brianmwang

You can always make the photo border a subtle off-white like #FAFAFA.

Tell your wife that the sentiment is very much appreciated.

Why do you think your motivation wanes after a few weeks? I'm genuinely curious.

I'll preface this by saying my partner and I have been actively living fitness/bodybuilding-oriented lifestyles for quite a while, so we understand the motivations behind why people use these sorts of tools.

While some people are into Fitocracy simply because of what it is now, I think many are spending time on the site for the promise of what's to come. We're still very early stage and we have a lot more planned beyond simple points and badges. Many features on our roadmap are being designed precisely to help users push themselves and keep consistently progressing in their fitness.

Appreciate the thoughts.

The 16k is total registered users at this point, though it's worth noting that we're invite only.

Thanks for the thoughts!

1. We're focusing on exercise for now as we want to make sure it's executed well. Long term we definitely envision including nutrition as well.

2. Some form of this is planned.

3. See: #2 :)

-Brian

We intend to build out functionality to let us offer programs around specific goals. The quest system is a precursor to this, but the idea is to have a fun way of offering structured guidance to the user and move them to specific outcomes.

And believe me, I'm in agreement with you about cardio. It's pretty worthless in many cases :)

We're still pretty early on in development. Fitness insights and guidance tools are absolutely planned :)

Yes, we do plan on further fleshing out the groups feature soon. One idea we're bouncing around is having a PvP style challenge system between groups, or I suppose more appropriately, GvG :)

Thanks for the feedback, dkarl.

We've had a largely positive response to our achievements system thus far but I agree that they aren't necessarily beginner friendly. We do intend on fleshing out the system more to support achievements for a greater variety of exercises (cardio, bodyweight exercises, etc).

I would vehemently disagree with the statement that it's "Facebook for gym rats" or that it doesn't provide value outside of updating your FB profile with your workout logs, but thanks for the opinion.

I don't seem to be getting this issue on Chrome / OS X. What are you running on?

I just reloaded the code with 350 more invites.

By all means :)

Hey Jayson,

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Responses below:

1) Design is certainly something I'd like to work on improving. As noted in the OP, I handle the design for Fitocracy which is a bit funny, since I was pretty much a total beginner at this process 6 months ago. We'd like to eventually have a full-time designer on board.

2) If you think it's bad now, it used to be 10x worse a month ago. I'm not even exaggerating here. That being said, better site performance is absolutely something we're working on as well.

3) UX is also a top priority that we want to hit hard on ASAP. We know there are quite a few shortcomings right now but we hope to make the experience more cohesive and simple over time.

4) You're right that the core users skew more toward people who are already quite active in working out. We've found that they're a pretty key demographic at the moment, but we do hope to make the experience more enticing and useful for absolute fitness noobs down the line.

Thanks again, Brian

Hey Jon,

You can email me at brian [at] fitocracy <dot> com.

I am indeed! I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far.

We already have quite a few bodyweight exercises on the site, though the scoring system for them is a little borked and is in need of an overhaul. Yoga is also on the site as well.

Regarding the internal server error, did that occur right after Step 2 or was it when you attempted to finish the sign-up process?

Hey, thanks for the feedback on netbook resolution. I clearly overlooked that when designing the flow on the workout tracker page. I'll try to get that fixed asap.

We freely admit that there's a heavy skew toward weightlifting on the site at the moment, but we're focusing on adding more quests/achievements around cardio and other activities quite shortly.

Duly noted. As mentioned, I'm no creative/graphics designer but we're hoping to have somebody with those talents join the team down the line.

We only use FB and Twitter for easy sign-up/sign-in. We'll be introducing posting to FB wall / tweeting workouts/achievements soon, but that will be totally optional. We'll never post to your social network accounts without your explicit permission.

Email addresses are a concern as well, of course. We won't email you unless you authorize us to do so in your account settings.

A photo isn't required for signup. You can just use the generic silhouette image for your profile image.

Image resize/distortion is something we will fix in a future update.

Hm, could've sworn that bug was fixed. We've found that trying a second time usually gets around the issue. Can you try doing so?

Clickable invite link: http://ftcy.co/jaBLMa

SEEKING WORK

My partner and I are currently bootstrapping our startup, Fitocracy (http://www.fitocracy.com) and are looking for web development contract work either in the NY area or remotely.

We cover everything from wireframes and Photoshop mockup designs, to user flows and interactions, to fully fleshed out web apps using plenty of Python/Django, HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Contact at bri.m.wang@gmail.com

I would argue that all those things I listed do in fact comprise much of what we understand as usability. Proper layout and good information architecture are built hand in hand with good alignment, consistency, readable fonts, and colors that work well together for the overall design. In order for interfaces to be understandable and easy to use, as well as enable the user to complete the desired objectives, all of the factors I mentioned have to be taken into account.

You may say that these factors aren't noticed by the 99% but have you ever heard somebody utter the phrase, "I don't know what's wrong with this, but I just don't like the way it looks?" That's a "99% phrase" but it comes from a very real place and can be easily avoided.

Are you really arguing that alignment, consistency, appropriate typography, non-mediocre use of color, and more broadly, overall usability are only relevant to 1% of web users?

The amazing part of this anecdote is that she didn't declare this to you in person.