HeiaHeia team blog

Impacts of seasonality, weather conditions, weekly rhythm, and gender are obvious in how people exercise.

Image source: skisport.fi

Helsingin Sanomat, the largest subscription newspaper of the Nordic countries, covered HeiaHeia.com in their feature “Hikiset tilastot” (i.e. “Sweaty statistics”, NYT, 24th February). The main question raised in the story: what kind of conclusions could be drawn on the national wellbeing of Finland based on HeiaHeia’s stats? We have over 100000 Finnish users (5% of working age population), which gives some ground to this kind of analysis. As said in the article, “only zeros are missing from our stats”, otherwise our users range from “physical rehab groups to olympic level athletes”.

Inspired by the article, here are a few fun stats on what happened among our Finnish users in 2011.

Seasonality:

People clearly do not exercise evenly all around the year. Anybody, who’s been to a gym or a swimming pool in the beginning of January, has seen the effect of New Year’s resolutions. Other clear phenomena: people take it easy during vacations, Finns slow down during the “dark season”, i.e. last three months of the year.  This happens, even though exercising would help you fight S.A.D., the depression caused by the lack of sunlight. The following yearly graph was plotted with over 4.5 million data points, so the basic variations between days & months do carry some weight.

On a weekly level, it looks clear that people tend to exercise most on Mondays and Tuesdays, and then again on weekends.

December 2010 vs December 2011:

The climate in Finland was very different in December 2010 compared to December 2011. In 2010, winter started early: in Helsinki on 17th November. In 2011-12, winter started over 1,5 months later: in Helsinki on 6th January. The effect on the popularity of winter sports in Finland was as huge as it is self-evident (it’s hard to ski with no snow ).

Women vs men: top sports

Women are clearly more casual in what they consider to be an exercise. Note to the guys: always pushing at 100% is not the most effective way to exercise! . A noteworthy thing in the top 10 lists is that both men and women have both running and jogging in the top lists, runners and joggers clearly are two different tribes! Also, it is somewhat surprising, that stretching makes it to top 10 also on the men’s list.

Dear users and friends,

We launched HeiaHeia.com exactly two years ago, on 21st December 2009!

Here are some nice highlights from our second year of operations – it sure was a busy year:

- WIRED UK listed us as one of Europe’s hottest start-ups!

- We won the “MTL Communications Award” (PR in Finnish) for the best B2C communications campaign in Finland in 2011 (actually tied with Finnair’s “Rethink Quality” campaign – Finnair’s campaign went on to also win at the European Excellence Awards, which we didn’t apply for ; )

- We started 2011 with a major update to the service: e.g. the current “activity meter” in the top of the page was launched then

- We ran several user surveys to understand better, to what direction we should develop HeiaHeia

- We launched a major update to the “Stats” view – the stats enable you to re-enjoy your past activities, as well as e.g. track your progress in any given sport type

- We launched a corporate wellbeing view to HeiaHeia, already used by dozens of organizations in about ten different countries, and growing fast

- We launched a pilot project with the Finnish Defence Forces (PR in Finnish), aiming to improve the physical condition of 18-year-old conscripts before they join the army

- Towards the end of the year, we launched two major updates: An “easy training program generator” in co-operation with Fazer and SATS, enabling you to create a training program tailored to you with just a few clicks! Also, we launched a “New Sport Wizard“, enabling you to create your own sport types in HeiaHeia. The new sport queue (we review and if needed, translate all new sports) is currently about 2000 new sport types long! (many of them doubles ; ). We’re pushing to empty the queue by the new year!

- The service has been growing fast all through the year, also through the darkest autumn/winter days in the northern hemisphere. ; )

- We’ve received and heard hundreds of awesome “feel-good stories” from users, ranging from “reaching your sporty targets” to “rehabilitating yourself after a surgery with the help of peer-motivation” and “losing 16 kilos”. A big thank you for sharing these stories with us!

- We’ve also gone through some “growing pains” during the year, related e.g. to overload situations – thanks for your patience as we work through these, and also a big thanks for all bug reports, comments, suggestions, and ideas!

Next on our agenda:

- We’re going to further improve HeiaHeia by introducing new and fine-tuning the existing, based mostly on the top requests from our user surveys

- We’ll be launching some very cool commercial co-operations soon

- Our corporate wellbeing tools develop all the time with the idea of “community motivation”

Finally, we’d like to say a warm-hearted Thank You for all of our users and friends for our first two years! Have a very relaxing holiday season and a sporty 2012!

- The HeiaHeia Team

PS. We think the best New Year’s resolution this year will be to start 2012 with a tailored training program in HeiaHeia! ; )

HeiaHeia.com, Fazer (the #1 consumer brand in Finland), and SATS (the #1 Fitness Center Chain in Northern Europe) have teamed up to create a super-simple way to create a training program tailored for your personal needs.

A feature asked for by thousands of HeiaHeia users, the training program generator is an easy way to create a training program that fits your own activity profile, and is a natural part of your social training log on HeiaHeia. The first programs on the system have been created by SATS, the leading fitness center group in Northern Europe with over 300 000 members. The use of these programs, as well as HeiaHeia.com, is free of charge.

A great reason to try out a training program could be your New Year’s resolution: promise yourself to go through a 2-month Gym program or a 1-month “Getting started” program – we promise you’ll feel good about yourself afterwards! ; )

Here’s how to use it:

#1 Click the new icon in “Extras”

#2 Select what kind of a program you want

#3 Fill in your details and assess your fitness level by answering three simple questions

#4 Pick how hard you want the program to be

#5 Choose when you want to start (note: the programs have been designed for a weekly rhythm, so it’s best to start on a Monday)

#6 Preview your program: each week has a theme (each exercise is described in more detail when you click it open later on in your training log)

#7 You are ready to start!

#8 Using the program is easy: all the planned entries have been entered to your training log. As a given exercise “happens”, just click to make an entry as you normally do – you are then asked, if you want to approve / edit / remove this planned entry.

#9 Deleting a program: you can delete a full training program by clicking it open from your training log timeline, and then clicking “Delete”

Please note: do not risk your health by following a program and not listening to your body! If you feel tired or ill, remember to rest adequately. You can always remove and restart a program.

The programs are at this point available in two languages: Finnish and English. I.e. if you use HeiaHeia in Swedish, German, Spanish, Italian, or Russian, you’ll be shown the programs in English.

All feedback on the programs and anything else is very much appreciated! Also, please tell us if you’d like to see other kinds of programs in this tool.

We carried out a user survey in August 2011, asking HeiaHeia.com’s users 11 simple questions. These questions ranged from our users’ physical activity before and after taking HeiaHeia into use, into wishlists on how to develop the service further, and key fixes required for HeiaHeia as it is. We got an amazing 1032 answers in a couple of days, at which point we figured out that the results are representative, they won’t change much even if we get 2-3 times more answers. Thanks again for everybody who answered (or was going to ; )!

After the survey, we crunched, prioritized, and visualized the answers. Here are some of the highlights:

“I move more since using HeiaHeia”:

This one is truly humbling. The results, especially among people who have not moved that much, are just spectacular. Splitting people into three categories, a staggering 80% of previously insufficiently active people have moved more since taking HeiaHeia into use. As an example case, a physical rehab group (people who had health issues due to physical inactivity) have sticked together for 18 months in HeiaHeia since their initial 2-week rehab camp, and “are moving like crazy just because HeiaHeia exists”. We’ve also been told numerous unbelievably inspiring stories on weight loss and getting in shape after surgical operations with the help of support and cheering from friends, family, and colleagues, enabled by HeiaHeia.

Also in the more active user groups, the results are awesome: out of previously moderately active people, 67% move more since taking HeiaHeia into use. Even in the group of already active people, 33% move more since using HeiaHeia.

Wishlist:

The most popular user requests for developing HeiaHeia further were the following:

#1 (with a clear margin!): More statistics
Users would like to get more fun & informative things out from their training logs, as well as a clearer split between “functional exercise” and “fitness exercise”. We’re creating new stats concepts based on the feedback as we speak. This is not a simple task, as creating simplicity requires a lot of work, so we cannot promise a fixed schedule for these improvements. ; )

#2: Training Programs
Ha! Something exciting is just around the corner regarding this one!

#3: More activity types
We’ve been absolutely buried with new sport requests and have not been able to process them timely. Apologies to everyone affected! The solution: we’re currently rebuilding the way we manage our activity types – we will give our users a way to create new sports themselves (to maintain good taste, we will screen the results though ; ).

Besides this top 3, we got hundreds of other ideas and requests also. Many of these are (now) in our plans, so thanks for each one of them!

Fixes required:

Key problems with HeiaHeia’s usefulness as is:

#1: Performance on IE7 , e.g. “stop running script” prompt by the browser
First fixes are implemented already, and we’ll keep an eye on IE7 going forward. If you have IE7 on your computer, we recommend you to update your browser e.g. to a later version of IE, Firefox, or Chrome.

#2: Speed of loading the training log (especially with lots of data)
We have clear plans for improving this.

#3: Usability with Facebook
The most common case here is simply forgetting, if you registered with FB or HeiaHeia login. Also, our FB sharing can be simplified even more. Concrete action: We’ll be updating several of our FB related prompts and help texts to improve our FB experience.

Conclusions:

To conclude, the survey results were very inspiring and give us a lot of clear directions for further improving HeiaHeia. Thanks once again for everyone involved! As always, you can send us further feedback at heia(at)heiaheia.com. All messages will be read, even if we don’t always have the time to answer all of them. ; )

We’ve just launched two very popular improvements to the stats view:

1) An all time view (shows four years at a time): here you can compare years side by side.

2) Horizontal scrolling of the stats – this enables e.g. seeing one Nordic skiing season (approximately November to March) in one view.

Besides these visible changes, we’ve been doing a lot of work “under the hood” lately, i.e. improving the performance of HeiaHeia.com, which can be experienced as shorter page loading times, especially in heavy pages like the feed and stats.

One thing we’re sorry for is that we still have a very long queue of new sport requests, we’re pushing to solve this one soon. Thanks for your patience here!

As always, all comments, feedback and requests are very much welcome!

We’ve just launched a fun bicycling campaign on HeiaHeia together with Nishiki – we’re trying to collectively cycle to the moon! And hopefully back also. ; ) A little treat for campaign participants (i.e. members of the group) from Finland: you can win your favorite Nishiki bike by choosing it on the campaign page. While bikes are only shipped to Finland, anybody can of course contribute to the good cause and enjoy the ride!

Samma på Finska: Nishiki ja HeiaHeia ovat polkaisseet käyntiin “Pyörällä Kuuhun 2011″ -kampanjan. Osallistujat (eli ryhmän jäsenet) voivat voittaa oman suosikki-Nishikinsä! Palkintopyöriä ei lähetetä Suomen ulkopuolelle, mutta kaikki voivat toki osallistua kilometrien keräämiseen ja nauttia pyöräilystä.

PRESS RELEASE
Helsinki, 12 April 2011

HeiaHeia.com and Pfizer’s Preve sign agreement
Introducing online and social media dimensions to wellness coaching

HeiaHeia.com, an online wellbeing service provider, and Preve Ltd, a Finnish subsidiary of Pfizer specialized in providing health coaching services for healthcare, have signed a service and license agreement concerning online corporate wellness services. As a result of the agreement, Preve’s customers will be able to use Preve’s health coaching concept also online.

“Users of the integrated service will have access to a personal health coach for at least three months. In addition, they will be using a customized version of the HeiaHeia online service. In the online service, the participants will be able to set personal objectives related to lifestyle changes, report daily activities and receive support and encouragement from peers”, says Jari Turpeinen, Director, Preve Ltd.

“The health coach assists the participant in setting realistic objectives that take into account personal motivation, abilities and resources. The coach also monitors the participant’s progress, motivating them to work for their goals. The coach and the participant stay in touch by regular phone calls as well as
communicating via the online service”, says Turpeinen.

“This agreement is a significant step in our strategy to build an international leader in online wellbeing services. Through this partnership we gain a unique opportunity to combine our usability and online competence with the resources and research base of the leader in health and wellness industry”, says Jussi
Räisänen, CEO and Co-Founder of HeiaHeia.com.

The partnership involves joint product development and several corporate pilots launched during spring 2011.

About Preve
Preve Ltd, a subsidiary of Pfizer Finland, develops cost-effective services for the self-care of patients with long-term conditions and for the prevention of various lifestyle-related diseases. The aim is to create wellness with new means. Preve provides services both to the health care sector and to employers, and its business is based on efficient networking. Together with partners, Preve wants to create health-promoting habits and to motivate service users to lead an even better life.

About HeiaHeia.com
HeiaHeia.com provides web and mobile services that motivate people to move more, share activities with friends, and cheer others – bringing a fun and social dimension into physical activity and wellbeing. Users can choose from over 350 activities and the workouts can be shared also on Facebook and Twitter. HeiaHeia.com’s technology offers a cost-efficient, commercially attractive way for various communities to provide engaging, customized online services for wellbeing.

English summary:

HeiaHeia has started a commercial co-operation with Fazer, one of the most respected brands in Finland. Together, we’ll be offering nutrition information to sporty people, as well as special sponsored features for members of a HeiaHeia group dedicated to Fazer’s Real bread, a unique rye bread carrying the heart symbol, awarded to wellbeing-focused nutrition products in Finland.

Suomeksi:

HeiaHeia ja Fazer ovat aloittaneet yhteistyön HeiaHeia-palvelussa erityisesti liikkujan ruokavalioon liittyvien asioiden saralla. Fazer Leipomot on Suomen johtava leipomoyritys, jonka Real-leipä on tarjonnut erinomaisen perustan liikkujan terveellisiin välipaloihin jo 20 vuotta.

Yhteistyön perustana on Fazerin Real-leivälle HeiaHeiaan luotu virallinen ryhmä. Fazer jakaa ryhmän jäsenille erilaisia makupaloja: emme paljasta vielä ihan kaikkea, mutta ryhmän jäsenet tulevat saamaan käyttöönsä mm. uusia, maukkaampia ominaisuuksia HeiaHeiaan.

Kumppanuuden myötä voimme tarjota HeiaHeian käyttäjille entistäkin hauskemman ja mielenkiintoisemman palvelun.

We’ve just crossed a very cool milestone in HeiaHeia.com – over two million exercises have been logged in the service! This means that we’ve doubled the amount of exercises in the first months of 2011 – and our growth in 2011 has been three times faster compared to the end of 2010.

Around 25% of our sports are different flavors of running, cycling and walking, and another 25% are “aerobics” of all sorts (Bodypump and Zumba are currently the most popular of these). 52% of our users are women, which highlights the gender-equal appeal of our Casual Wellbeing philosophy very nicely.

Altogether we have users from 142 countries, including Antarctica (this one might be a joke ; ).

An interesting side story: We launched the sick days feature in January, and soon 50 000 sick days have been logged. Sick days are by default private, but a lot of people publish them to their friends. Funnily enough, sick days are cheered (in a “get better soon” manner) just as much as actual exercise entries!

PS. More good news from HeiaHeia coming soon. ; )