Type 1 diabetic here. Maybe I can offer some unique insight. Or maybe, also being a hacker, that makes me overly critical, so sorry if this is too harsh.
There are tons of tools like this out there (including software from Medtronic, the leading maker of insulin pumps, that they've clinically proven increases diabetes control, and integrate directly with glucose meters). I don't use them because:
* My meter stores that stuff for me and does charts and stats. If I want those charts on my computer, I can just upload the data with the software that comes with the meter.
* Having all the information graphed in one place on the web isn't more useful than looking at my meter.
* If I did want more than the meter does in one place, I would just use a spreadsheet.
* These tools don't add any major additional insight into what I can do to manage my diabetes better, at least compared to the work in using them.
Your pitch -- and the center of your development thought process -- needs to be "use this and you will live longer and have less stress in your life, for X, Y and Z reasons". Don't write another line of code until you have that, is my advice.
The most general problem is that there is no "stickiness" to the app -- no compelling reason to keep using it day after day. (Some ideas to get you going: make it get smarter the more I use it. Send me actionable info -- "you've only gone to the gym once this week -- on weeks when you go at least 2x, your avg. BG is 20 points lower". Make me want to show off when I'm doing well, and indirectly apply social pressure to do better when I'm not.)
And you don't even have some basic details right. You have nothing for exercise! That's huge! And the glycemic load, fat content, and amount of fiber in a food is as important as how much carbohydrate is in it. Knowing how many carbs are in a piece of pizza isn't that useful (and there are a million other tools to do that already --including ones built directly into insulin pumps and blood glucose meters, and mobile apps). If you don't know that you should take very different insulin amounts and patterns when eating a serving of Skittles, pizza or brown rice even though they have the same amount of CHO, you don't know enough to help.
There really isn't anything in the app that shows you've even read the wikipedia page about diabetes. Sorry if that sounds harsh but every part of the app reflects it, and so as a diabetic it's hard not to find the whole thing condescending. In addition to nothing on exercise, your app doesn't do anything with A1C/fructosamine, C-peptide tests, cholesterol, T4, etc., all of which are more useful to compare to blood glucose readings than BP, and as important to track over time. Have you even heard of A1C? They run commercials on TV reminding diabetics to get it checked regularly all the time.
Maybe my expectations are too high, or maybe yours are. If you're going for super-simple, it needs to be a lot more simple, a bit more useful, and a lot more memorable. If you're going for sophisticated, you've got a whole lot of work to do and probably need to get diabetes and/or a medical degree first. But you need to make a choice: are you going for power users, or casual users? Even if you got the medical details right, there's a basic market fit problem here, and a lack of stickyness, as mentioned above. There are way too many competitors not to have the market fit be solid and have some very unique twist.
In general, if you're selling a specialty product, you need to know more about the specialty than the average user. I've created some very successful software for the specialty $foo market. But I was a $foo-ographer for 10 years, everybody in the $foo world knows my name, I've been blogging about $foo for 5 years, etc.
As a white guy, would you start a line of hair-care products for black people? Open up a Thai restaurant even though you've never been to Thailand, don't even eat Thai food, and there are already 3 good Thai restaurants in the neighborhood -- but you heard that lemongrass is somehow involved? Probably not, so why do this? DON'T FAKE THE FUNK.
Oh, final pet peeve. For the love of Pete don't say stuff like "CareLogger makes it possible to share your logged information with your physician simply by printing off the desired records." No. Being able to print a web page is not a feature. I can just take my glucose meter to the doctor and they can pull my data directly from it into their computer! Don't mention stuff that makes you look bad, even to downplay it. If you can't compete on a feature, don't mention it. Sell the features you do have, preferably the ones competitors don't.
> Your pitch -- and the center of your development thought process -- needs to be "use this and you will live longer and have less stress in your life, for X, Y and Z reasons". Don't write another line of code until you have that, is my advice.
We built this application in 3 days. It went from a friend saying I've been trying to use this tools but they are hard to use and cost too much money. So we build a tool equal in functionality to those on the market but with a better UI, web based and free.
We didn't go through an extensive product planning process where we could get to the root of our customers problems and needs.
Instead the plan was to launch a dead simple, minimum viable product. Part of this process is being able to get access to a community of diabetics and finding out exactly what diabetics want in a tracking tool. This is much much easier now that we've launched and put ourselves out there.
> You have nothing for exercise! That's huge!
Yes, this is on the todo list. We decided to focus on the other four as they seemed to be in the most demand.
I'm an Aderal person. If I want to work at 3 AM. I take some Aderal and I will have the ability to think and not fall asleep no matter how tired I get. So it(slightly different it) definitely does not do that to everyone.
On a side note: I have ADHD (and dyslexia but not really important) and Aderal can sometimes make me more active that before-Yes it depends on how much I take at one time, but still. I wouldn't say it calms me down. Meh
Same here - almost exact reaction. I remember as a kid that Ritalin used to calm me down but, as an adult, these are definitely stimulants to me today.
Ritalin, like most stimulants, boosts the dopamine levels in the synaptic cleft. This is the same basic mechanism of caffeine, nicotine, methylphenidate (Ritalin), amphetamine (Aderol), cocaine and methamphetamine. It shouldn't be making you sleep better. ;-)
There's a lot of hyperactive brain activity in an ADHD person, caused by a need for mental stimulation. And medication probably slows that activity down by satisfying that, allowing him/her to sleep.
If memory serves me, the operating hypothesis for ADHD is actually that it's due to reduced activity in a portion of the brain that regulates and directs the rest, the theory behind most ADHD drugs being to increase activity in that portion of the brain in order to let it better regulate the rest of the brain.
Hence, the seemingly paradoxical effect of a stimulant making someone calmer. Someone with ADHD, unable to relax because of too much distracting, chaotic activity in their brain, may thus find that the drugs help them relax.
By crude analogy, it's the inverse of the way moderate doses of ethanol (a depressant) can make someone seem more active due to reduced activity in parts of the brain that provide inhibitions and impulse control.
From personal experience, I feel reduced amounts of gratification from doing mundane things. Mental stimulation is reduced, therefore I'm driven, in some cases like a motor, to find more stimulation. Activity in the brain , in the form of thoughts, is one way to increase stimulation. Stimulant drugs satisfies this need for stimulation, so we don't need to keep on thinking about stuff, like the meaning of life. My theory is that this need to race through thoughts is the mechanism for bad short term memory. Running through more thoughts means old thoughts are forgotten.
There are also different types of Adhd by the way. There's inattentive and hyperactive. My explanation probably fits inattentive ADHD since that's where my personal experience lies.
Yes, I have to second this. Almost 50% of adults diagnosed with ADD have a substance abuse problem by the time they get help for it, and something like 30% have major depressive disorder.
If you don't get actual medical help, there's a very good chance you will slip into either self-medication or major depression or both in the long run. Been there, done that, lost years of my life in the process. Learn from my life, please.
As long as you're fine with web crawlers not seeing your content, people not building mashups based on your HTML, and so forth, be as much of a heartless bastard as you want. But do keep in mind that Googlebot is the biggest disabled user in the world. If blind people can't see it, search engines can't see it. And if search engines can't see your website, who cares about you?
If I want people building mashups with my site, I'll provide an API, HTML is not an API.
If I want Google to see my data, I'll provide it to them when they crawl, more accurately, if I'm ajaxing in data with JavaScript, it's usually explicitly because I don't want crawlers getting to it.
It is not a web developers job to go out of his way to support people who deliberately break their browsers and more often than not contribute very little to the bottom line. Most of us are building apps for people that actually want to use them as intended.
Hypothetically assuming I had a product targeted at people who were technically capable of developing mashups (or, for that matter, had ever heard the word), I would want to have them use a published API rather than my HTML, because I routinely need to change my HTML. I do not want to have to give everyone 6 weeks of notice every time I do a split test to avoid breaking my core users' sites.
There are tons of tools like this out there (including software from Medtronic, the leading maker of insulin pumps, that they've clinically proven increases diabetes control, and integrate directly with glucose meters). I don't use them because:
* My meter stores that stuff for me and does charts and stats. If I want those charts on my computer, I can just upload the data with the software that comes with the meter.
* Having all the information graphed in one place on the web isn't more useful than looking at my meter.
* If I did want more than the meter does in one place, I would just use a spreadsheet.
* These tools don't add any major additional insight into what I can do to manage my diabetes better, at least compared to the work in using them.
Your pitch -- and the center of your development thought process -- needs to be "use this and you will live longer and have less stress in your life, for X, Y and Z reasons". Don't write another line of code until you have that, is my advice.
The most general problem is that there is no "stickiness" to the app -- no compelling reason to keep using it day after day. (Some ideas to get you going: make it get smarter the more I use it. Send me actionable info -- "you've only gone to the gym once this week -- on weeks when you go at least 2x, your avg. BG is 20 points lower". Make me want to show off when I'm doing well, and indirectly apply social pressure to do better when I'm not.)
And you don't even have some basic details right. You have nothing for exercise! That's huge! And the glycemic load, fat content, and amount of fiber in a food is as important as how much carbohydrate is in it. Knowing how many carbs are in a piece of pizza isn't that useful (and there are a million other tools to do that already --including ones built directly into insulin pumps and blood glucose meters, and mobile apps). If you don't know that you should take very different insulin amounts and patterns when eating a serving of Skittles, pizza or brown rice even though they have the same amount of CHO, you don't know enough to help.
There really isn't anything in the app that shows you've even read the wikipedia page about diabetes. Sorry if that sounds harsh but every part of the app reflects it, and so as a diabetic it's hard not to find the whole thing condescending. In addition to nothing on exercise, your app doesn't do anything with A1C/fructosamine, C-peptide tests, cholesterol, T4, etc., all of which are more useful to compare to blood glucose readings than BP, and as important to track over time. Have you even heard of A1C? They run commercials on TV reminding diabetics to get it checked regularly all the time.
Maybe my expectations are too high, or maybe yours are. If you're going for super-simple, it needs to be a lot more simple, a bit more useful, and a lot more memorable. If you're going for sophisticated, you've got a whole lot of work to do and probably need to get diabetes and/or a medical degree first. But you need to make a choice: are you going for power users, or casual users? Even if you got the medical details right, there's a basic market fit problem here, and a lack of stickyness, as mentioned above. There are way too many competitors not to have the market fit be solid and have some very unique twist.
In general, if you're selling a specialty product, you need to know more about the specialty than the average user. I've created some very successful software for the specialty $foo market. But I was a $foo-ographer for 10 years, everybody in the $foo world knows my name, I've been blogging about $foo for 5 years, etc.
As a white guy, would you start a line of hair-care products for black people? Open up a Thai restaurant even though you've never been to Thailand, don't even eat Thai food, and there are already 3 good Thai restaurants in the neighborhood -- but you heard that lemongrass is somehow involved? Probably not, so why do this? DON'T FAKE THE FUNK.
Oh, final pet peeve. For the love of Pete don't say stuff like "CareLogger makes it possible to share your logged information with your physician simply by printing off the desired records." No. Being able to print a web page is not a feature. I can just take my glucose meter to the doctor and they can pull my data directly from it into their computer! Don't mention stuff that makes you look bad, even to downplay it. If you can't compete on a feature, don't mention it. Sell the features you do have, preferably the ones competitors don't.