What could I possibly have done on my vacation to Mexico related to software development and usability? In fact, the vacation was engineered to be about anything BUT software development and usability. Sure, we evaluated the user-friendliness of the swim-up bar at our hotel but otherwise we were steering clear.

Still, there are lessons in life that apply across disciplines. What did I learn on vacation that I can apply to my work? Whether it’s touring the Mexican countryside or working on a software development project, everything is better when you take the time to talk to (and LISTEN to) real people.

Example Numero Uno - La Candelaria:
If you ever go to Baja California Sur, Mexico, you need to go to La Candelaria. I hear there is really great pottery there. Yes, I was there. No, I didn’t get any pottery. No, my wallet hadn’t gone missing. The pottery lady was in the US and so, no pottery for me.

We heard about La Candelaria via Lonely Planet (where they have a very cool service called Pick-And-Mix, giving users the opportunity to download individual chapters of guidebooks for a small fee, saving them from buying the whole thing and wasting valuable suitcase space, which can later be filled with pottery). Every page it seemed touted this place, so I determined that we absolutely must go. Lonely Planet said it was about 13k off the highway. Lonely Planet was, alas, off by about 10k. It was actually 23k off the highway, and at 17k or so we started to get discouraged. Mind you we were in this tiny car (thank you, thrifty husband) and the road was quite sandy and bumpy. About the time we pulled over and decided to turn around, along came an American man in a big truck (smart, not thrifty). He asked us if we were going to La Candelaria and delivered the sad news about the pottery lady’s absence. But, he said that since we had come this far, why not follow him to his ranch where he had a beautiful pool fed by a waterfall, and did we have our swimsuits? Yes! We could swim. Fantastic. We were on our way.

The ranch was very interesting (one day it will be a destination with a restaurant and cabins, so we’ll definitely go back). Up the road a piece was the waterfall. He had built steps, an overlook (rumored to be a good place from which to dive into the pool, but I wasn’t brave enough), and a place to change. He told us he needed to get back to the ranch but no one would bother us, and we were free to swim as long as we liked.

The pool and the waterfall were absolutely magnificent. We were surrounded by high rocks (there was enough bravery to jump from some of the lower ones), cacti, and birds flying overhead. We swam around the waterfall, played, and had an amazing time. We never would have known of the place if we hadn’t talked to this generous man, and taken him up on his offer to see a slice of Mexico few see.

Example Numero Dos: El Spicy Coopers and the band

If you go to Baja California Sur, Mexico to get away from it all, I would advise that you stay in San Jose del Cabo, instead of Cabo San Lucas. That is, unless you just like having Ruth’s Chris and the Hard Rock Cafe at an arm’s length. I personally like them farther away than that.

Thursday afternoons in San Jose del Cabo are the Gallery Walk. You can probably surmise that if I’ll trek 23k off the beaten path for pottery, I went nuts for the Gallery Walk. We ducked in and out of galleries, jewelry stores, bought silver bowls, little paintings, etc. At one store we got to talking to the owner (probably because he thought he was going to sell me a necklace but thrifty husband intervened). He told us that just around the corner was a great Italian restaurant (wait, Italian in Mexico?!) and that at about 9:30 his band would start playing. He said to go sit on the balconey, that it was great.

We obliged, and actually got the very last table at around 8:00. We ate a lovely Italian meal, and as promised, the band began. You’re probably thinking mariachi band (as was I) but if you’re a fan of the Gipsy Kings, you would have been in heaven (as was I). They even played a GK cover. We looked around and realized we were the only Americans in the place. After spending an afternoon doing a very touristy thing (where the only other people doing it were also tourists) it was quite refreshing to be the only ones speaking English. I felt like we had a little window into the life of a young, professional Mexican living in this little resort town. It reminded me of times out with my own friends. Young people are the same the world over.

We didn’t take any photos at El Spicy Cooper’s but we have memories that will last forever. The best parts of our trip weren’t things we found in a guidebook or items on the menu at the hotel spa. They were the little vignettes of life and culture that we found by talking to the locals, through our genuine interest in their town, their way of life, and of course, their art.

At 11:15, thje Social Media panel took the stage. Very interesting solutions and a great contrast to search. The name of the game here is all about user-generated content and connecting folks with similar medical conditions or interests. The panelists include Sophia’s Garden, PatientsLikeMe, Daily Strength, OrganizedWisdom, Inspire, MedHelp International and DiabetesMine (a great blog, by the way).

One is left with the question: isn’t much of this already covered by other community sites like Facebook and MySpace?

See some more liveblogging of Health 2.0 con here.

Video of the conference is being done by icyou.com can be seen here.

There was an interesting panel discussion with several health vertical search companies. All of the panelists did a five minute demo of the solutions, and all were most impressive. The general use case all were tasked with was to show how each company’s solution responds when searching on a simple term: ‘diabetes’. Each vertical search response was extremely complex, attempting to show a dizzying array of information in a compelling way for the user—a daunting task indeed. I was struck with the idea of how specialized this information is, and I wonder if the general user would be able to draw reasonable conclusions from this sometimes very technical data? Some users may not even have the vocabulary to describe the problem they are experiencing. Isn’t this the role of the ultimate in personalized search, the clinician?

The Search in Healthcare panel includes Healia, Kosmix, Microsoft and Google.

The topic of data liquidity involves the basic problem of how to get information out of and between the various data ‘silos’ that exist in Healthcare IT. The classic approach to this problem is to establish a ‘gold standard’ for communication to which all players agree. The best candidate for this gold standard would be the CCR, but it is far from approaching total ‘semantic interoperability’, using Peter Neupert of Microsoft’s term. (For example, CCR currently has no mechanism for handling financial transaction data).

Peter made great point. Rather than spend time on striving for the perfect interoperability standard, the truth of the matter is that data consumers will simply have to implement multiple standards in order to talk to multiple data source. A good metaphor for this is the how a similar problem has been solved in the financial sector. When one uses something like Microsoft Money or Quicken, there are multiple sources of financial data, including one’s Bank, brokerage accounts, credit card accounts, etc. While there are several competing standards, no one standard has become dominant.

For healthcare, this implies that it may be a while before we achieve total data interoperability: unfortunately, working with various data sources will almost always require some degree of custom implementation. There may be some standards, like CCR, that help solve a lot of problems, but there will often be data that exist outside of the standards.

8:15 – Introductory Speech at the Healthcare 2.0 conference – Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt and Indu Sabaiya opened the conference. After taking care of the logistics for the conference, Matthew showed a series of slides on the following topic:

What is Health 2.0?

According the Matthew’s best guess, Health 2.0 promises the following:

• Personalized search that finds the right answer for the long tail
• Better presentation of complex medical, integrated data
• Communities that capture the accumulated knowledge of patients and caregivers—as well clinicians
• Empowering the consumer to make decisions

Matthew then showed a cartoon with a lady sitting in a doctor’s office, working on her laptop. The caption reads ‘looking for a cheaper doctor on e-bay’. Is this the promise of Health 2.0? That by empowering patients we introduce market forces that can help reduce the costs of healthcare while maintaining or improving health services?
Health 2.0 in a nutshell is ‘User-Generated Healthcare’.

Holt feels Search is still the dominant part of Health 2.0

Another way to look a current problem in Health 2.0 is as follows: we have excellent content on the one hand, and we have detailed information about healthcare-related transactions (e.g. Insurance EOBs). However, there is not a really efficient way to bridge the two. (Note: this problem is something for which Gazoont has wonderful solution.)

What is the continuum of Health 2.0?
User-generated health care > Users connect to providers (we are here) > Partnerships to reform delivery > Data drives discovery

Next up: panel with Google, Microsoft, WebMD and Yahoo.

Neal, Todd, David and I are headed to the Health2.0 conference in downtown SF tomorrow.  Should be fun.  They were expecting 100 folks and had to shut down the registrations at 400.  Lots of interesting heavy-hitters in the “consumer-centric” healthcare space.  Google, MSFT, WebMD and a whole bunch of startups like RevolutionHealth, Organized Wisdom, etc.

Our goal is to learn something and stay out of trouble.  Watch this space for a blog entry or two from the conference.

We are very excited about moving our home to the Innovation Depot in Birmingham. We are still putting together furniture from Ikea, working from folding tables, and having a ton of fun in the process. Innovation Depot is truly something to be proud of for Birmingham. Plus, it will make a great space for kick-the-can and for playing Bluegrass on the roof (more on this soon). :)

In our ClearCast podcast series, David Karabinos did a very interesting interview with Susan Matlock, President and CEO of Innovation Depot. This is the second in his series on incubators. Listen to this interview here.

Also, we are very please to be mentioned in a recent article in the Birmingham New about the Innovation Depot. See the article here.

Here is a relevant snippet from the Birmingham News article:

Two other newcomers - Gazoont Inc. and Point Clear Solutions - involve former participants in ComFrame Software Co., a one-time incubator tenant. Gazoont will provide health information for consumers, employers, payers and providers.

Point Clear is a professional IT services firm delivering software products targeted at solving core business problems, improving user and customer experience, and redefining business processes

Working with both companies are Blaine Anderson, president and CEO; Donnie Gooch, COO; Neal Evans, chief technology officer; and Lee Farabaugh, user experience director.

People in the user experience field will tell you, if you’re looking for a job, that it’s much smoother sailing if you go to a place where user experience is already well-understood and accepted. Trying to be a one-man or one-women champion for usability in a company where feature set drives product development is a tough row to hoe.

I left just such a place (where usability was well-accepted) to come to PointClear Solutions. I was part of a group of 6 usability engineers and we had clout in the development process. We designed the interactions, passed our designs to the development team, and were then allowed to QA and usability test the finished product to ensure that it met our users’ needs.

At PointClear, I started as the one-woman champion for usability. The others saw the need for what I was touting, but maybe they weren’t sure just how far it could go. However, I’m continually amazed at how user-centered thinking has permeated our organization. The developers don’t hesitate to suggest enhancements that would increase the usability of an application. We have great whiteboarding sessions where everyone is focused on the user’s task and how best to help them accomplish it.

Just today I was chatting with a developer about a new component to an application we’re building. He made a suggestion on how an interface I designed could be improved for usability. It got my wheels turning, and I asked if he could make the application behave a certain way, to support the user’s task even further. Before I could finish typing, he one-upped me with an even better suggestion. It just made me smile. No battles here, just a collaborative work pattern where the end user is sure to benefit.

My husband’s 35th birthday is coming up, and I gave him several choices on a gift. He chose a new grill. We love to grill, mostly fish and sometimes burgers. We probably use our grill 4 nights a week. A long time ago I spent $100 on a Sunbeam grill. I traded it with the seller of our first house for his, since he was moving to a loft and wanted something smaller. We’ve had that traded grill since 2003, and one of the burners finally broke into two pieces. I was quite proud that we grilled for $100 for so long.

But at a recent dinner at our friends’ house, we saw what gourmet grilling could be. We had steaks that rivaled the finest steakhouse. Our friend Clay seared them on his Lynx grill, to perfection. David couldn’t stop talking about that grill! (And it had really cool blue backlighting on the knobs). I did some research and realized that I don’t want to spend more on my grill than I did on my bicycle (and that still leaves me room to buy a very nice grill). The only Lynx we could afford was the smallest one, but it lacked some features that we wanted.

So we found ourselves at Lowe’s. After much Internet research and several trips to multiple home improvement stores, we settled on a Char-Broil TEC grill (the TEC part refers to the infra-red burner). And the best thing about it is something we discovered AFTER we got home. Char-Broil has an excellent web site for their TEC grills, with informative videos on how to use the different features. Because the only thing worse than a yuppie with a fancy grill is one who doesn’t know how to use it.

In my research I learned that BTUs are important, and if you want to sear meat, you need an infra-red burner. We found both on the Char-Broil. But I was surprised at how little information there is for the grill-hunting public. The only point of reference I had for how many BTUs we wanted was our friend’s grill (25,000 per burner). None of the literature I read really explained why infra-red was important. I fear that there are lots of guys out there, with big fancy stainless steel grills on their decks, and not the foggiest idea of what they’re capable of. What a shame.

We just finished a wonderful dinner of salmon burgers, grilled corn and potatoes. Yum!