August 2011 User Survey Results

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. ; )