Thoughts on Other Projects: Demigod

Demigod is a stat tracking app online that allows you to track personal stats about yourself. Basically, you can track stats about your fitness, nutrition, or brain (or mental exercises). There are certainly a lot of other stat tracking apps out there, but this one tries to combine all self improvement stats into one convenient website where you can go to track everything. Their presentation did a good job of convincing me that the United States (myself included) should do a better job of tracking their nutrition and fitness, and how this site can assist in that.

The site looks very slick and it does look easy to pick out exercises for you to do for a week. It also seems that it does encourage you to do these exercises by "leveling up" your character the more stuff you do. This gives you a sense of accomplishment when you finish one of the challenges and puts it permanently into your profile, making you want to do another challenge for the next week. I think it's really cool how they split the challenges into three categories (nutrition, fitness, brain). This makes it easy for someone who's really only interested in one of these things to still use the website. The site even has challenges for quitting smoking, or other unhealthy vices, which seems really nifty.

My main problem with the site is that it requires manual data entry on your computer, i.e. you have to log on to the site on your computer and enter that you actually followed up on the challenges. The problem with this is it makes people not want to use it if they did do a challenge but forgot to input that they did. Or if they don't use the computer much, it can be tough. I really do think this should be a mobile app. It's easier for people to pull out their phone right after working out or something and entering that they did than it is to log in at home. However, this is a very minor complaint. Most people who wouldn't want to enter their stats on the computer probably wouldn't sign up for it in the first place so it is unlikely a target demographic.

Overall, this is a very nifty app. I could see myself using this if I was trying to get a bit healthier, which I may need to do. The team worked super hard on the site, and it definitely shows, it looks very polished and professional. Watch out for these guys at the final presentation.