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Preview HN: match-making site for food

38 points by cont4gious ↗ HN
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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, and we look forward to your feedback.

36 comments

[ 9.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread
drx
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.

Some things I've noticed so far:

* in signup, it would be nice to be able to specify meters vs feet. I had to google the conversion

* 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)

doctorj
Thanks drx. We are still struggling with trying to find a catchy name for "meal swaps". Suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Would it be interesting if users could name a meal swap after them?
desigooner
is there no way of switching the meal plans after one selects during the signup?

ALso, some of the UI is too glossy (sign up forms) to be able to easily distinguish between the selected item and other options.

doctorj
Not yet. We are working on a user profile page where this would be possible. Thanks for your feedback.
27182818284
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
doctorj
Thanks we appreciate it. Here is an insight on our design goals:

Usable Health is to food what Orbitz is to flight tickets. Usable Health is to food what Match is to finding your soulmate. Usable Health is to food what Amazon is to book recommendations.

Usable Health is not a calorie counter. Usable Health is not a health information aggregator. Usable Health is not a fad diet.

notahacker
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!

I like the basic concept and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of extending and expanding upon it.

doctorj
Thanks for pointing that out. The ranking system is a multi-dimensional algorithm that optimizes for a variety of micro and macro nutrients. Individuals with different dietary needs have different star representations / health scores for the same meal. For example for someone with hypertension that chicken sandwich will have a very poor health score.
notahacker
that's a fair enough answer. It'll help the usefulness of the app massively to be able to compound the effects of particular meal combinations over the course of time (not least to give committed users a reason to keep returning and updating their details).
dkarl
notahacker raised an interesting point about not being too harsh. Some people could benefit a lot if they cut down from a burger, fries, and a large soda to a chicken sandwich and a diet soda. If you rate the chicken sandwich 2/5, your site will just depress them. On the other hand, a knowledgeable person with aggressive goals wouldn't trust your site if you gave that chicken sandwich a higher rating. Have you thought about making the ratings relative to a person's current dietary standards?
doctorj
The ratings are currently personalized to each users nutritional profile that is created at the end of the sign up process. Our detailed sign-up process resembles a health risk assessment in which a user has to answer questions about past and existing diet related chronic diseases like diabetes and coronary artery disease.

The ratings also depend on prior choices made by the user. This means that the same meal may have a different ratings for lunch and dinner.

brianmwang
Do you intend on adding meals from non-chain restaurants? If so, how do you plan on tackling that?
doctorj
The new healthcare reform bill makes it mandatory for many more restaurant to publicly disclose their nutritional information. More can be found here http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/03/22/menu-measure-health...

It is also interesting to note that while the law will not likely go into effect for another 3-4 years, many restaurant chains are "getting out in front" of the legislation, and are beginning to offer nutritional content info on their websites even before they are required to do so.

As of now we work with local restaurants here in Atlanta and do a statistical nutritional analysis for them. Tin Drum in our featured restaurants is an example of that. In fact we are about to deploy a kiosk / ipad version of our app in the Tin Drum premises where it will be used as a health-based digital menu.

kasted
Totally been looking for a site like this, Awesome concept!
LeBlanc
Interesting application. Good luck with your launch!

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?

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.

doctorj
That is definitely doable. One of our partners describes us as a recipe database that is tethered to a personal health record.

The plus icons are the health scores. We tried to stay away from the user rating stars but in retrospect that seems to be causing more confusion that anything else.

Thanks for the good wishes.

bajsejohannes
This is a great idea! I hope you succeed in helping people eat healthy.

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?

[1] As seen in the book Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz

[2] So it is great that you have recommendations!

bajsejohannes
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)
cont4gious
This would really defeat the purpose of personalized recommendations. The test account was for a quick look at what we offer, not as a long-term solution.
bajsejohannes
Not really. What you do is create a temporary account for each session, unless one exists already. If the user chooses to create an account later, it is not really created, but the temporary account is promoted to a permanent one, and the details like username are filled in.

Again, check out stackoverflow.com. They do this.

doctorj
Unlike stackoverflow.com the food recommendations generated by Usable Health are dependent on each of the answers in the sign up process. For example someone who weighs a 100 pounds will receive different recommendations from someone who weighs 200 pounds so unfortunately there is no way of getting around the complete sign up / nutritional profile creation process.
bajsejohannes
I see! Well, then I agree that my suggestion might not be a good fit. (I was fooled by the fact that I could try it without entering any details)
jasonkester
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.

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.

There seem to be star ratings that you can click on to rate things, but clicking them does nothing.

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?

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.

doctorj
The recommendation engine takes into account the choices made prior to the current meal before making a new recommendation. You are seeing the "Looks like you selected a combo" message because someone else made a selection using the hacker account and the app will not let you select multiple meals in the same time period. This will not happen if you created an account for yourself.

There is a FAQ link in the app that addresses some of the issue you brought up and we are working on incorporating the rest. As of now the only way to go back to the home page is to hit the log out button.

jasonkester
Why not simply link the logo to the homepage? That's an affordance that every other web app in existence makes, and it was pretty surprising that you don't even have your logo linked to anything.
doctorj
Great idea and done. The logo in the app now points to the all locations page. The logo outside the app points to the company home page.
speek
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).
cont4gious
we're working on this right now, actually. We're going to support making arbitrary meal portions. Right now it's hard-coded to only 4.
yummyfajitas
Feature request: dietary options would be nice.

I'm vegetarian, but I got no suggestions without meat.

doctorj
Did you find the preferences icon in the top bar? Word of caution - please don't change the preferences on the hacker account as they would affect everyone using that demo account. Instead create an account for yourself through sign-up and get more personalized recommendations.
yummyfajitas
Found it now, and I discovered that there is no healthy food near me at restaurants I am aware of.

One more suggestion: let me give you a location and tell me about meals I can get near me (i.e., within 1/4 mile of my address, tell me the healthiest meals I can have).

doctorj
Thats an awesome idea - thanks for your feedback. We currently have a much larger database of vegetarian option in our home recipes category so you might find items with high health scores in there. Another functionality we are currently working on are cross location swaps so very soon you will be able to find healthier options in other restaurants (or home recipes) that resemble what you were planning to order at a particular restaurant.
mynegation
Very nicely done and I've been looking for something like that for a long time!

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)

rcavezza
After my profile was created, it just took me back to the home page. :-(