Athlo Blog

The Athlo development team is hard at work improving the way you get feedback when you generate training plans.  We feel confident that the plans we are generating for you are good plans, but sometimes convincing you of that is harder than you might think.  To better communicate the output of our training algorithms, we’re trying to think of good, yet simple ways to let you know what we’re giving you.  For example, consider this new chart for marathon training plans:

There is a lot going on in a training plan: weekly cycles, multiple phases, rest plan consideration, workouts per week, etc.  We’ve taken a few shots at what we think works, but we’d love to know what’s important to you.  How do you look at a plan to tell if you like it?  Do you want all the details?  Are you looking for trends?  Do you compare to other data?  Let us know what you need when you look at our dynamic (and free) plans and we’ll do our best to accomidate.

In more subtle news, we’ve been busy tweaking the front end to give you a little more pleasant user experience.  MSIE 6 users should notice an incredibly better and more functional interface on the calendar page.  All users will find friend summaries now on their home page as well as quick links to see what’s hot on the blog.  Another simple but nice feature we’ve added is the ability to copy your friends calendar entries.  Simply view their calendar, click on an event, and one-click will add it to your calendar.

We’ve got a lot of momentum going right now on the development team.  We’re excited about what’s coming in the weeks ahead.  Keep hitting refresh and we’ll keep writing code!

We’ve done some serious house cleaning on the personalized home pages.  The biggest and most obvious change is the addition of the “What’s New” column that documents what the people in your network are up to.  Each day, your active friends will show up in this column with snippets about what they’re up to and links to more detailed information.  For now it only shows when people log workouts and add friends, but over the next week we’ll add several more types of logs to keep you informed with who’s doing what.

A more subtle enhancement is the friends page.  We’ve added tabs to let you quickly view all of your friends, who’s active, who’s local, and who hasn’t accepted your friend request yet.  Moreover, we’ve added some nice controls to make it easy for you to expand the friend boxes and get more information.

We hope you like the changes.  As always, send us any feedback you may have.  For you MSIE 6 users, we know there are some quirks when viewing the page with that browser.  They are at the top of our list now and we hope to roll out patches in the next few days.

We posted a few site updates over the weekend that we’d like to briefly point out as we think they make the overall site experience much cleaner.  First, we’ve added a home page for every user.  Once you’ve logged in, clicking the Athlo logo or your name will take you to your home page.  This page’s purpose is to provide you insight into the activities of your friends.  You’ll find who’s been active, who’s been on the site, and most importantly who hasn’t logged any recent workouts and is potentially getting lazy.  We’re hoping all of these things plus the features in our pipeline will help you to motivate yourself and others.

On the profile page, you’ll find a much cleaner interface for uploading images and setting your profile picture.  While not an ultra-critical feature, we’re taking the time now to make nice some of the features we slapped together early on while focused on other training features.

Lastly, we’ve added a lot more links to connect you to your friends’ profiles and training calendars throughout the site.  On your profile and training page you’ll find links to your most active friends, and on your friends pages you’ll find a new sub-menu that will allow you to easily jump between their profile and training pages.  Seeing what your friends are doing is much easier as a result.

We’ll be rolling out some more interface enhancements this week so keep checking back and poking around.