August 8, 2007

Amy Tenderich writes brilliantly on her blog DiabetesMine.com.

That is a complete sentence, maybe a paragraph, possibly a whole post.

It was going to say she writes brilliantly in her open letter to Steve Jobs about the design of diabetes stuff . She does that too.

Anyway I had sent a letter to a pump company CEO with much the same idea but about the design of the way the pump operates.

So this is more or less what I wrote:

July 16, 2006

iPod!
Your pump user interface is a bit cumbersome. Scrolling is at time strange and the whole thing needs an infusion of customization and simplification for users. Give the designers an iPod, now there is and easy to use and customizable interface.

The food database is a great idea but we hardly ever use it. It is too much of a pain.

Do you eat a lot of Baby Foods? How about Beans? There they are the 2nd and 3rd groups of food items listed on the first screen. Two of the first six, 33% of the best screen real estate. You know what they say the three most important things about real estate are, Location, Location, Location.

Think of the food groups like play lists on an iPod. Users should have that degree of customization of what food is in a food group and what to call the group. We should be able to put any food in any group, call the group what works for our lifestyles and have as many for few as we need to manage our diabetes. One size doesn’t fit all and one set of food groups doesn’t either, your diabetes may vary.

On the subject of that food database, top food items work great in the pump. How about cutting a deal with the supplier to get the PDA application for pump customers so we have the rest of the food items handy too?

I am with ya Amy! I just made the mistake of writing the pump gut not the Apple guy.

2 comments :

  1. Love the letter, and as an animas user that has the same issues with babyfoods and beans I hope it gets through....
    Jamie

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  2. Thanks for the comment. There was a lot more to the letter too. I was hoping they would come out with some decent software by the FFL conference but it is still vaporware.

    I'll post more maybe even the whole letter.

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