First up, the good stuff.
The thing I love the most about Nike+ is that it gives me so many extra reasons to feel motivated to go for a run: 1) I set myself a goal to run 112km in 8 weeks which Nike+ is tracking for me, and is displayed in the widget in the sidebar of this blog and on my Facebook profile for all to see; 2) I signed up to a Brighton & Hove challenge to see who can run the most KMs in 60 days and it's seriously satisfying when your latest run gets added to your total and you overtake someone (spot the competitive streak!); 3) because your distance, time and pace are all logged you have a lasting record of your run which somehow makes the effort seem more worthwhile.
I've always liked running on a treadmill because of the data the it continually feeds back to you about your speed, time and distance. When you're running outside it's difficult to know how you're doing and Nike+ is a great fix for this. While you're running, Nike+ tells you each time you complete a KM, and you can hit the centre button on your iPod at any point to check your pace. It keeps you focussed and stops you slacking.
There are some cute touches too. When I finished my run today, I got the voice of Lance Armstrong congratulating me on my longest run so far, and the other week Tiger Woods personally told me that I had beaten my fastest 5km time. Yes it's cheesy but still kind of cool. Also the Power Song feature where you press and hold your iPod's centre button to start playing a pre-selected motivating track is helpful when you feel yourself flagging a bit.
I was also pleased to see that Nike+ embraces widgets. You can grab code to display most of the information from within the system as a widget. This could be improved by having one-click adding to the common widget destinations (Facebook, iGoogle, WordPress, Typepad etc.) Forcing users to copy and paste HTML code is sooo 2003 :)
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity for Nike+ is an open API so that 3rd party developers could build mash-ups and new services using data from Nike+. For example, I would like to have an update sent to Twitter each time I complete a run, which would be a dead easy application for someone to write if the Nike+ data was exposed through an API. Also, there are so many other web apps out there relating to training, exercise, dieting etc which could be enhanced by integration with Nike+. Nike could get all of this extra value for free, just by creating an API. Get to it guys!
The Flash interface of the Nike+ online service is a big weakness. It feels slow and clunky and would work much better as a normal HTML interface. Because everything happens within one Flash movie, you can't deep link to particular pages in the site. To work around this, they've added a 'share' link in various places which will generate a URL to the page you're looking at, but it's slow as hell because you have to wait for all of the Flash to load. Try this link to see what I mean. Flickr first started as a purely Flash-based application but they quickly moved to HTML as it's much more fit for purpose. I hope Nike do the same.
Finally, the set-piece social networking elements (profiles, friending, messaging) are incomplete. I expected to be able to click on another Nike+ user's name and see details of all of their runs, goals etc. It's also annoying that you can't send messages to other users. I'd really like to use this to stay in touch with some of the other runners I've met through using the system.
I saw Nike's UK Brand Manager talking about Nike+ at a conference recently. He admitted that they had neglected it's ongoing development a bit but were planning on giving it some more love. I think that what they need to do is hire a product manager to own Nike+ and work with their agency AKQA on ongoing improvements to the online service.
If you're a Nike+ user, let's hook up! My username is tomnixon.
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