Activity Tracking for Teams

I’m Joost, I build prototypes, and this is a recent prototype of mine where I’m trying to figure out what to do with activity tracking especially within teams or organizations. And we spend a lot of our time at the office, and the office isn’t necessarily good for you but it could be in a way. And I think if you could somehow change people’s behaviour based on QS related data, the office would be a very nice place to do so, because you spend a lot of time in it.

Modern offices include standing desks or the environment is improving and improving but there are still lots of things that we can discover. And actually my first prototype was to find out was there was a company I was friends with and I tried to experiment with moves data, and got six people to sign up, and they were like, we’ll all carry around move for just a bit and we’ll us it.

And at the end after two months I presented to them a infographic and you’ll see it in a bit. And the infographic they actually realized that the huge amount of data that they generate, not only during like the working day but also when they’re off work. You can find out where they went on holiday, how many times they went to the grocery store, or where they were living, or how many times they were exercising and even average speeds or whether people were walking or taking a bike to the office.

And they said you know, having such a detailed information about me as a person within a company it’s quite troublesome and we don’t want to share that much amount of data. So the project got a bit out of hand.

And I cofounded CountUs, which is a platform where you can actually track stuff, so it’s Move on Jawbone and Fitbit and it’s only Steps right now because of privacy reasons and the social dynamics.

So you get your own dashboard which is really basic, but you also get the company dashboard were you can actually see what’s the total amount of steps we as a company or organization have been doing today, or we can set goals as an entire company and work as a team towards the goal or see how it’s doing in months or weeks. And you can actually put this on a wall or a screen at the coffee corner and say like, if people look up and go, you know we haven’t reached our goal today, so I might go to the grocery market nearby to get healthy food for lunch.

And those are things you can actually try to do, and for now it’s just a really basic graphs and numbers, but there are loads more you can actually do. And while building a prototype of this what I actually learned was there were many things that I didn’t expect at all.

Firstly, company culture is very important. If you do that in a small company it’s very friendly. People can communicate at friendly levels and have like friendships. While in bigger companies the hierarchy is very troublesome for example, using the data. And people have loads of ideas of what they would like to have in the dashboards like mine. They would like to have gamification, and they would like reward base buddy systems or incentives. People want to connect to company wellness programs. There’s things you can actually do with it like what are the policies on saving data from previous employees, all things that I never realized when I started doing this. But I think that is very interesting, and what I am going to do, I’m going to see whether I can make it more of addition than just a dashboard, but into really finding ways to motivate and change people’s behaviors.

But also the dashboard you’ve seen, bootstrap, really basic, it isn’t really that nice a design. I’m not a designer just a builder, but essentially I want it to look like this, a dashboard of where you can see and I think having this activity within a company would be really nice.

So I’m having a office hour after this at 1:30PM, so if you’re interested feel free to join.

Thanks.