Ask HN: Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool)

by dmix • 16 years ago

26 28 16 years ago

dmix10• 16 years ago

This was an app I built over the winter break in about 3 days. Its just a simple tool for people with diabetes to log their blood glucose levels, meals, etc. I explained the story here in a blog post: http://dmix.ca/2010/02/announcing-carelogger-a-diabetes-trac...

We soft-launched about a week ago and have had 80 people signup which we think is awesome.

We'd appreciate any feedback.

dale-cooper4• 16 years ago

This looks great. As a diabetic i've been considering doing something like this, now i won't need to :)

Some feedback:

Can't create new entries, get "We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Would like to be able to enter different types of mediciation, i use humalog+lantus.

A mobile app would be awesome. I might be able to help, i have iphone experience and a little android experience..

EDIT: Prefilled time when creating an entry is off by one hour.. timezone/dst issue?

dmix10• 16 years ago

Thanks, fixed the new entry error. (Late night releases = bad idea).

The timezone is UTC by default. I might make it detect timezones in the future.

dale-cooper4• 16 years ago

Ah, yes that works now.

Detecting timezones would be nice.

After reading your blog entry i see that you have no plans to charge for it or display ads. What about open sourcing it?

maxklein• 16 years ago

I was about to do this. It's a great idea, it's an excellent market and most of the competition is terrible. I actually did my research on this so I know for a fact you'll be successful.

Just be sure to allow people recommend it to their family and friends. That should be a big part of your marketing - getting geeks to get their parents to use this.

pibefision• 16 years ago

Add Facebook Connect at login and signup.

nathan822• 16 years ago

Great landing page, initially I was clicking around trying to figure out why such a slick looking tool was completely free! You really get across how and why your service would be useful.

A few little nitpicks, hopefully they're helpful: The bottom signup button isn't clickable. The orange 'join today' text could maybe do with a nicer font - more handwritten, less script. There's a small white square in the top right of your stock photo. Cutout outline visible on the woman's hair. The screenshots might be better popping up in a lightbox. The sign-up form struck me as generic, and didn't match the page I had just come from. The site root doesn't show my dashboard when I'm logged in. The icons next to the different types of entries look like youtube 'play' buttons, confused me for a moment.

dmix10• 16 years ago

Nitpicking is welcome, this is the type of feedback we don't get from our usual users - appreciate it.

nathan822• 16 years ago

Glad to help, a couple more before I go back to obsessing over my own pixels...

The vertical spacing between the green headings could do with tweaking, more space above and less below to tie them to the block of text they go with. Top headline text "Keeping tabs..." has the dots of the i's and the left edge of the 'g' sliced off. Your logo is nice but the wordmark looks (to me) very corporate and squashed up; maybe incorporate some blues from the logo and use looser kerning.

peterb• 16 years ago

I am the father of a Type 1 who is 8 years old. The problem is the same with any of the diabetes tools: you have to manually enter the numbers. Until you can get around this fundamental problem, you will have difficulty getting people to use the app. A mobile app helps, but it really needs to be automated. Also, many people will not share sensitive health information with a random website.

Keep an eye on what Google Health and Microsoft's Health Vault are doing. Good luck.

dale-cooper4• 16 years ago

I see the same problem. But this still makes it easier than typing it down in a notebook, especially if there's a mobile app.

simon_• 16 years ago

I am diabetic (type 1), and I have been meaning to make this for years. Damn you!

dale-cooper4• 16 years ago

Hmm.. we're 3 diabetics who have been meaning to this already in this thread. I think I see a pattern, diabetics are lazy ;-)

More seriously.. Too bad it's not open source, it seems it could make a great product that way.

mattew3• 16 years ago

Our company works with 2 prominent diabetes companies. I am going to let them know about this. I may be able to help get you some significant exposure on this if they find it interesting.

dmix10• 16 years ago

That would be great, thanks.

mattew3• 16 years ago

The initial comments that I am getting back are that there are a lot of loggers out there, but your's looks quite slick. What is that you feel differentiates your application from the other loggers out there?

dmix10• 16 years ago

What makes us different:

- it's free

- our users tell us it's great having everything in one place (glucose, blood pressure, medication + food tracking) other products often only have 1-2

- we have a diet tracking feature that draws carbohydrate nutritional data from thousands of different types of food

- the UI is very easy to use

- its web based and accessible from any browser (most loggers we found were desktop applications that cost money)

- we are actively improving the service and are very open to listening to our users feedback

tibbon• 16 years ago

While I'm not a diabetic, my sister is. I'm sending this along to her for her thoughts.

alexh• 16 years ago

I like it!

Unfortunately, the fundamental problem with diabetics, and the reason that the (now) 4 people who have commented here never created this app, is that diabetics are lazy. This needs to be soooooo easy to use. Which it is, to the extent that it is a webapp.

This really somehow needs to get turned into a mobile app, which will remind you to do the checks, and prompt you for a reading. If you were to provide a simple web API, I would probably be plugging into it tonight on Palm.

If this app texted me, and I could respond with readings, I would be in love.

Particularly for basal tests and bolus tests on an insulin pump, prompted readings with a dead simple interface are key. When you are supposed to be doing this 5 times a day, you are going to be as expedient as possible. This is the primary problem with logging systems. Personally I either forget, or don't want to run upstairs every time.

The only real missing feature of note is the lack of an interface for basal and bolus testing. Though that only applies to a subset of diabetics.

dmix10• 16 years ago

The texting feature is a good idea.

Most of the tech people we talk to think a mobile app is an essential feature. But at the moment we noticed we have an older and less tech savvy user-base. So its not at the top of the list at the moment. But definitely in the future.

Btw, there are about 4-5 iPhone apps for tracking diabetes = in the app store if you are looking for one. Not sure about Palm.

iaman• 16 years ago

Very nice. I agree with most commentators that a mobile app would be a big step forward. It will also greatly help patients to share their log data with their physicians instead of mere print outs as suggested on the web site. The solution for laziness would be complete automation as one poster suggested or the patient's physician should press to see this data during all their visits which will indirectly make it a habit for the patient to enter their data. Anyways, nice app again. Good luck.

Vindexus• 16 years ago

I have to agree about the signup page appearing out of place. I'd keep it in the same style as the rest of the site.

The About page has "About HumaLogger" as the header. I'm assuming you guys changed names once or twice ;)

dmix10• 16 years ago

Indeed it was called HumaLogger until a few days ago when we realized "Humalog" was trademarked. Thanks for the heads up.

liminalist• 16 years ago

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.

dmix10• 16 years ago

Thanks for writing that.

> 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.

Ask HN: Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool)

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