Joseph A. Cerro

A VC Cleans House

Via Dharmesh Shah I hear that Fred Wilson is "cleaning house:"

I've decided to take off many, if not most, of the widgets on the left and right rails of this blog...

I'd like to know if there are any of them that provide real and frequent value to you all.

That last line is the key one. From the comments on Fred's post, many of his readers find widgets to be a distraction at best. As for me, there are several sites with high quality content that nonetheless I avoid (or read through an RSS Feed Reader) because of the annoyances caused by the Web 2.0 widget of the day. (I'm sure that their advertisers are thrilled to hear things like that.)

My personal pet peeve? Snap Shots from Snap.com. Snap Shots are the annoying little pop-up boxes that give a preview image of a web page when you accidentally mouse over a url, thus blocking the next few lines of the text that you want to read and completely interfering with the flow of web browsing. Supposedly, one can opt-out and disable Snap Shots, but every time I do, they seem to come back and haunt me again a few days later. As a result, Snap.com is one of the few domains that I have blocked at my router.

However, I am mildly amused that a search for "hate snap.com" yields around 18,400 hits. I am quite impressed that even on the 10th page of results, the hits are relevant!

So folks, step away from the kewl widgets, and focus on generating good content instead.

Update: I have to give Snap.com some grudging respect for having the courage to take this approach to defending their product. Certainly an interesting exercise in brand development...

Medical Device Usability Gets Noticed

As I've helped an elderly relative navigate through the US health care system over the past couple of years, I've been struck by how often essential information is available, but not truly accessible, to patients, to providers, to payers, and to other caregivers, due, in large part, to a lack of "usability" or good industrial design in software, hardware, or business processes.

Today I came across an interesting blog called aiming for grace: chronic illness considered. It's written by a designer with diabetes who wears an insulin pump. In one recent post, she comments on a cleverly titled BusinessWeek article.

...there were some research data that spoke to the role of good design and medical compliance and behavior in a quantitative, statistical way. Design is so often dismissed as extra, "nice to have" component rather than a critical, integral part of making a functional and effective product or tool. The study this article references at least broaches that misconception. "Recent research bears out...that design can influence how a patient deals with his disease...researchers said they looked at quality-of-life issues for...patients with type 1 diabetes. They found people who used [easy to use insulin pumps] experienced 70% less therapy-related dissatisfaction than those who repeatedly inject themselves." Ok, so they're comparing pump therapy to shot therapy but still, it's a start. There is a correlation between design and behavior which is totally cool. It's saying that the technology and quality one uses to manage this disease impacts the experience, approach and behavior in living with it.

I couldn't agree more. I also came across a provocative blog post by Amy Tenderich at Diabetes Mine, where she eloquently makes the case for Steve Jobs-like user interface wizardry for medical devices.