Trapper Markelz

The story of the Twitter Well-Being Tracker

When you set out to build a product sometimes, things sound good on paper, but the farther you go, the more you realize... what the heck was I thinking? That sort of happened to me with this attempt to build an automatic Twitter well-being app that parsed conversations and rated their well-being content. IN the end, that just wasn't that interesting. Given some law of averages, the number just doesn't vary enough to tell you much. 

So we ended up with something quite different... an online quiz that tells you about your own well-being and that of your followers.

Once upon a time, a company named Healthways created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, or WBI, a national survey that provides a comprehensive, real-time look at the public health and well-being in the U.S. The WBI is based on telephone interviews with at least 1,000 U.S. adults each day. Over one million people have been surveyed since the survey launched in 2008, making it the nation’s largest and most comprehensive look at overall well-being. 

Although it’s an accurate description of a population's well-being, the WBI was not designed to predict the well-being of me, or you, or any other person on an individual level. 

To remedy this, Healthways, the parent company of MeYou Health, partnered with leading behavioral scientists to create an assessment tool for individuals. This tool is called the Well-Being Assessment (WBA), which Healthways administers to employers, health plans and other organizations. MeYou Health has adapted the WBA for online use and calls it the Well-Being Tracker, or WBT.

When we first started on this journey we asked: “Is it possible to find out the well-being of Twitter by capturing the conversations and analyzing the sentiment?” 

Read more

...or GET YOUR SCORE! and say hi to the well-being bot.

Come see me on a "gamification" panel, March 29th

I have been asked to participate on a panel this month.

Gamification: Level Up Your User Experience
03/29/2011 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM 

What are the scenarios where gamification works? What is the future of gamification? How will it manifest beyond just games and location services? MITX is bringing you the experts who can answer these questions: 

• Mike Schneider - SVP, Director Digital Incubator Allen and Gerritsen (moderator)
• Steve Curran - Founder/Chief Creative Officer Pod Digital Design
• Nataly Kogan - Vice President Consumer Experience, WHERE Inc.
• Trapper Markelz - Head of Product, MeYou Health
• Peter Stringer - Director Interactive Media, Boston Celtics
• David Tyler - SVP, Bunchball  

Register now to come check it out if this seems like your kinda thing!

So just what is this gamification thing? Who knows these days. From my perspective it is a neologism that isn't that well defined. I would like the definition to be actually turning something into a game. But it is also often used to describe any scenario where you apply game-like mechanics... even when the application of those mechanics does not actually create a game. It should be a fun discussion though. I hope to contribute a perspective, but I also hope to come away learning something.

Health products designed for the first step

When I first started at MeYou Health a little over a year ago, I had no idea how I would build a product that facilitated behavior change. Crazy enough, I am speaking at a few conferences in April on this topic, so I am in the process of putting together the materials. They center around designing for the first step. It is a belief that before we can do anything major, we need to get people up over the first hurdle of doing something, anything, to improve their health.

Figuring this out started in January of 2010 with interviews. We partnered with a market research company and conducted dozens of video and in-home interviews. We asked people about well-being. What do they think it is? What prevents them from improving? How could we help?

A month later, we interviewed a few dozen more individuals as part of a branding project. If there was a company about well-being, how would it inspire you? What would it offer? From this information we build a test product (a minimum viable product) and launched it to 1,500 people. 60% of those used it every day for two months. Each day we asked them how they felt. Did they do something new? How did it make you feel? 

We then surveyed those participants and asked them: did we change your life yet? Thankfully, some of them answered yes!

I learned a lot about people in those four months. But the most important thing was somewhat unrelated to what we needed to succeed. Instead, the most important thing I learned is something that could cause us to fail... or worse yet, end up lumped in with many of the online health solutions out there:

It is really easy to reach the people that do not need help.

Let’s say you build a health product, and you put together a search engine marketing strategy that targets all the fitness health keyword volume you can get your hands on. Are you really reaching the people that need your product? No, you are not. Recognize that any health product will always get a segment of the population ready to try the latest and greatest online health solution. These are people who are already at a sufficient state of readiness to search for products and content in this space. These aren’t your real customers and if you attract lots of them you might think you are doing great. 

But these are the wrong people! They don’t need our help!

When you attract the wrong people, you start doing the wrong things. You ask your participants to do things they aren't ready to do yet. You ask them to enter information they don't know yet. You trivialize their challenges, misunderstand their barriers and priorities, and alienate them in record time. You end up with a health product full of healthy people.

The individuals I want in our products are all those without the current desire to take action. These are the individuals who are too busy to work on their well-being, too quick to make excuses, or are enabled by culture, location or circumstance to maintain behaviors detrimental to well-being. Just imagine how easy a product needs to be to attract this mindset. That is where we started.

So in the words of Maya Angelou, I am obsessed with how we help others know better, so they can do better. Stay tuned for the principals that help me keep MeYou Health's Daily Challenge on the right path.

My photo spread in Mass High Tech!

A while back I was interviewed for an article in Mass High Tech about gaming and start up's in the health space. A few days later, they called and asked if they could send out a photographer to take a few pictures. I said sure, and things went as you expect. He snapped a few shots. It was all good fun.

Then about a week after that, the article was published on their blog: "Boston's game, health care and IT expertise drive social games for health" (read more) and there was a tiny little photo of me in the upper right of the page. I thought that was the only photo they used! Turns out no!

I didn't know there was an actual paper version of the article printed with me standing there in full-on goof-glory. :) As I was telling the photographer, I sort of forgot about the photoshoot and he was lucky that I even decided to shave that day! If I would have known I would be taking up an entire page, I might have dressed a little nicer, but oh well... I guess it is genuine because that is who I am!

I found a place on Mass High Tech where you can download the PDF of the articles, so if you want to see the full thing in all its high-res glory,  Download the PDF.

Two speaking opportunities coming up!

I have been invited to speak at two conferences in April 2011. I have yet to really nail down my talks, but that process is starting as we get deeper into February.

The first, is the Healthcare Experience Design conference on April 11, 2011 here in Boston.  The speaker list is:

• BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford
• Matthew Diamanti: Senior Director of User Experience at Mayo Clinic
• John Bahl: Head of Member and Consumer Online Strategy at Aetna
• Vincent Matyi: Principal User Experience Architect at University of Pennsylvania Health System
• Peter Jones: Author, Design for Care
• Trapper Markelz: Head of Product at MeYouHealth <- WOO HOO
• Lisa Nugent: Global Creative Director at Johnson & Johnson
• Joanne Fournier: User Experience Designer at HelloHealth
• Rick Lee: CEO of Healthrageous
• Alex Fair: CEO of FairCareMD
• Jamie Heywood:CEO of PatientsLikeMe

The second, is the Healthways Well-Being Summit on April 26th in Dallas, Texas. The full list of speakers is not yet available. I am holding down a 20 minute slot sometime in the morning. But the list includes some serious heavy hitters like:

• Daniel Pink - Author of DRIVE: The surprising truth about what motivates us.
• Dan Buettner - How to live to 100+ and Blue Zones pioneer.
• Nicholas A. Christakis - Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks.
• Deepak Chopra - Author of more than fifty books on spirituality and well-being.
• And assorted others... like ME!

So I have a lot to prepare for in the coming months! I am hoping to talk about our progress at MeYou Health coming up with realistic, convenient, immediate, and genuine ways to get people to take small actions that make them mindful and more prepared along their continuum of well-being.

The story of Munch 5-a-day by MeYou Health

In fitting with the MeYou Health tradition of launching as many products as fast as freaking humanly possible, here is another one for the portfolio... Munch 5-a-day. The full story is over at the MeYou Health blog. Check it out. Grab the app. Let me know what you think. A little excerpt:

I was at my doctor’s office getting a yearly check up when I was asked me a question that stopped me cold. “How many servings of fruits or vegetables are you getting every day?” Here I was, working at a health company, and I was unable to answer my doctor’s question. I stammered through, my mind racing back over my meals the past week.

“Uh…. I ate a few salads this week, a few pieces of fruit, I dunno… maybe one or two? Is that good?”

He looked at me with a blank expression. I guess my answer was suppose to be somewhere closer to five to ten servings… whoops.

Munch-5-a-day for the iPhone is meant to help you solve this problem — not eating enough fruits and veggies.

Read more

The fun part of this whole thing was that after I randomly discovered this app, we negotiated and completed the paperwork for purchasing this application from a company in another country as well as rebranded and relaunched it in around 30 days. The whole process was total craziness... but the team here at MeYou Health is awesome and knows how to get things done.

The employees of MeYou Health sharing our new year resolutions

A fun video we whipped up at the office talking about MeYou Health, My Resolution 2011, and sharing a little bit about us! I'm in here at 1:10.

 

The story of My Resolution 2011 by MeYou Health

Near the end of October 2010, I had this crazy idea that we should do a New Years Resolution application on Facebook. I looked around and couldn't find any that were really popular. Something like this seemed right up MeYou Health's alley. The self-introspection that occurs while you think about yourself and your goals for the year is a healthy act. It also tends to be a social act as others ask you what your resolution is to sometimes get ideas for their own.

Many people like to make fun of New Year resolutions... but I find most of those arguments to be largely over semantics. Whether you call it a yearly goal, a yearly challenge, a personal improvement project or whatever you want to call it, the act of assessing yourself and your life as you think about the coming year is something that we all do. Humans are big on fresh starts.

So in the course of a few weeks we found a company to build it, worked through the concepts and set a launch date of Dec 30th. We nailed the launch date and things were looking good. We seeded the product with a few users, and the numbers started to climb. As we entered New Years Eve, things were looking up. People were joining, sharing, inviting en-masse... it looked to be close to taking off...

And then we were banned.

We didn't realize we were banned, but at some point during the night while we all slept, we awoke to find that our application had been deleted from Facebook. All the ad money we had turned on was being wasted as it funneled people right into an error message for over 10 hours.

The specifics aren't important. What was terrible is that we were not notified abotu this. We were not told why we were banned so we didn't know what to fix. At first we thought there might have been some sort of accident (did one of us delete the app?) so we rebuilt the app and re-deployed it only to have it banned again. After the second ban, we went in and changed a bunch of features to essentially remove the ability to rapidly invite your friends or ask for support.

As of now, the app is still up... and we never really heard from Facebook on why we were banned. We believed we were following the terms of service. We were respecting the invite throttles. We were properly messaging users when they were inviting too much (and preventing them from inviting further). In the end we made a pretty minor change so that, instead of our app sending the invite, we let Facebook send the invite on behalf of the app. That seems to be working. 

So New Years day was pretty crazy as we scrambled to pull our app back from the dead. We were offline during the primary time it was suppose to be up, but I guess we learned something: You better play nice with the machine learning algorithm robots at Facebook, or they will attack when you least expect it. Maybe next year when we release it as My Resolution 2012, we will be ready!

Happy New Year everyone! It isn't to late to make your resolution!

Quantifying for non-quantifiers

MeYou Health recently hosted the Boston Quantified Self group. I was asked to speak adlib about what we were doing at MeYou Health related to the QS movement. I didn't actually know I was on video, but here it is!

quantified self carrot and stickk part 1 from PK Shiu on Vimeo.

 

The Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell

Well I made it! It was a wild ride, and I had lots of fun working my way through the Lost Fleet book series by Jack Campbell. If you want to do it too, I suggest you start with book 1. 

This was one of those books that was recommended to me in some random internet powered social media recommendation thing that I can't remember. One of those "If you liked Forever War you would like this!" Turns out it was right. Thank you internet.

The story follows Captain Geary as he wakes up after being in a survival pod, drifting in space for 100 years. He finds out that the last battle he fought, was the first battle of a war that has been raging for over a century. He also immediately learns that his actions in that first battle saved the lives of the rest of the fleet, and that he was turned into a mythical hero.

Through a very quick set of events, Geary finds himself in charge of this massive fleet. They have been double crossed and trapped behind enemy lines. The last 100 years of war have left a mark on an undisciplined, disordered, and political fleet. If he ever hopes to get them back to Alliance space, he will need to accomplish the impossible. Good thing he is a mythic hero sent by the stars!

The best part of these books is also the part that I see people negatively review the most... the huge epic space battles. Trying to describe the engagement strategies of how hundreds of ships... moving 30,000 kilometers per second through space interact and fight does make your head spin. But that doesn't mean it isn't cool to try and think about the complexity of it all. It isn't for everyone, but it was for me.

I recently read that Victorious is NOT the last book. There will be more coming, and I am looking forward to it.