Health and wellness improvement has become the major application for the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Fitness trackers and new smartphones are including a bunch of sensors and applications that allow users to track daily activity, calories burned, water consumption, sleep & weight. Nudge gathers data from fitness tracking apps, allowing users to understand their own overall wellness in one app and simplifying the tracking of non- automatable tasks, like food and water consumption, with an approach that prioritizes simplicity over precision.
The first screen gives the user the “Nudge factor” which is a 30-day snapshot of how healthy you have been living. It includes 4 health factors: nutrition, hydration, sleep and activity. By touching on the nudge factor, users can get some information about how good or bad are their scores and get some overall sense of their performance.
A menu on the left allows users to access a series of options, including the home dashboard, log, clubs, profile and settings. While it is using the “sandwich” icon, it is not difficult to find or to understand its functionality.
The logging screen is where the simplicity approach is very interesting. In terms of healthy habits, it doesn’t matter if you are eating apples or bananas, what does matter is if you are preferring fruits over fast food, and of course if the portion size and amounts are reasonable. Nudge offers in one screen the possibility of logging food, sleep and water consumption. In terms of usability, the one screen approach really facilitates the process, but there are some issues with the hierarchy and feedback to the user: First, the top 4 “buttons”are a summary for the day, and they are not touchable, but they follow the same design standard than the rest of the screen. In terms of hierarchy, it was confusing to see the indulgences category separated from food, but after learning about it doesn’t represent a important frustration. (Update: some of these details were solved in the new version launched today)
Each category es editable (from the previous screen, the edit “link” is accesible on the category bar) . It is questionable if the edit button is confusing or not in that position and if its repetition on the screen is a bad design or not. Maybe placing a general edit button for choosing the elements are going to be logged can be a solution for this detail.
I’ve been testing several of these QS apps, and the main problem that I found on them is that they use the phone reminders to try to make you drink more water, or do more workouts. They had a really good short-term impact in my own behavior, but I had to uninstall them after a couple of weeks. I also started to discard almost every of these reminders. Another problem is that some apps are really good in some aspects, like fitness tracking, but not good in terms of fitness motivation or food tracking. For example, MapMyFitness is very good tracking at running tracking, even when some of the screens are confusing, but tracking food in the app requires at seven “clicks” for logging a fruit. Nudge is not constantly trying to reminder you to do things, but instead it offers the possibility of logging three days back. The simplicity and the not enforced commitment are the most important characteristics for Nudge.
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