The very next morning I received an email from Veronica. She just installed my app and loved it, but she was missing one thing. Some people take halve a pill as medication and Veronica is one of them.

[two_thirds]Oops! Never thought of that. I never do, so it never occurred to me. Since I was busy planning the new version it was perfect timing. Just fit this feature in with the rest of them.[/two_thirds]

Between then and now, the free version has been downloaded and installed quite a lot. It is now ranking #48 in the Android market’s medical/free section. Better then I expected, especially since there has been no significant marketing.

Fun stuff

But on with the good stuff. The new version has three big improvements and minor tweaks in performance and user interface. The improvements are:

1. Medication amounts and doses can now be fractions. So 1, 1.5 and 0.5 all work.
2. When you miss the alert sound, it will repeat for max 30 minutes. The first reminder will be after 2 minutes, and then every 5 minutes for halve an hour.
3. If you heard the alert sound, but want to delay a bit, you can now tap the snooze button. This will delay the alert for 10 minutes and then start over.

A notification with refill alert

Both the free and the paid version are upgraded and will be pushed onto the market today, so please upgrade to this new version.

Just ask

If you are missing something in this app, be like Veronica and tell me. Or if you just want to say hi, drop me a note.

I’ll be at the Power of One in London on 11/11/11, if you are there, walk up and say hi.

In your language?

If you are a non English/Dutch speaker and want a version in your native language, consider helping me write it. It’s not much work.

In the mean time

In the mean time I will be busy working on the next version, looking forward to my trip to London and countless other things.

Let me explain.

The problem

My medication reminder app shows a list of alert moments for the next few days. Sounds simple, but how to go about it? Some constraints:

1. The list is finite, only alerts for the next few (max 7) days are shown.
2. The list is ordered, by date and time.
3. Users should be able to grasp the information in a few seconds. Less thinking is better.
4. Users only want to know when to their next medication moments are!
5. It’s for a mobile app, so potentially users from all over the globe.
6. All of those users are in a hurry.

How to decide on the date format

How hard can it be? Just show a list, order first by date, then by time, showing how many of what medication the user should take. So I start out by displaying dates as ’09/16/2011′. That isn’t always very clear. Especially for dates such as ’09/07/2011′, is 09 the month (September) or 07 (July)?

To prevent misunderstanding over which part is the month part and which part is the day part, spell out the month like ‘September 16th, 2011′. Looks better doesn’t it? But does this really fit the users mental model? It probably does when you’re making a dentist appointment for over 2 months. But for this app the user is more likely to think in terms of Thursday or Friday. So, add the day and I end up with ‘Wednesday September 7th, 2011′.

Wow, wait just a minute! That is a lot of text. Does it fit on the screen of a mobile phone? Do users really need to read all of it? Users want to know when it’s time to take their pills not read a book. I really need to cut down on the prose.

Is the year (2011) needed? Let’s see, the users will most likely be interested in medication moments between now and a couple of days. (Besides that is what my group of test users told me.) So, remove the year and while I am at it, I am removing the month as well. See how that works out. Now the format is something like ‘Friday the 16th’ and ‘Saturday the 17th’.

It’s starting to look better and better. Can I also safely remove the 16th and 17th? What happens if I do?

The alert list only shows the next seven days (starting today), so there should only be one Monday, one Tuesday and so on in the list. So, I can make things easier and shorter by just showing ‘Friday’ and ‘Saturday’ etc. So I have gone from ’09/16/2011′ to ‘Friday’. I need to code less, the users need to read and think less. Everyone wins.

Done!

Done! Wrong!

Or actually Done wrong!

Test with users

So far, this has been a mental and logical exercise. My users should be happy, but my test users were not as excited as me! To be honest I’m starting to feel more then a little stupid by now.

They are right of course. If it’s Friday 9 o’clock in the morning, today is today and tomorrow is tomorrow. It takes more brain processing cycles to think of today as Friday or Saturday.

My test users made sense (at least to me), so I will use today for today, tomorrow for tomorrow and the rest of the week can be regular Wednesdays and Thursdays. Sound logical when you write it down, doesn’t it?

The end result now looks something like this. Personally I am happy with it and my users tell me they are as well. But who knew I had to think so much to make my users think less.

My lessons learned?

1. Always (and I mean always) test with real users!
2. Take the users mental reality/expectations into account.
3. More user testing.
4. Less is probably always better. Less reading, less thinking. And hopefully less coding.

Pills on the Go

Finally the first release of Pills on the Go! A medication reminder for people who are busy. After rigorous field testing during the summer, PotG was released to the Android market.

Main features

The focus of Pills on the Go is to remove everything that is not directly useful, but only sounds useful. This is never as easy as it sounds, but a lot of clutter was removed. Now to find more so called extra’s to remove.

Notification with a refill warning

So right now the app does two things and hopefully well. It reminds you when to take your medication. And it reminds you when to refill your subscription.

Just the first step

Now it’s time to work on…..

1. A Dutch version.
2. A free version.
3. Improvements.

So I guess that makes me one of those busy people that could use this app.

Right now a lot of effort is being put into completing an android app, that is almost ready for the market. Also another initiative is being explored that has less to do with a single technology but more with an all round experience. I will keep you posted on how it goes.