There are a lot of fitness tools out there, and I mean a lot. They can track everything from the frequency at which you workout to the level of effort you put into each lift. They come on ipods, probably ipads, computers, cell phones etc. But in my personal opinion - they’re all just too much for me.

At the end of the day, the only thing I care about is how much I lifted today, and how much I lifted 6 months ago. I want to see if the weights I’m lifting now are heavier, if I’m plateauing, if I’m gaining at a steady rate. I want to see if I’m getting stronger in one muscle and not another. It should be relatively simple - the only data I need is the weight I lifted.

This is why I recently built liftrr.com. It only tracks a few exercises (after a quick survey - I determined these were the ones people cared most about) - but all you need to do is enter the maximum weight you lifted on the site, each time you lift. It takes less than a minute, is easy to do, and gives you some really great charts to visualize your progress.

Whats the real benefit though? Besides the ease of use, and the neato charts - the benefit is charting multiple exercises on one graph and being able to compare your progress across exercises and muscles groups.

This is of course just the beggining of the site however, so I’ll be adding some deeper statistics as I get more data points, but for now its really just about keeping it dead simple.

Also, I’d love to hear any thoughts/feedback etc.

Thanks!

-Nash

As a user-interface designer I sometimes have illusions of grander. What I mean is, I’ll be provided a task/project/goal etc. - and design out some fantasy of what it could be. This is generally an issue, because for designers - design is easy. Developing a back-end to meet that design is truly the challenge, and generally much more time consuming.

Now that we’ve established that coding generally takes longer than design - the goal becomes to release simplified versions of a product - meaning we need more simplified UIs to match those releases. This enables a company & product to be agile (google it).So, why design the “vision/fantasy” first if its so impossible to complete or use as the first release? Because by doing so, you’re essentially creating a product road map for yourself and your team. If everyone understands where you’d like to end up by step 10, steps 1-9 become much more clear.

That said, I find its best to scale down my designs to a first release candidate, second etc. working with developers to decide which pieces of the design can fit in the functionality with each release. The enables the agile environment many web companies now work in to the thrive, as well as keeping everyone on track towards the same goals.

What techniques do you use to keep your team and vision on track?

Often in branding today (especially regarding online businesses), slogans are forgotten, left behind, or simply never created. Is this because they’re not effective, out of style, or just not minimalistic enough for lets say… Google (which is informally “Don’t be evil”)?

Of course, the most important time for a slogan is during the launch of a business, or the reinvention - when you’re trying to deliver a message. So then the question becomes, after how long is it appropriate to drop the accompanying tag-line?

I don’t know the right answer to this question, but I think there is a unique amount of power a slogan can hold - which is currently being lost. From my experience, a start-up I helped to create during college (MenuMunchies.com) maybe gained as much of a following as it did solely because of its slogan.

The site which provided food menus to the late night crowd read:

“MenuMunches - Sometimes, you just get mad hungry”

The people ate it up! They thought it was hysterical, and 3/4 of the school we launched at used the site (and a good amount still does). You’re probably saying, “there’s no way you can attribute the success of a web site which actually provided useful information to a funny slogan.” Well, you’re right, but I can think it certainly helped them to remember it and come back. It’s impact created a positive first impression.

Regardless, of my previous example, it makes me wonder how many apps, and projects are released today, “slogan-less” that could be gaining something from having one.

I’d love to hear your app’s slogan in the comments - or any thoughts you may have!

I saw this tweet today: “user: We’ve sent 11 newsletters to our users in the past 12 months. The click % has dropped from 29% to 6%. How shitty is that?”

Obviously, something is changing - and I doubt its their business or following. I think twitter as a form of social and corporate interaction, is revolutionizing the way we’re informed about our favorite brands and businesses. Its direct, short, simple, and immediate. If I’m following a company’s twitter, and maybe some of its employees - do I really have time to read the monthly newsletter? Probably. But, what are the chances it’ll have anything new to tell me? Slim to none.

Twitter is one of the first, if not the only social networks where people/customers really do want to interect with businesses which they may use, or follow for whatever reason. I use it more for business than for friends - and I bet so do most of the people who are still posting on Twitter after 4 months.

The question I pose, is now that you may be following your favorite store/design company/auto maker etc. do you really need to get the monthly newsletter as well - or is it just becoming more fuel for your spam folder?