Product Thursday: Designing with Emotion

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I just finished reading Designing for Emotion, which contains a number of interesting examples about how design can be used to evoke emotion. There are a few cool examples in the book, but the one that stood out to me most was Apple’s implementation of their blinking sleep status indicator. This has been documented before (and patented back in 2002), but if anyone has wondered why their Macbook’s sleep indicator was strangely comforting it’s because the pulsating rhythm is based on the respiratory rate of a human (12-20 cycles per minute).

At Shelby, one of our core values is “be human” - this applies in the way we carry ourselves in the larger startup community, internally with our team and also in the way we approach building product.  This is a product philosophy that I’m increasingly taking to heart and one that I think has to be at the center of transformative technology products in slower-moving, low-tech industries.  

Take healthcare, for example. There are a ton of technology companies building solutions for the healthcare enterprise (I used to work at one), but most are just focused on performing a specific task and not providing enjoyable UX. As Aaron Walter says in Designing for Emotion, “certainly we all want to eat edible foods with nutritional value, but we also crave flavor.” Based on my experience, design of healthcare IT systems has been focused on making products that are “edible” - they get the job done but they’re pretty crappy in terms of creating an experience that physicians feel they can’t live without.  It’s no surprise to see that adoption of healthcare tech is slow. I believe there’s a huge opportunity for better, more human design to help speed the adoption of healthcare tech among a physician population that is short on time and patience.

Anyone else have other examples of industries waiting to be transformed by designing with emotion?

The advent of electronic medical records has been a boon to patient safety and physician efficiency in many ways. But it has also brought with it a slew of “timesaving” tricks that have had some unintended consequences. These tricks make it so easy for doctors to document the results of standard exams and conversations with patients that it appears more and more of them are being documented without ever having happened in the first place.

Leora Horowitz hits the nail on the head in this op-ed in the NY Times.

When I worked in healthcare, our app had a setting to automatically and electronically sign patients’ charts. To make sure the docs actually looked through each chart, the app forced them to view each page of the chart (rather than just automatically signing the pages without viewing them).  At most hospitals, physicians found it cumbersome and frustrating that we were “slowing them down” (they could still complete charts faster than in the paper world). Not one stopped to realize or appreciate why this was necessary.

Technology can enable some incredible things in healthcare, but without a fundamental shift in incentives and culture there will be even more challenges to overcome.  I’m hopeful that a generation of net-native doctors will be better positioned to responsibly use technology than our current generation.

Source: The New York Times

“As long as some people like to share as their form of control, we can have a commons.”

I came across this fantastic TED talk in Shelby this morning on a more open healthcare system.  It’s awesome to see someone who “gets” the open web articulate so well how it can impact the healthcare system.  

What I found of particular interest is John’s comment (above) about sharing as a form of control.  Being “social” on the internet may not be for everyone - there are plenty of lurkers out there on reddit, Facebook, Twitter (and Shelby). However, the people that see sharing as a form of control (which increasingly seems to be the younger generation) have a huge opportunity to build something incredible.  

There are plenty of people working on solving problems in “social” - lots of them may work at social web companies today, but I suspect they’ll be taking much of what they’ve learned and working on similar problems in health and wellness (where I think sharing is a much tougher nut to crack) in the near future.

Healthcare is a long slog but I think it’s worth it.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Blueprint Health’s inaugural demo day here in New York.  For the unititiated, Blueprint is an accelerator and member of the Techstars network specifically focused on healthcare startups. Mat and Brad are great guys and really invested in the success of Blueprint and the companies they mentor.  Healthcare startups outside of the quantified self movement haven’t really been in the limelight (as far as I can tell) so I was blown away away when I got to the Blueprint offices and was greeted by a packed house and tons of investors that traditionally focus on the consumer internet space.

I have a feeling we’re only seeing the beginning of innovation within healthcare. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in this space and I hope that the entrepreneurs who face this tough road are courageous enough to keep trudging along even in spite of the fact that it’s a difficult space to work in. The long sales cycles, physician adoption challenges and a host of other things are enough to frustrate someone who expects the pace of innovation in healthcare to mirror that of consumer web services.  In a world where super fast $1B sorts of outsized returns dominate headlines (oh hey Instagram!), it’s understandably a tough thing to stay focused on a business that might be a “grind” over the long haul.  In light of this recent news about Instagram, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the current consumer internet landscape can relate to other verticals (in addition to the impact it will have on them).

Dennis Crowley worked on Dodgeball and has been thinking about location for most of his career - he started thinking about this problem a while ago but it has only been recently (in the past few years) that he and his team have been able to really bring their solution to the masses. This example is one that is relevant to healthcare, I think. I hope we’ll see more young entrepreneurs take a crack at problems in healthcare and even if their first companies fail, they’ll keep working on effecting change in the space.  These are the entreprneuers I want to work with and I’m really excited that others like Brad and Mat at Blueprint Health have committed to working with them over the long haul as well.

Because of the nature of incumbents, regulation and other factors, it’s unclear whether or not we’ll see a Google or Facebook sized exit in the heathcare IT world.  However, I am hopeful that we’ll see a a number of companies have a big impact, help cut a ton of waste and save millions of lives in the process. I hope that there are a bunch of entrepreneurs willing to “go for it” and endure the pain of the process in the hopes of changing the industry.  And I hope that there are also investors out there who are willing to weather the storm and back the entrepreneurs who may be a bit idealistic now but who have the fresh perspective necessary to succeed in the face of the challenges we face in the long term. Their first idea may not be a huge hit, but the next few very well might.

PS - I realize it might seem hypocritical that I’m writing this post as someone working for a consumer Internet company. While that is a fair point, I’m still involved in healthcare on a number of fronts and I strongly believe that experience in a consumer oriented internet company coupled with my healthcare background can actually help me provide perspective in healthcare that is unique (hence this blog post). Right now, though, my skill set is best served with the greatest team in NYC building an awesome product that I love. :)

Fast Food Founders & Longevity

jayparkinsonmd:

Ray Kroc (McDonald’s) at age 82
Jimmy Dean died at age 81
Taco Bell founder Glen Bell died at 86
Sonic founder Troy Smith died at 87
Hardee’s founder Wilber Hardee died at 89
Baskin-Robbins founder Irvine Robbins died at 90
Carl’s Jr. founder Carl Karcher died at 90
Frozen french fry mogul J.R. Simplot died at 99
Murray Handwerker, credited with making Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs into a well-known national chain, died at 89

Interesting.

Hrm. Must be the preservatives?

Wonder if they ate their own dog food?

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