Big day for Google Health: The online health platform announced a new design, new features and a couple of new mobile health apps partners. For the first time, I'm tempted to use it.

"Our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress," Google Health Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown wrote on the company's corporate blog. "For example, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day."

Google Health also inked partnership deals with wireless fitness tracking device FitBit and mobile app CardioTrainer: "We’ve also integrated with several new partners to make it easier for you to collect the data you need to track your progress, including Fitbit, maker of a wearable device that captures health and wellness data such as steps taken, calories burned and sleep quality; and CardioTrainer, one of the top mobile apps for tracking fitness activity and weight loss. In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information," Brown wrote.

CardioTrainer is a free Android app that claims to track walking, running, yoga, biking and other cardio exercise. The app can use GPS to track workout routes and tracks stats including distance, pace and calories burned. CardioTrainer also enables users to set up weight loss programs and races against their own personal best times.

FitBit and CardioTrainer are a good start for Google's new tack. I would imagine other wellness and fitness devices and services like WiThings WiScale, Zeo's personal sleep monitor and the RunKeeper iPhone app are likely candidates for near-term partnerships with Google. This group has already made moves to work together to enable their common users to view data in a common portal.

More than anything, I'm just surprised Google didn't offer these features and a better user interface sooner.

Check out the Google blog post on the redesign here