Was Gruve Released Prematurely?

My wife (then girlfriend) and I used to be huge fans of Sport Brain back in 2001. We used them every day, joined a bunch of their different online challenges, and participated in the motivation groups within the community as well. It was a way for us to compete between ourselves and others all while having fun in the process. It got so competitive at times that my wife’s colleagues at work would make fun of her for doing laps around the lab to pass her downtime. If the Sport Brain service and website hadn’t fallen by the wayside and if they had grown the product I don’t doubt we’d still be members.

Last week I picked up one of the new Gruve Solution devices from a friend hoping for that same Sport Brain like community, challenges, and a fun little gadget to make getting healthy even more enjoyable. What I got instead was some pretty little graphs that let me see when I moved and when I didn’t along with some elementary suggestions on how many calories I should consume. Really, that’s it?

Not only was there no community, no challenges, and no depth to their site … you couldn’t even click for details on the why’s or how’s they suggested your daily calories, your couldn’t share you data, export your data, or track anything else like food or exercise on the site related to your fitness. I have to admit I was a bit confused where the meat of the product was.

Maybe I should step back a bit. The concept behind the Gruve is that N.E.A.T (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) is the key to losing weight. According to Muve (the makers of the Gruve) it’s about what happens during the entire 24 hour period of your day more than the food or the exercise specific activities. This might explain why it failed to register weight training, barely registered my circuit training, and seemed to have trouble registering any of my bike rides. Sure it registered runs and walks but so does a $10 pedometer and those don’t require an annual contract. But it’s about the rest of the day right? I guess …

Well lets talk about one of the decent things I mentioned above, the graphs that their site produces. You can see a month, week, day, hour, and minute graph of your data showing “estimated” calories burned, all in full color. It’s unfortunate that there are no comparison features available that let you see your data relative to your age or social group. Without any comparison features all it tells you is Green is “good” and Red is ”bad.” … wow that’s N.E.A.T.

I know I may seem a bit harsh right now but without having much meat to review I’m kinda at a loss so here are a few suggestions I have for Muve to make the Gruve Solution device more appealing and functional for their users:

• Drop the price, seriously, $200 is an iPod Touch with Nike+ built in and their website doesn’t have annual fees. Bring it down to like $50 – $70 even if it’s all via referrals from existing Gruve users. They could earn their annual fees by recommending friends that sign up. As an aside, I did not pay that much for mine. I essentially paid for shipping & handling from my friend and that’s about it.
• Invest seriously in your community building adding challenges, community groups, and forums. Social media is huge now days, take some hints from the Daily Mile and Traineo. You’ve already invested in a twitter presence and updates, now take to the next level.
• Create widgets that people can embed within their webpages / blogs to show their Gruve data.
• If your not going to invest in your site you have to strike some deals with other websites like Daily Mile to import the Gruve data into their site so people can track their information somewhere useful. While your at it a data export option would be nice.
• Improving the accuracy of the product itself. The fact that it barely registers exercises like circuit training or bike rides are huge negatives. Not everyone is just a runner and for $200 I was expecting more. I know N.E.A.T. isn’t about exercise but I think people are expecting this from the device and/or site, especially at this price point.
• Get that Mac client out soon, your wired online contingent contains a lot of Mac users most of which aren’t as savvy as I am to have VM Ware installed. I’m guessing your delay is tied to your use of the .NET runtime and I certainly hope your not going to require installing Mono on our Macs to run the client.
• Add a knowledge base behind your recommendations of calories otherwise they seem baseless. Even if your just using BMR at least say and show that information somewhere.
• Add a disclosure or notice somewhere on your Health Information page saying how your not going to sell or misuse this information. I can click through the privacy policy and dig but it can and should be much clearer to the user.
• You allow stats entry for users but don’t seem to do anything with it. Why not offer the ability to overlay your weight or health changes over time with the Gruve data? At least then it wouldn’t seem like we’re giving data into a bottomless pit.
• I know it’s a small thing, but please add the ability to remember my login and password. I can’t tell you how annoying it is typing that every single time. I know it’s a nitpick but usability is the collection of small interactions that make a better experience for the end user.

I have (and still do) high hopes for this little gadget and am awaiting their Mac software release this summer (booting daily into VM Ware is unacceptable). I certainly don’t think in it’s current incarnation that it’s worth $200, I’d hold off on the Gruve until it gets some meat. I’m certain the Gruve can succeed eventually once it gains some much needed features, it just seems like it was released prematurely and is missing the website polish and the social media plan you’d expect at this price point.

Without addressing these short comings I’m afraid the Gruve is just going to be another flash in the fitness gadget night.

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