Ask HN: Please review my new site

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!

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.

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!

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.

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…

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

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! :-)

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.

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!

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?

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...

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.

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"

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

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!

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

please add metric options also

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?

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.

Nice!

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