Very interesting article by Brian Klepper.

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/10/an-impending-ha.html

“The other big idea is that the Web can facilitate the efficient aggregation and reformulation of knowledge and data to create new information that is not only descriptive, but prescriptive, evaluating complex situational configurations and recommending next steps based on current best knowledge and experiential data. Health care is fundamentally an information-based discipline, and the Web catapults us way beyond individual expertise to the organically evolving wisdom of mass collaboration.”

This is precisely what Gazoont does at its core.

This is a very interesting PR effort that Microsoft has launched around its HealthCare initiatives. Obviously, you have to take this with a grain of salt; but, personally, I got chills when I first watched this video. The main reason it had this effect on me is that a lot of what we are working on at PointClear and Gazoont made me say ‘hey, we do that!’ as I watched the video. This is also true of some other companies with whom we have worked (Halo and CapMed, for example): ‘hey, they do that!’ Consider the following:

0:17 - ‘Secure Data Sharing’ - that is a plug for HealthVault (PointClear is currently one of three vendors approved by Microsoft as HealthVault integrators)
0:26-0:30 - when the Care Manager notifies a particular set of patients of some information - this is precisely on of the things Gazoont does!
~0:50 - interaction between the jogger’s personal tracking device (personal monitoring devices are a specialty of Halo) and the application on the ‘big screen’ - looks like a next generation PHR (CapMed) + secure message delivery - uploading data from a personal fitness device to a PHR is also a classic HealthVault use case
~1:45 - I just have to say the medication reminder ‘table’ is extremely cool. The whole doctor/hospital workflow reminds me of a next-generation Awarix product
~1:55 - side note: what’s up with the Doctor’s X-ray vision device finder thingamagig? That’s a super-power; not a technology, right?
3:29 - Digital Wallet card - the great-great-grandchild of a PHR running on a personal USB key

And of course, Lee Farabaugh and our superior Usability team should love the very cool ‘Minority Report’-esque User Interfaces.

Here is the video called ‘Office Labs: Future of personal health concept’:

As the only child of a parent who is ‘older than 50 but less than 100′ (Mom, I hope this is vague enough), I have a particular interest in my role as caregiver in the use of technology to help me help my Mom more efficiently, while maintaining her privacy and independence. There is a burgeoning market of hardware and software (the latter of which is of particular interest to us at PointClear) that helps caregivers monitor various tasks and events–from whether or not certain medications are taken at the appropriate intervals to whether someone needs assistance because of a fall in the home. More importantly, it gives folks who are living independently a sense of security that help is always available–even if they aren’t able call for it. The obvious issue to overcome is concern about loss of privacy. Apparently, the trade-off is worth it for many seniors, according to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

When John Fowlkes’s adult daughter suggested installing an electronic monitoring system in his apartment to oversee his well-being from afar, “I was very skeptical,” he says. To Mr. Fowlkes, 86, who has an active social life including an 80-year-old girlfriend, the idea evoked thoughts of Big Brother.

Work and Family columnist Sue Shellenbarger learns about new home-monitoring technologies that may allow doctors and families to track the medical condition of seniors from afar.
Mindful that a younger friend had fallen at home and lain on the floor for hours before anyone came to help, Mr. Fowlkes, of Raleigh, N.C., gave in. To his surprise, he found the setup “makes you feel more secure.”

source: Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2007; Page D1
Link to article (may require log-in)

Here is a video that compliments the article:

On this topic, we are all very excited about Halo Monitoring, Inc., a company in Huntsville, AL, and a finalist in the Alabama Launchpad competition. Halo has some very exciting products that they will bring to market in the near future in this space. You can listen to a very interesting conversation between Halo’s CEO, Chris Otto, and ClearCast’s host David Karabinos in our Podcast series here.

After I had left my last job and before I had really decided to start PointClear, I made up a list of “Lessons Learned in the Last 5 Years”.  Basically a brain dump of stuff I had learned about the IT consulting business and business in general.  I have that list posted at my desk where I can see it every day.  The goal being not to repeat the same dumb mistakes of the past, but to make only NEW mistakes…  (If you want to see the list just email me…)  One of the items is as follows:

• There is always a temptation to think that the grass is greener somewhere else.  This is why services companies want to move into products, government contractors want to “go commercial”, project-based consulting companies want to create a staffing arm, etc.  It rarely works and you lose focus…

Well, this year has been a good one at PointClear.  We have had some great successes and have built a really impressive team of folks – the best I have ever worked with.  But we have sort of bent the rule above.  I’ll explain how and why we are only “bending” the rule, not breaking it outright J

Thomas Edison quotes courtesy of 37 Signals:

Thomas Edison quotes:

I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others.

I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.

Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the one thing that he can’t afford to lose.

I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.

I have more respect for the fellow with a single idea who gets there than for the fellow with a thousand ideas who does nothing.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

I have really gotten hip to this live blogging thing at UX Week. At first I was intimidated by the idea, but once I attempted it, I found I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’ve heard from others that are following along that it’s beneficial to read the posts.

Today we are dragging a bit, after a week of conference talks and a few too many delicious mojitos last night. So I’m sitting back and listening today. But I wanted to share a few insights about live blogging.

The first day of the conference, I took copious written notes and then created my blog posts in my room after the day ended. The second day I decided to take the plunge and blog during the session. I had a couple of concerns:

1. What if I missed the meat of the topic because I was so busy typing?
2. What if I distracted the people around me who were trying to listen?
3. What was I really trying to do? Take notes? Provide a perfect written record of what went on? Or was it a more personal approach with my own thoughts and anecdotes?
4. Did I have to blog every session I attended? The folks at OpenTheWindow are doing an excellent job of that, but sometimes I like to sit back and listen so I decided to allow myself that luxury if I wanted it.

The posts kind of evolved as I did them. It isn’t necessary to take exact notes because the slides are published. Instead, I tried to provide a narrative that incorporated the slide bullets with what was spoken by the presenter to augment the slides.

I think there are several benefits to live blogging:

1. I have a written record of the conference that I can refer back to at any time. I can look up and download the slides, or I can just skim my post to get the information I’m looking for.
2. Others can get a sense of the presentation that goes beyond the slides provided by the presenter
3. I can hit “Publish” the moment the presentation ends, and then edit later. You don’t get more real-time than that!

I did have some questions about what I’m doing, and I’m not sure I have the answers but I wanted to throw them out:

1. What about accuracy? How do presenters feel about my account of their presentation and what if I got something wrong?
2. What about privacy? This was a paid conference….how do the organizers feel about the information being disseminated? I have a good feeling they love it, because it encourages more people to attend.

I don’t have a good sense of how many people were live blogging from the conference but I think the number was small.

I’ll leave you with a live blogging anecdote. The first day, I wrote a post about Scott Berkun’s books. (They’re on their way to me via Amazon, as we speak). I closed the browser and went to dinner with my friend Rebecca. While she was in the restroom I decided to check my Blackberry to see if I had any new messages. I had a comment from Scott! (He doesn’t know me from Adam’s housecat, as my grandmother would say). Wow, cool. I love that.

This morning’s keynote speaker for UX Week 2007 was Lisa Strausfeld of One Laptop per Child (http://laptop.org/).

This non-profit was started by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a first investor in Wired Magazine.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has a vision for providing “children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” This morning’s demonstration of the XO laptop was inspiring to see.

Laptops are distributed to children in classrooms. The laptops are on a network called a “mesh” that allows one laptop to see all other laptops. There are 4 spheres involved in the “mesh”- person, friends, neighborhood and activity. A child can move between the spheres, working on their homework or joining activities that other children have launched and shared. Activities include taking pictures, writing stories, create drawing, making music and browse the web. The obvious emphasis is on collaboration and interaction. All activities are automatically saved to a journal and time-stamped.

The laptop itself uses Flash memory instead of a hard drive, requires little power, and employs a new display technology that works in direct sunlight. The OS is Red Hat Linux – “Sugar” open source software.

To be even more inspired, check out the Progress page at
http://laptop.org/en/vision/progress/index.shtml.

And consider getting a child a laptop this approaching holiday season!

Erica and I are comin’ atcha live from UX Week 2007 in Washington, D.C. It’s a nice background for a conference about user experience created by the folks at Adaptive Path.

Today opened with a keynote from Deborah Adler, who created the Clear Rx prescription packaging and labeling system for Target. Motivated by an incident where her grandmother took her grandfather’s medicine because the information on the bottles was so similar, she has revolutionized the precription container.

There are 3 billion prescriptions filled each year in the US. $76 billion is spent on filling those prescriptions, and another $76 billion is spent on complications and misunderstandings resulting in confusion about how to take the medicines.

Adler’s work focused not only on the information architecture of the label, and the form factor of the pill bottle (flat so that information can be more easily read, with color coded rings to distinguish the medicines for each family member), but also later focused on real world implementation at Target. For instance, she had to create 23 different versions of the label to meet state standards for different states. She recreated all of the warning icons to make them easier to understand.

This session was so interesting to me because of our work in healthcare, especially with older users. Adler said that future work involves ways to “remember that you remembered to take your medication.” I have no doubt that she will come up with a compelling solution.

Reprinted from Good Experience by Mark Hurst

“Innovation” is one of the most popular buzzwords of the current moment, perhaps second only to “Web 2.0.” Buzzwords often bring on lemming-like behavior in some people, so I’m naturally skeptical about the recent run of cover stories and business books on innovation. Still, I have come across some worthwhile thinking on the subject, so here’s a crash course in recent writing about innovation.

- - -

My friend (and past Gel speaker) David Bodanis wrote an outstanding essay for the Financial Times about a month ago, called “Sparks Flew,” about innovation. Bodanis reveals the secret: “Immerse your innovator in the hot new thing,” and “Now the trick: tell your innovator to try the reverse of what everyone else is doing.” That’s true innovation: *not* doing what the lemmings are doing.

“Sparks Flew”:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/294a331a-075a-11dc-80b9-000b5df10621.html

David’s book “Electric Universe” contains many of those case studies in more detail. I recently read the book and highly recommend it:
http://urlx.org/amazon.com/abdd7

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Last week’s Economist had a cover story on “Apple and the art of innovation.” The thinking should be familiar to any customer experience practitioner: Apple’s innovation revolves around the user, not the company itself or its products.

Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. … … Nintendo has done something similar with its popular motion-controlled video-game console, the Wii. Rather than designing a machine for existing gamers, it gambled that non-gamers represented an untapped market and devised a machine with far broader appeal.

“Lessons from Apple” (site reg. required, unfortunately):
http://economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9298983

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Finally, two other books to consider:

Scott Berkun’s new book “The Myths of Innovation” describes some of the common pitfalls in innovation-related thinking and how to overcome them. Scott has run the Sacred Spaces tour at my Gel conference for two years; it’s no surprise that the examples in his book are thoughtful and well-rounded. href=”http://urlx.org/amazon.com/f9916

Scott Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming in Code” covers the story of Mitch Kapor’s effort to build “Chandler,” an ambitious piece personal organization software. Anyone interested in innovation in software processes would find this a useful case study to study. It addresses the question, “Why is good software so hard to make?” http://urlx.org/amazon.com/dcdb1

Post a comment here:
http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/004255.php#comments

Last night, I received an email from Google anoucning the new release of the Google Analytics interface. I finally got around to checking it out this evening. Whatever I say can’t really do it justice; instead, here is a screenshot (click the thumbnail for the full-size image):

It is a truly a wonder of information architecture. There are some fairly sophisticated metrics here and the presentation makes it easy to draw reasonable conclustions from a dizzying amount of data even for those who aren’t wizards of statistical mechanics. Remarkable.

While digging through the various reports for www.pointclearsolutions.com, I came across something that caught my eye (click to zoom):

This is a ‘keywords’ report, and it indicates the keywords that were used in searches when visitors arrived at our site via the various search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft Live, etc.). Naturally, one wonders, why would folks interested in stopping air pollution be arriving at our site? Stopping air pollution is a noble goal, certainty–but it is hard to understand what we at PCS would have to do with it (other than contributing to it, perhaps).

So, I tried searching for ‘how to stop air pollution’ on Google. And there we are! The 10th ranked page under the topic of ‘how to stop air pollution’! (Click to zoom.)

Try the search yourself (you may not find the link on page 1, as the results are dynamic depending on how Google’s Skynet is feeling at that moment):

Search Google for How to Stop Air Pollution

Now, as you will notice, this search result actually links to Lee’s ‘Stop Air Pollution, Listen to Bluegrass’ blog entry from last month. This single blog entry led to 13 unique visits to the PointClear site. What a wonderful example of an unexpected consequence! Google Serendipity.

Update: the 13 visits had a 100% bounce rate, meaning the users didn’t ’stay’ on our site and visit other pages. Presumably, listening to bluegrass is not the solution they were seeking (pity!). Still, these are 13 visitors we wouldn’t have had otherwise.