Introducing Gyroscope Multiplayer
We believe connecting people and creating awareness is the next big step in living healthier & happier lives.
We’ve just released a redesign of the Gyroscope dashboard, with a new multiplayer section featuring your friends and groups. In addition to your latest stats, there is now a window into what the rest of the world is doing.
After testing it with some friends for the last few months, the multiplayer experience has been so much more fun and engaging than the singleplayer view we previously had, where you only see your own history.
Friends
Adding friends is a simple and automatic way to stay connected with the people you care about. Since there is a lot of data automatically coming through, it creates some powerful transparency. For example, everyone’s steps are constantly updating throughout the day and can be seen by friends.
On the new friends page you can see who has been most active. It combines activity from a multitude of sources — whether your friends are on Fitbit, Apple Watch, Moves, Jawbone or just an iPhone, you can all now be part of the same experience. We hope that having instant access and constant awareness of this information will help motivate people to be more active & healthy.
Groups
There is a lot of data behind the scenes, but we wanted to create a very simple and intuitive group experience — one that feels like just a bunch of friends talking to each other and sharing some insights.
There are 6 different types of groups, not all for physical fitness. With a travel group you could share your latest checkins, or with productivity how much time everyone spent on their computer. We think that no matter what you want to achieve, doing it as a team with your friends is more powerful and more fun.
As you do things in the real world, they are automatically shared with the relevant group. Others in the group can then reply with emoji or by sharing their own photos.
To keep things on topic, there is no way to manually post chat messages. We figured there were already hundreds of apps to talk to people. Our goal is to create a really lightweight experience that you can spend a few minutes each day looking at, and then go out into the real world and do things.
Create a group and share the link with your friends to get started!
Behind the Scenes
Last year we released Running by Gyroscope, an app that let you add creativity to your workouts and create sharable cards.
We were amazed at the quality of posts, and the hard work people were doing every day. However, most people were basically playing a single-player game by themselves. A lot of amazing things were happening every day, but there wasn’t a way to experience that excitement.
At first, we tried featuring special content as it came in. I reposted and retweeted some when I saw them. It worked pretty well, but wasn’t enough.
The problem was that they only truly resonated when they came from people you know. An olympic athlete has infinitely more impressive stats, but seeing your friend do something is generally more relatable.
We realized we had to connect you to the people you knew, but just broadcasting to all of your friends didn’t seem like the right way either. The problem with sharing with everyone you know—whether on Gyroscope, Facebook, or Instagram—was that not everyone is interested in the same things. Having such a broad audience means you end up significantly editing and curating, only sharing the most interesting things and not the small steps and hard work that happens behind the scenes.
A shared visual language
Seeing your life in these cards creates a mental link between what you did, how you felt, and the visual representation—whether it is your daily steps or what you did online or your heart rate. This is powerful because after establishing a baseline with your own data, seeing other people’s becomes more useful and easy to parse.
Like trading cards, they turned out to be really fun to swap with people and see how the stats compared. The same view for other people was illuminating and added a lot of helpful context. It made all the info from the single-player view much more relevant.
For example, if I spent 1 hour in Slack yesterday, that is useful to be aware of. But is that more or less than my friends and coworkers? If I walked 3 hours this week, is that a good amount or did everyone else walk twice as much and I should be doing more? These are some of the types of questions we hope to easily answer by connecting people and letting them share knowledge. We think having this context is where the real life-changing insights will come from.
Leaderboards
We wanted to encourage both competition and collaboration. Fitness groups show a leaderboard for the past seven days. This means your hard work adds up over time, but new members can still rise to the top.
Competing with someone is a fun motivator, but truly winning only happens when your whole squad is doing well. If you see someone is falling behind, you could talk to them and make sure everything is ok, or invite them to go on a walk.
Different types of groups feature different content. We try to encourage regularity by showing frequency and not just distance.
Get Started
All of humanity’s most remarkable achievements have come from teams of people, communicating and collaborating with each other. We want to harness that same power to solve hard problems in our own lives. How to be more healthy, lose weight, run faster, get more work done, or explore the world — all of these can be easier and more fun as a group.
The friends & groups features are now live for all Gyroscope members—on both the website and in the app.