HeiaHeia team blog

We’re thrilled to announce a development, marketing, and distribution partnership between HeiaHeia and Muuvit Adventure, an award-winning programme for aiding school children to move more and learn while doing it. The initial target markets will be Germany and Switzerland, where Muuvit co-operates with local authorities, football clubs (e.g. HSV Hamburg, VfL Wolfsburg and FC Zürich) and international organizations such as World Heart Federation and UEFA.

HeiaHeia’s unique online solutions will be combined with Muuvit Adventure’s proven excellence in motivation and learning (the Adventure is based on over a decade of experience from Finnish schools, ranked #1 in the world by PISA, with more than 1,5 million Finnish school children). The target of this partnership is to improve the wellbeing of millions of school children and their families with our joint offering.

Press release in Finnish

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve crossed half a million exercises logged on HeiaHeia.com! The 500 000th entry made in the service was “Paddling, 1h 45min”, by Hanna-Leena from Finland. A big cheer from the HeiaHeia team to Hanna-Leena!

As a snapshot of what kind of activities people log into HeiaHeia, here’s a list of the Top 10 sports from the last 30 days:

#1 Cycling
#2 Running
#3 Walking
#4 Gym
#5 Walking the dog
#6 Jogging (We love the fact that a lot of people see a mental difference between running and jogging!)
#7 Stretching
#8 Swimming
#9 BodyPump
#10 Zumba

…and a few fun picks from the long tail:

#23 Riding (a horse)
#39 Ice hockey (a new season starting soon all around the ice hockey playing world – people are back on their skates)
#46 Mushroom picking (mmmm…. outdoor activities combined with seasonal delicacies!)
#65 Beach volleyball (feels quite distant watching out our office window in the rainy Helsinki… ; )
#84 Salsa (the more generic “dancing” is in the Top 20)
#141 Open water swimming (greetings to all the swimtrekkers reading this!)
#274 Handstand (our feelings compressed in one word: wow!)

One obvious observation from this list of activities is that HeiaHeia has become a service that appeals equally to both women and men.

Another interesting development within HeiaHeia is the amount of groups: as of today, 905 different clubs, hobby groups, casual groups of friends, company wellbeing initiatives, etc, have created their own groups in HeiaHeia. We have big plans on developing our groups concept forward, to make it a more fun and useful tool for these “micro-communities” both inside and outside HeiaHeia.

HeiaHeia!

A lot of HeiaHeia’s users are utilizing Facebook in some way. Linking together the two services requires actions on both sides (which is an obvious usability challenge), so we put together a little check-list on how things work and what your options are. We will also add these tips to our Quick Guide.

There are two basic things you can do with Facebook to improve your HeiaHeia experience:

1. Using Facebook Connect to authenticate

You can use Facebook Connect to authenticate yourself in HeiaHeia. With this method, you attach your HeiaHeia account to your Facebook login. In practice, HeiaHeia will never see your login credentials, Facebook tells us that “this user is the owner of this account”. You cannot mix&match login methods after selecting one: you need to stick to the method (e.g. HeiaHeia’s “native account” or Facebook Connect) you select upon account creation in HeiaHeia.

When logging in with Facebook Connect, you need to click on the Facebook icon in our front page. After that, you need to input your Facebook login details (unless you’re already signed in to Facebook) and then ”Allow” sharing on your wall and using your data while you’re offline (this needs to be done only once).

HeiaHeia has had a relatively high share of female users ever since our launch in Christmas 2009. We think that being appealing to both genders is a key proof point of our idea: bringing positive motivation for keeping fit.

This positive motivation is driven by cheering each other and sharing positive feelings. We didn’t want to be driven e.g. by guilt or by technology, two classic drivers of fitness products and services (also many very popular services – these drivers obviously work, we just thought there would be room also for something else in the market. ; )

During the last 30 days, the gender equal trend has taken over HeiaHeia: 51% of new registered users in August were women! Big thumbs up for all of you!!! And for the men as well. ; )

Another insipiring piece of news: yesterday was our busiest day ever in terms of new user registrations, beating the old record by a clear margin.

Life’s good, HeiaHeia!

Here’s a pretty popular request: many people want to enrich their entries with maps (GPX files). We have an API for doing this automatically, which is used already e.g. by eCoach for Nokia N900 – we are working with a number of other parties, more news to follow on interoperable products!

For those who want to do this manually, we now support uploading GPX files with entries (you’ll find this option under “Show more” in relevant activities). One practical tip: if you leave the distance and duration fields empty, they’ll be auto-filled with data from the GPX file.

Comments or feedback on this? Please let us know!

Wow!!! Last week was off the charts in terms of new user registrations, exercises logged, cheers given, comments made, load on our servers, and just about everything else we measure. ; ) Thanks everybody! Exciting to see, what this week brings up…

PS. All kinds of cool new stuff is in the making, please keep on sending requests for new features & comments on old ones.

User feedback: Our user level system has been a bit unclear so far. And it’s been a bit too challenging to climb the ladders. Also, people don’t like dropping to silver after a hard-earned gold!

Addressing the first issue, here’s how it works: we’re calculating a score on your general activity in HeiaHeia with our secret formula (TM). Sources close to the matter say that at least your exercises logged, number of friends, profile completeness, cheering and commenting activity, as well as usage of more or less all other features in the service, have an effect on the score. Each level you earn gives you more special icons to cheer your friends with.

To address the other points, we’ve done a couple of changes to the system: We dropped the levels a bit. As a result, the creme de la creme will reach a completely new level: diamond! Also, as we say in Finland, “saavutetuista eduista ei tingitä”, i.e. you get to keep the levels you reach, we’re not dropping you back anymore.