Leslie Wu's blog

Mobile Health 2010

I had the great opportunity of volunteering for BJ Fogg's Mobile Health 2010, which brought luminaries and speakers from all manner of corporations, NGOs, and arms of the government, from the CDC to ViveCoach, from the HeartMath institute to startups such as qpid.me.

BJ Fogg & Jon Froehlich

BJ Fogg, of Stanford's Persuasive Technology lab, also invited speakers from academia, such as Jon Froehlich from UW and attendees from Intel's Research Lab-Seattle, Nokia Research, and the like.

Spanning two days on the Stanford campus, Mobile Health 2010 took place on May 24-25, 2010 and was sponsored by AARP, ARHQ.gov, Lysol corp, the US FDA.gov, McKesson.com, and the West Wireless Institute.

If you'd like to learn more about Mobile Health 2010, please see a subset of the panels and speakers in HD video tagged as mh2010 on Vimeo.com.

If you are more of a text-based learning, the hashtag #mh2010 on Twitter contains chunks of the conversation, and the account @texting4health gathered and summarized parts of the conference, tweet by tweet.

We'll re-tweet some of these here, give a taste of the conversation:

RT @rob_havasy: Mobile Health 2010 was excellent! Inspiring & informative speakers & many great new relationships.

RT @shellyspoeth: @jensmccabe @texting4health @msaxolotl@marytdx thank you for the tweeting from #mh2010 great way for us non-attenders

@texting4health: Surprises in mHealth: what happened Haiti, end-user tech integration, speed of gov't attention, lack of user perspectve in EHR 

how to make mHealth profitable? lowest hanging fruit: oversupplying the overengaged, home health care, self-monitoring, eldercare #mh2010

20,000 minutes/month of wellness advice from GreatCall mHealth, WellDoc customize=> $1,530 PPPY cost savings / rand controlled study #mh2010

"spread the love, nothing else" -- Ramin Bastani talk on qpid.me here: http://bit.ly/qpidHD #mh2010 #sex#mobilehealth @qpidme

GreatCall (David Inns) myJitterbug.com on LiveNurse: 91% unsure but 20% need medical attention in 24h #mh2010

RT @msquihuis: Number of physicians available relative to population not keeping up #mh2010

RT @kimfuqua: Thinking about other uses for frontlineSMS for Gashora Girls School in Rwanda. JoshNesbit's presentation inspires. #mh2010

RT @zachinmotion: "The difficult we do now. The impossible takes a little longer." - Great quote from #mh2010 conference

@jensmccabe vivecoach / keas -- neither seem to *really* address the RL coaching aspect that personal trainers/ strength coaches do! #mh2010

tone: used a lot in consumer but not health space, understand what is good for voice vs text vs smartphone app #IDEO#mh2010 #design

RT @msquihuis: Frontline SMS - acts as local sms gateway for Ushahidi - critical for #haiti quake #mh2010

RT @martytdx: Epocrates is the primary mobile reference used by HCPs (77%) #mh2010

lessons from ePocrates speaker: doctors prefer push, suffer from "alert fatigue" whether by SMS or other media #mh2010#epocrates #h1n1

ePocrates: can aggregate what MDs are searching for / looking up (i.e. flu vaccine) in a geospatial /temporal fashion, like GOOG flu #mh2010

RT @jonfroehlich: Kevin Patrick, UCSD: mDiet was first RCT of using SMS intervention for weight loss. Took two rounds to get through NIH

RT @msaxolotl: RT @jonfroehlich: Richard Adler: 99.5% US GDP to be spent on healthcare by 2082 #hcr via Longterm Outlook for HC Spending

re: obesity, primary care physicians not trained expertly in exercise, nutrition coaching, and behavior change.. !#mh2010 #mobilehealth

RT @chiefmaven: #MH2020 Using mobile to leverage 'teachable moments'

@bacigalupe @jensmccabe presentation? check out rough HD video cut preso here http://bit.ly/getUpMove #mh2010#getupandmove

prototyping

Scott is lecturing today on prototyping.

The assignment for next week is to storyboard a particular scenario, which makes me think of what kevnull has to say on communicating concepts through comics, where he suggests using dialogue whenever possible.

Scott's version of 147 is fairly design-heavy up-front, but I wonder if it's worth reflecting on what Zed has to say about implementation and invention: the C2I2 hypothesis.

 

“An Implementation is something you’ve done many times before and doesn’t need as much collaboration from the client. An Invention is something you have limited knowledge of and therefore need an outside collaborator to get right.”

The crux of the difference between Invention and Implementation comes down to knowledge. If it’s something you or someone else has built a million times before then it’s an Implementation. If it’s something you’ve never built before then it’s an Invention. Notice I didn’t say if it’s something that’s actually new, but that it’s something that’s new to you.

...

I’ve found that only three development processes are really worth trying out these days: eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and Capability Maturity Models (CMM).

...

You’ll see that I prefer XP for Collaborator+Invention projects, and CMM for Customer+Implementation projects. These two situations are fantasies though since most real projects tend to force themselves into the disadvantaged situations (Customer+Invention or Collaborator+Implementation).

mobile

Designing the Mobile User Experience

Barbara Ballard

Today: Video of Rob Heitani, Palm designer

Show and tell: the eMate 300

"Lisa on Ice" -- "Eat Up Martha"

Scott talked about the human "brain" as a factor that generally stays constant over time, but this really isn't true.

While you can argue against IQ or for multiple intelligence or for g-factor slash EQ slash social intelligence, I believe it is true that IQ scores over time actually increase.

I also don't believe the claim made that the size of mobile devices remains constant -- the iPod touch is way slimmer than most any (computational / comm) mobile device in the past.

Scott's talking about "sensor networks" now. I'm not too big into sensor networks myself, or at least I don't see them having a big impact in industry or academia in the next ten years.

He's talking again about Moore's law now, and at least made the distinction between "speed" and number of transistors, but I believe it is actually the density of transistors that is said to double, not the number specifically.

Wikipedia-ing it now, it looks like Moore's original formation was density, but "number" is the more popular variant these days.

design inquiry

core77/hack2school: Advice for Design Students

Yahoo: Challenges of interface design for Mobile Devices


One of Neil's students came to me this morning for office hours, asking about the "Discovery" assignment on contextual inquiry (contextual interviewing).

I told him that his observation and recording seemed done well enough, but he needed to go further with his insights, and frame opportunities for design innovation in the human-computer interface (interspace, as Terry might have said), rather than simply in the computer-computer interface.

For example, if a mobile phone has poor reception, you could "fix" it by getting network technology. But, as I told this fellow, one could see the need as going beyond "better reception" into "awareness" of signal strength, on both (or n, even) sides of a telecom-mediated chat, before, during, and after the actual cell phone call.

If the friend being observed was doing his homework, then how did he manage his interruptions? Was physical proximity a proxy for attention or disruption?

Go deeper, my friends, and go beyond what is merely liminal :)

phases of design

Design phases (IDEO)

• Understand
• Observe
• Visualize and Predict
• Evaluate and Refine
• Implement

Simple iterative model: Needs -> [Design, Implement, Evaluate] x (loop)

Another one, ETC -- express, test, cycle.

Brainstorming -- "encourage wild ideas" and "defer judgment"

IDEO -- "be visual", "build on the idea of others", and "one conversation at a time"

There's a reason why one might argue for "one conversation at a time", in a parliamentary procedure Robert Rules of Order sense, and in that "interrupting against" can impede the energy, but as Deborah Tannen points out (http://www.google.com/search?q=deborah+tannen+interruptions) one can make a distinction between "talking with" and "talking against" and in the case of interruptions, not all interruptions are "talking against".

Also, I feel there's a certain sort of latent gender bias here. "One conversation at a time" is geared to steer folks away from battles one-to-one, but at the same time, women are much better at, on average, understanding multiple conversations compared to median men.

That aside, it's still unclear that brainstorming is a "better" way of coming up with ideas, but done with the appropriately selected participants, facilitator, whiteboard space, moderate focus, and delay in judgment, it seems at least not completely useless.

Lecture nit: s/Javascript/JavaScript/

"ocean waves... and eventually the fire trucks come"

designstudio

(Backdated yesteryesterday.)

Today I had design "studio" for the first time, and drew inspiration
from the d.school exp class I took the other week.

For example, we phrased critiques as "I like, I wish" and talked a bit
about design tradeoffs, usability, lo-fi / hi-fi fidelity, and the
utility of making and critiqing multiple variations.

I mentioned stick figure 2.0, and ended on a d.school inspired
exercise of voting with positive post-it notes.

Listening to Jan Chipchase right now, moblogging from my iPhone:

Nokia has experimented with a form of co-creation / participatory
design, with the use of what they call an "open studio" -- give folks
a question, see how they frame their problems in a non-verbal way.

Design research -- informed opinions that makes your peers smarter.

2 week limit for "tour bus ethnography"

Ideas for 147 project -- how would you design a mobile phone for the
1/6th of the world's population that cannot read?

Better support for shared mobile phones in developing countries.

Setting boundaries for mobile interaction.

Sent from my iPhone

lecture zwei

Jots on lecture zwei (two).

When Scott titled the lecture "Discovery" I was actually a bit confused. Having been to (ACM SIG)KDD -- knowledge discovery in databases -- when I think of discovery, I tend to think of knowledge discovery in an either automated, mixed initiative, or human-driven sense.

But that aside, when Scott talked about the difficulty of using video, I thought about how things have gotten better in the last some years. iMovie '08 was pretty easy to pick-up for me when I started using it to cut down the Xerox Star and Lucy Suchman talks, and Camtasia Studio has proved great in video prototyping.

In Bjoern's d.tools, videos are indexed by controller states, and during lecture, I thought that it'd be great to have a lo-fi way of signaling, as you record, "hey, these last N seconds were of interest".

Scott talked about ethnography versus ethnomethodology, and while I think Paul Dourish gets the analytics / philosophy critique just right in his works on the role of ethnography and embodied ixn design, I often saw the split between ethnography and ethnomethodology as a split between a collective analysis and an individualist, in-the-moment one.

Scott didn't mention the history of ethnography as having long-running studies, which I think Dourish points out as being important to classical ethnography, but I found it interesting to see that Nokia Research's Chipchase limited his ethnographic-styled inquiries to two weeks at a maximum.

Don Knuth as a "Six foot Seven version of Yoda" -- why, so, that's so.

srk mentioned contextual inquiry not as interviewer / interviewee but as master / apprentice, and as I look to my next project, I think these things, in concert what Brad M said today in CS547 (on Natural Programming), will serve to push me to grow as a designer too.

I was worried that we talked of "the Discovery method" rather than "a Discovery method", but hope that will work out.

And as for countering the "That's Obvious" response, the confirmation bias of it all, I wondered if it might be useful to state one's expectations up front?

"Deep Hanging Out", I like it.

WWMPD? What would my participant do? Makes me think of Mackay's directive to ask, in acting style, what would my character do in this situation?

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPhone

whither design studio?

We're prepping for design studios tomorrow, having done the assignment ourselves (name passports), with studio guidelines at the ready.

Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professi

What is design? I wish Scott had a more ready answer at bay, regardless of the loading of the word design. In lecture, Scott said yesterday that "design is choice".

Marx has said that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it," which at least the start of a framework of design.

Personally, I find inspiration both in Donald Schön (Educating the Reflective Practitioner) and in Christopher Alexander (The Timeless Way of Building).

I took a class with Ralph Johnson once, one of the two of the Gang of Four I have met thus far, and he said that most people tend to like either The Timeless Way of Building (like me) whilst others like A Pattern Language (like Ralph).

And while Alexander has, I have heard, not had as much an impact on architecture as Schön had on the epistemology of design, his work on patterns has definitely found wide appeal, beginning in the software engineering community (Smalltalk and later Beck's XP), and later in the land of all things enterprisey, and even the visual / interface design community (as you see in the course textbook by Tidwell).

We've agreed to support an "I like, I wish" philosophy of design critique, and to put ourselves out there first.

I think I'll try to promote a guideline of "step up, step back," where people should step up to speak, but step back if they're taking lots of airtime.

What, anyway, are we teaching about design? Which methods and which school of design? It's hard to say, and I guess we'll see -- it's not yet clear to me what Scott believes in himself.

The Timeless Way of Building

In "It's Just a Method", Harrison et al. report on a pedagogy for teaching design, which seems to be explicit in the choice of what methods of design to teach, and that at least, seems to be a start.

But finally, does it really matter if you say "my work" versus "the work"? I'm tempted to say no, but guess that there are no such studies that support it either way...

day one (forty seven)

It's day one of Intro to HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and Scott is just getting set up.

day one

I thought I'd have an unofficial HCI studio blog for the quarter, as a journal and as a record of the journey.

It's almost 1:20 in the PST, and Hewlett 201 seems mostly full (out of its legal 191 capacity). It's my second year here at the farm, and I recognized eight or so faces as they streamed in the way.

Scott has started talking about Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement ("form follows functions"), now Raymond Loewy and "design for manufacturability".

Henry Dreyfuss -- a culture of prototyping.

"This is JOSEPHINE the average American female--and JOE, a typical 6 year old."

Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly (1945).

(Also see Waldrop's The Dream Machine.)

Scott's talking about the ENIAC now, and then quotes T.J. Watson's apocryphal, I believe, quote on the world's need for only five computers.

Wikipedia says the ENIAC had 17,468 vacuum tubes, and I find it fascinating to think about how today's modern data center may have something akin to 17,468 x86 "blades". Do blades (commodity PCs, really) fail as often as vacuum tubes did 60 years ago? I don't know, but I think in both times, there are young workers running back and forth, replacing failed components :)

Personally, I feel that engineers and designers ought to think at data-center scale, where applications may serve tens of thousands, if not millions (billions?) of possible in a software-as-a-service way, but that's a topic for another post.