatically? Does she know about <http://www.mypyramid.gov/> ? It has all
the info and also <http://www.mypyramidtracker.gov/planner/> seems more
complete, although a bit more complex to use.

EDIT: I found many other errors in the number entry validation: height: inches
don't go more than 9; if I type 9999999999999 into the calories intake, I get
funny values in the deficit, etc. let's hope it doesn't have some misplaced '
;)

~~~
sarasioux
I'll fix data validation errors ASAP, I tend to overlook those since QA-ing
your own software is kind of challenging.

That pyramid referral is the best -- the full database is there for download,
awesomeness. Thank you!

------
dzlobin
Seconding on the not-so-great color scheme. There is also a small bug on
Chrome/Ubuntu; the pop-up that comes from scrolling over the upgrade link is
transparent and the feedback link gets in the way of reading the text.

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mtinkerhess
I'm having rendering issues with Chrome on Ubuntu. The text boxes for current
weight, goal weight etc. show up under the labels instead of to their right,
and are mostly hidden and hard to click on. Firefox works fine.

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boundlessdreamz
please add metric options also

~~~
ugh
Best would be to make that automatic depending on location.

~~~
cullenking
Disagree with this if it's the only way this feature is set. I'd say making
the initial default based on the user agent language preference, however,
there will be people that would like to change this...I prefer metric units
personally despite being in the US.

~~~
ugh
Sure.

------
blhack
I sortof like the idea of this website, but I cannot for the life of me figure
out how to use it.

Maybe I'm missing the point?

It's for tracking how much you eat and work out, right?

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MrSafe
You may consider adding a tag line describing what the site is about. I
couldn't really tell what I should do.

The tool tips where too long and I didn't read past a sentence or two.

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hockeybias
Nice!

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hansxyz
Losing weight by eating less calories and / or exercising doesn't work. It's
just a popular myth.

~~~
gridspy
Obviously you are a perpetual motion machine. It works fine for everyone else.

