Adaptive Path Blog

After research, it was time to begin coming up with concepts for what it was we were actually going to design. From the research, we came up with six primary design principles:

• Wear it during sex. Make the product elegant, discreet, and comfortable.
• Make better use of data. Have the product use the data that is generated (blood glucose levels, amount of insulin dosed, trends) in smarter ways.
• Easy to learn and teach/No numbers. A broad cross-section of diabetics will use this product, so it cannot be overly complicated, nor difficult to teach. And while numbers are important, we didn’t want to solely rely on those for indicating status and trending.
• Less stuff. Diabetics have to carry around a lot of stuff. We wanted to be sure that whatever we created wasn’t just one more thing to carry around.
• Keep diabetics in control. The people we spoke to weren’t interested in automatic pumps for the most part. They wanted to retain control of their insulin dosing.
• Keep diabetics motivated. Diabetes is a difficult disease to have. Diabetics, in the words of someone we talked to, “never get a day off,” so keeping motivated is a challenge. We wanted our product to help diabetics set goals and be so easy to use it helped keep them on track.

We also observed five major activities that all diabetics have to perform: maintaining equipment, checking blood glucose levels, interpreting those results, adjusting their blood glucose, and keeping motivated. (See our Diabetes Alignment Diagram [48k pdf]).

We started brainstorming around these core sets of principles and activities, first with just our small team, then in an open design session with about half of Adaptive Path participating.

After several brainstorming sessions, we had about 100 different concepts, all pasted up in our project space.

We had to make some hard decisions: would what we were going to design work with people who used syringes? (No.) How far into the future did we want to design for? (Two-three years.) What part of diabetes management could we reasonably affect? (We focused primarily on the day-to-day diabetes management, not on things like long-term care and diabetics’ relationship to doctors and to the health care system.) Was it going to be one object? Two? Three? (Two, as it turned out: a pump/monitor and a controller.)

We spent a lot of time discussing how the best of these ideas (because, frankly, some were unworkable or loony or had been done before) could fit together into one system that would really address the needs of diabetics as we’d heard them. It was Rachel Hinman who finally came up with the idea of what we’d eventually call The Charmr. “There should be just this little thing you can carry around that controls the pump/monitor and it should be like a piece of jewelry or something,” she said one afternoon when we were all exhausted from thinking about this problem for weeks on end.

The moment she said it, the room came alive. “A piece of jewelry with a touchscreen!” “Get a piece of foamcore!” “How big could it be?” “How much would it weigh?” “Anyone have an iPod Shuffle to compare?” And on it went until we had a concept we all loved, and the more we thought of it, the more we loved it. “It’s like a mood ring for your condition,” Rachel said. We wore the physical prototype around and started to call it Charmr (dropping the E in a joking homage to Web 2.0 companies) because it was like a charm bracelet and it worked like a charm (we hoped).

Several days later, Alexa Andrzejewski and I sat down with a blank whiteboard and said, “Ok, now that we’ve picked this concept, how does the Charmr really work?” That’s the next story to tell.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 10:37 am and is filed under Charmr Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.