I want to give it 5 stars but no app is without its kinks. This app definitely has room for improvement but is amazing for where it is at now! I have personally spent years tracking different aspects of my life such as health/ finances/ work through various methods. Virgin Pulse houses all that in 1 place, I love it. And it offers tips and advice so even better! Navigation is pretty straight forward but still not as smooth or seamless as I would like. Since it houses so much information on different topics it would be nice if the user that the ability to organize and group certain portions together at our discretion. Also color coding would be great. It currently has its own version of color coding which is not explained anywhere. I had to call and ask what ever color meant. I was so thrown off that some goals I was tracking that I was falling behind on were labeled green. Some where yellow. And others that I was doing well at were red. It made no sense. But the colors correspond to genres and not for how well you are doing on that goal. Regardless, I have my personal color preferences I would like to use. I’m excited to see this app improve and for now will be content with what it offers, as no other app/ journal/ or tracker I have ever used even comes close to this one.

I think the VP program overall is great. It encourages and reward’s participation, healthy habits, and education while giving additional interaction between employees. Unfortunately, the app design is buggy and often pretty janky. Many of the ways to earn points do not track properly and instructions for earning/participating/connecting are usually incredibly unhelpful and vague. There’s enough working point tracking to get the maximum value every quarter, but it’s pretty demotivating when you go out of your way to do an activity for the points and then VP doesn’t acknowledge it and leaves the box unchecked. An example of bad instructions within the app is the quarterly wellness screenings bonus. You can’t sign up on the app, must be on browser, and there is hardly any confirmation from VP that they know you have scheduled an appointment, or after you go, that they got your results properly. It takes a few days for them to update your charts, and the checkbox in the app never gets checked. VP Cash awarded from the check is given at the end of the quarter so there is no way of knowing you got credit until the quarter is over. Even the bonus points you get from completing the checkup are not even included in your points log. What’s even the point of the log if you are only going to log some of the earnings.

Overall does an okay job of very basic self-tracking behavior and (for me) was easy to get in the habit of entering info every day. It is limited in capability and lacks much in the way of functionality. Where it really falls short is tracking steps. I have a MaxBuzz wrist device. The app does not accurately counts steps - and sometimes just stops recording. I have noticed this in several different scenarios but especially when flying. I travel a lot for work and noticed the app gets locked up when I get off the plane. I recently got off the plane on concourse B in Atlanta and walked to baggage claim. That should have been at least 1000+ steps. Instead, it recorded zero steps. I tried turning the phone off/on but the app refused to update. This happens too often and is very frustrating. Maybe it can’t handle the phone being put into airplane mode. The app also doesn’t recognize my time zone no matter how many times I enter it in the profile; it always shows the last sync time 6 hours ahead - as in UK time. I am at home today and logged my stats first thing this morning and checked my steps through out the day but the app says last synced yesterday. This app could be so much better if they would put some effort in the development.

The app works fine. The wellness program itself is nonsense. As with other wellness programs, you can earn points by exercising, but also included is completing health “journeys”, reading daily cards about diversity and wellness and cyber security and mindfulness. The points earn entries in a quarterly raffle for prizes. You earn multiple raffle entries for the more pints you earn, a max number of 100 raffle entries for 10k points. Problem is that there is no publicity about who wins what quarterly prize. That’s because out of my company of 10,000+, 20 prizes are given out. There’s no incentive to earn more than the max of 10k points a quarter. Even with 100 entries, the odds of winning any raffle prize is only slightly better than winning the mega lotto. I earned 24k points the first quarter of the program, partly cause I completed a smoking cessation “journey” (don’t smoke, never have, wanted to see what would happen). Guess I could also complete the pregnancy wellness “journey” (I’m male). Guess they could give me the insipid response of “but the real reward is your health”. Um I already exercise. Only reason to participate in the program is to get paid. How about setting this up like the Blue Cross Blue Shield wellness program - average 7k steps a day validated by my Fitbit, earn $50 a quarter? THAT is an incentive. Discourage your company from using Virgin Pulse as a wellness program - waste of time, self defeating.