My employer recently started a company fitness challenge in the form of a daily steps competition. They decided to use ‘The Outbreak’, a mobile app that gamifies getting steps. Installing the application was the easiest part of interacting with the application.

Read more: Using Fix Health’s ‘The Outbreak’ is a Pain

The UI

The first time you open every view, you are drowned in a deluge of “helpful” notifications, explaining how to use the app in such baby steps that even a braindead monkey could use the application. Even Clippy was not as annoying. Fix Health: Treat your users like they have at least two IQ points to rub together.

The interface is kludgy, requiring users to click on avatars to see information instead of providing helpful team rosters. It’s as if the UI team took the “what not to do” rules, and then discarded them. Everything you’d like to know is obscured behind an unusable collection of touches and swipes.

Manually Uploading Steps

The unholiest of transgressions is that this fitness application requires you to log in every day to upload your steps. This lack of automation is inexcusable; any modern fitness application will automatically import your steps from your mobile device’s native health app.

There is one, and only one, reason for this decision. By requiring users to log in and upload their steps every day (oh, and if you forget one day, you get no credit for that day’s steps), they are driving the one metric that drives modern application development. It’s all to make sure they have a captive audience of Daily Active Users.

This application is transparently manipulative, incurring the ire of coworkers on your team if you miss an upload, regardless of if you did the work and got the steps. This is a disgusting practice, and to my mind, immediately disqualifies this application as a viable or appropriate platform for company fitness.