Ask HN: Doing research on a fitness-tracker app. What features would you want?

[brown9-2]

As a side project, I am trying to build a "better" webapp for tracking personal fitness, nutrition, goals, activities, etc.

I've tried several sites (DailyBurn, FitDay, DailyMile, LiveStrong, etc) and I've found that each seems to be missing a few features that I would like to see.<p>My initial goal is to be able to build something that is useful for me and fits my goals (track workouts, graph my progress over time, easily be able to enter nutrition info, but not be forced into pre-defined concepts of how I want to breakdown what I want to track).

As a community of like-minded individuals, I'm really curious what other HN readers - who I figure have likely tried many of the same webapps out there, and have the same interest in being able to track their data - would be interested in seeing from such a webapp.

Would you mind taking a survey I've put together about your experiences with fitness/nutrition webapps, what you liked, what you found lacking, and what features you would want in a perfect tool for this? The survey is at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R3XVVKB

Thanks!

[ABrandt]

Like ryanelkins, I only answered the first 2 questions in the survey because the rest didn't really pertain to me. I've checked out many of those apps but never became a real user. That being said, there are a couple of things that I think could be killer features.

On the working out side, I want an app that intelligently tracks what I'm doing. For example, I could strap it on my arm while I bench press, and the accelerometer detects my reps etc. Not a trivial thing to do, but for me this would be incredible.

As far as nutrition goes, I've often dreamed about a service that taps into credit card purchases (via Yodlee API) to give a rough estimate of nutritional intake. For example, a purchase total of $6.47 at Taco Bell could be items X, Y, or Z which has an average of 650 calories. Once again, not a trivial problem to solve but very very valuable. Good luck, once you get an MVP I would love to test it out.

[ryanelkins]

I tried to take the survey but I guess you really only want responses from people who has used these sorts of apps before (which is fine). I answered 'No' to the first two, which means there is really no answer fro the next 3, which were all required.

The only experience I have with something like this is when I lift weights. I write out everything I want to do in a note pad beforehand, then I record my actual results - exercise, sets, reps, weight. I use it to remember where I am and how I can improve. If I want to graph this to see progress in a particular exercise I then have to manually enter it all into something like Excel.

It would be nice to be able to set clear goals - both short term, medium term, and long term, and track my progress towards them. It would be nice to receive encouragement along the way. Especially for those who work out alone, to give a little boost to the motivation level.

[brown9-2 → ryanelkins]

I tried to take the survey but I guess you really only want responses from people who has used these sorts of apps before (which is fine). I answered 'No' to the first two, which means there is really no answer fro the next 3, which were all required.

Thanks for the feedback, this should be corrected now.

[desigooner]

Clickable: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R3XVVKB