Check it out! I have been invited back to the HXD Conference for their 2012 event. Last year I talked about my experience at MeYou Health designing for the first step. This year I am talking about something a little bit different.

2011 at MeYou Health has been all about selling. As we have engaged and started rolling out Daily Challenge to customers, we have gotten a glimpse inside their wellness solutions. The same themes kept coming up over and over again:

1. “We can get people to sign up but can’t get them to come back.”
2. “My employees don’t take advantage of any of the programs we offer.”
3. “We have to offer incentives to get our population to do anything.”

 Reading between the lines, I continue to see a lack of credibility given to the attention of the individual. The products that are built try to do too much, too fast, and with too little regard for the attention they are likely to receive from the participant. 

So this led me to the topic of my HXD talk this year:

Overcoming indifference - How the attention economy plays a role in health product design

We all know designing online health interventions can be very difficult. Often we are asking participants to do things they know they need to do, but not necessarily things they want to do. We therefore face a huge barrier of indifference. Just because we build it, doesn’t mean they will come. 

Whether we know it or not, we all are playing a zero-sum game in the attention economy. Five minutes spent with your website/product is five minutes the individual is not spending somewhere else. How much attention are you asking for? What are you asking them to choose between?

In this talk I will highlight the key principles we learned while working on Daily Challenge (http://dailychallenge.com) that can help you streamline your online health product and become a celebrated steward of attention.

As I have started putting this talk together, I have found it to be a bit of a challenge. The reading that has informed my thinking on this is a lot more organic and scattered than my previous work on topics like gamification and behavior change. After all, I am not a researcher on this stuff. I read and utilize whatever I can to get to a product I can ship and a story that makes sense in the market. 

The other challenge is I have a completely different talk to do at the beginning of the month, so my attention is currently split!

It is going to be a busy March! Wish me luck!