MyVitality Sprint 4+

This app helped me in my trek to charting food and goals.

Good thing I didn’t have to pay for this app. Definitely not user friendly. Doesn’t offer much interaction. The coaches challenges really didn’t reflect in the best interest to its audience (like going out for long walks or eating outside during 20 degree weather while the coach live in the southern states) The coach didn’t seem that educated, their response was a lot of copy and paste from different resources and not really expand/explain in their own words. Not only was the app a disappointment but so was the coach. There’s a lot of work to be done.

My whole review here is not only mine but collected reviews from a handful of other users who paid money to use this App.

Here is What worked...
This app is a great concept for holding people accountable for their eating habits.
In this app, you will find an area where you have an opportunity to gain points for making healthy nutrition choices.
There is a leaderboard which will show your ranking in correspondence with the points you log daily in comparison to everyone else’s earned points. The app encourages you to break your daily routine to try new things. I thought the premise behind this design was a creative way to challenge people to make better health choices.

Here is what didn’t work...
The app has only three tabs for you to click on: POINTS, LEADERBOARD , and CHAT.

If you would like to ask the coach questions, you must do so publicly on the group chat. To speak privately with your coach you must use email or Facebook messenger. There is no easy access to your coach to chat privately within the app. Without a way to ask questions privately, it may discourage people from certain asking questions in the public chat.

In addition, within the community chat page, it’s very easy to fall behind if you are not constantly monitoring it. Important information for the challenge will be posted in the chat and is quickly lost in the mix of comments and posts. If you want to refer back to a post about nutrition information or suggestions, you have to scroll through and search the entire chat; this can be very time-consuming.

Let’s talk about earning points: to earn points you have to check boxes that you completed the tasks for the day.
You will have a healthy habit and healthy nutrition box to check off points each day along with a bonus challenge sporadically. Point calculation is solely the honor system; there is no required proof of completion for these challenges, which will inevitably take away from accountability.
The bonus challenges for the day are posted in the morning (of their due date) between 7-9am and you have the rest of that day to complete. This causes a few issues when trying to set people up for success by excluding those who start their days before 6am. For example, if the bonus challenge is an extra 30min of cardio or working out then the people who work out at 5am (and have planned their day out the night or several days before) have to stress out about fitting in an extra session. There was also a bonus challenge to shut your phone off your phone for 3 hours during a weekday. This challenge also does not set people up for success; a lot of people have jobs that require social media or have kids & therefore, cannot be asked to complete this challenge without some form of advance notice. As-is, most every challenge followed this pattern which does not account for pre-planned schedules demanded by adulthood.
However, if these daily challenges were given a set date ahead of time people could better plan, users would have the ability to achieve greater success.

I felt there was a lack of recipes shared and, maybe, I actually missed them because of the short-falls of the chat section of the app. Nothing is ‘pinned’ by the coach & users must scroll & dig for the information from the coach.
Grocery lists and team aspects were also promised to be included. I didn’t see any grocery lists. There was nowhere in the beginning to sign up your “team.” At the end, it asks who your team is.

The leaderboard in the last week is taken down so you do not get to see where you ranked at the end of the challenge-only who the top prize winners are. There was no explanation for how the prize winners were chosen.

I didn’t feel like there was any 1:1 coaching or check ins on a more personal level.

All in all, I love the idea of a community challenge, however, I feel lots of bugs need to be worked out and that I have wasted my money and time. Hope the creators of this App can make the necessary adjustments needed to transform this product to utilize its fullest potential.