usablehealth.com is my startup that I've been working on for the past year or so. We're funded through research grants from Georgia Tech. We've also partnered with restaurants, gyms, and self-insured employers and health systems. Our first official launch is Aug 9, with our second Sept 1.<p>Our algorithm uses some key metrics about you (age, height, weight, activity level) to give you the optimal meals from your favorite restaurants that will help you achieve your health goals. We also allow you to choose a starting meal, and then swap that meal out for something healthier. These recommendations are something we call "Health-Based Meal Swaps". We are trying to become the Netflix or Amazon of meal recommendations.<p>I want to give the HN community a preview before we launch. You can do this two ways, by going to http://usablehealth.com and clicking on 'Sign up for free' with the promo code 'hackernews' or you can sign in right away with a generic profile with username 'hacker' password 'news1'. This promo code and test user will be removed at the end of this week.<p>We would love your feedback about anything on the site. There is a 'Feedback' tab on the right of every page after you sign in, or you can send me an email at andre at usablehealth dot com.<p>Thanks, and we look forward to your feedback.
I was a little surprised to find a McDonalds chicken sandwich with over 50% of recommended daily salt intake (default 'hacker' settings) given a four out of five star recommendation. There's a fine line between not being too harsh about people's diet and being overly generous in ratings!<p>I like the basic concept and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of extending and expanding upon it.
Once you're logged in, there's no way to get back to the homepage to figure out what the site is supposed to be about.<p>I can click through restaurants and menu items, but there's no indication as to what is actually going on. Tooltips pop up randomly, and if you can manage to keep one on the screen, they give you a paragraph that doesn't actually explain what's going on.<p>There seem to be star ratings that you can click on to rate things, but clicking them does nothing.<p>Eventually I clicked "Select" on something, and it popped up "Looks like you selected a combo" in a javascript alert box. Was that an error? Confirmation? What next?<p>If I could make it back to the homepage, or to some form of documentation, maybe I could find out. But I can't, so I left.
It seems that there is a bug on the page:<p><a href="https://app.usablehealth.com/best_choice" rel="nofollow">https://app.usablehealth.com/best_choice</a><p>On rollover the plus signs, the tooltip box quickly disapear and we dont have the time to read it.<p>I'm on Firefox 3.6.8.
Interesting application. Good luck with your launch!<p>One thing I noticed is that it is not very clear what the little plus icons next to a recipe mean (the ones that are either gray or green). Pretty sure that represents the "health score" but is more green plus signs better?<p>Also, not all the things I was craving were on there. For example, I couldn't find any variant of steak. Would it ever be possible for the user to submit recipes from a recipe database and have your algorithms calculate its health score and then recommend other things? I feel this should be doable to a certain extent if you have the ingredient list.
I'd love to be able to modify my protocol. I don't eat carbohydrates, but protocol number 2 pretty closely matches the pattern of how I eat (though there's usually two more snacks in there that I eat).
Very nicely done and I've been looking for something like that for a long time!<p>Couple of immediate remarks:
1. Allow sign-in using e-mail in addition to user name. I am using firtsnamelastname or FLastname or sometimes something else (depending on availability) and need to remember each time my username. Remembering e-mail address is much easier
2. Unless you want to limit your addressable market to US, Liberia and Myanmar, add a possibility to specify my height and width in metric units (cms and kgs)
This is a great idea! I hope you succeed in helping people eat healthy.<p>About meal swapping, I would try to make as little emphasis on the "swapping" as possible. If people first need to think of the most delicious thing they could eat, and then get something else, they will probably be less happy than if
they just get a recommendation [1][2]. How about calling it "compare meal" instead?<p>[1] As seen in the book Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz<p>[2] So it is great that you have recommendations!
The site is interesting. I like the meal swap approach -- normally I get cravings for a particular meal so I can just put that there and get a healthy substitute -- nifty.<p>Some things I've noticed so far:<p>* in signup, it would be nice to be able to specify meters vs feet. I had to google the conversion<p>* in signup, 'inactive' looks clicked, had to think for a sec before noticing it wasn't (and the signup form wouldn't let me sign up)
I really liked going into that site and testing it out. Unfortunately, this will not be true when there is no 'hacker' account. If the site is going to be free in the future, I would definitely try to get rid of the mandatory creation of an account. How about being able to use the site (using cookies for a temporary account) and make the registration something you can do after a while? (like stackoverflow.com)
I think the idea is really interesting. Even without a link, this is one of the few show/tell HN submissions that had me raise an eyebrow. Good idea, good work
is there no way of switching the meal plans after one selects during the signup?<p>ALso, some of the UI is too glossy (sign up forms) to be able to easily distinguish between the selected item and other options.