Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Peter Hudson, Founder of iTriage (Part 3)

SM: I’m asking for specific experiences related to this product. I don’t want generic information.

PH: From this one, I think understanding the health care consumer through our experiences as doctors and seeing it all fall apart when they end up in the ER. Second, it’s all about users and the number of people you have.

SM: What is specific to the health care consumer that you’ve learned here?

PH: I think there’s a lot of technology that tries to engage people in different ways. We’re engaging people in the right way, which is high value decision support.

SM: You’ve been involved in the design of this product from the beginning, yes?

PH: That’s correct.

SM: Give me some examples of how people are designing health care products in the wrong way. What design decisions have you made for your product to be designed the right way to support a good solid growth of six million users? What are some of the design decisions that you think are fundamental to your success?

PH: We targeted an audience of users that involved virtually 100% of the population as opposed to going to a segmented user. Our idea was to sign up as many people as we could and then have segmented functionality over time.

SM: That’s difficult to do in a mobile app with a small form factor user interface. Going very generic makes it difficult for a product to be successful when your interface is a small mobile phone kind of interface. To me, what you’ve described sounds counterintuitive. It’s much more effective to design products in a more focused, segmented way than in a broad, generic way.

PH: I think it’s easier to get people to like your product when it’s appealing to a specific need. The relationships between a lot of these items are constant, but they haven’t been well related before in other technologies. It’s hard for people to understand them and conceive of relationships. I think we do a good of that. We looked at all sorts of content sources when we started. We wanted to be a large company, so we didn’t want to pay royalties based on users, and two, we thought all of the content out there was pretty weak. It was long and designed to drive more engagement and eyeballs over multiple page views. In reality, we didn’t think consumers really needed that when making a decision. We wanted them to have focused categorically specific content that had the right sections so that they could get just what they wanted. We found that that approach worked really well.

For example, somebody who is looking at migraines often looks at the treatment. Clicking the treatment section of the condition migraines is one of the most common clicks on migraines, versus psoriasis, which is a rash disease, where people will click on images much more frequently. So, people are using the categories to get the most efficient content that they can to hopefully, make a decision about their conditions or the treatment or what they’re going to do about them. So, they’re using it in a utilitarian way, but they’re also using it very efficiently. We created something that has broad-based appeal but has efficient use of content and access to content through a UI.

SM: Where does that content come from. You made a statement earlier that you didn’t want to pay royalties. Is this all original content?

PH: Most of it is all original content, yes.

SM: I see. So, you created well thought through navigable content that is specific to your application instead of bombarding people with lots of generic content that is not very high value.

PH: Yes. We could have gotten three or four pages of information on any condition you pick and just stuck it on our app. People would scroll through it, but it really isn’t efficient for getting at exactly what they’re looking to solve. And then the second part of that is before we came around, I don’t think anyone was taking you from content like a condition to the right kind of provider and then location-based search.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Peter Hudson, Founder of iTriage
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