Last June, we shared how our award-winning Clinical Trials tool was a product of “Wow Week,” which takes place every sixth week here at PatientsLikeMe. It’s essentially our version of Google’s “20-percent time,” or a period of unstructured time where our engineers have the freedom to work on their own ideas. We believe it fosters passion, experimentation and risk-taking. In fact, we know it has given how many other site improvements were conceived during “Wow Week” in 2011.
The list is quite long (kudos, engineering team!), so we singled out three “Wow Week” projects that seemed to really resonate with our 128,000+ members.
MyCycle
Engineering Team Credits: Amy Newell, Doug Martila, Ben Zack and Scott Listfield For women, your menstrual cycle can be intricately tied to your health condition(s), as well as how you feel. Now, with MyCycle, you can monitor your cycle length, view it next to your other health information and predict the next start date. (If you’re a female who has not indicated your gender on your basic information, you’ll need to do so in order to receive access to this feature.)
Fuzzy Dates
Engineering Team Credits: Jeffrey Chupp (no longer with the company) and Michael Berkowitz Are you often fuzzy about your dates? So are most people. In recognition of the fact that photographic memory is a rare trait, you can now specify dates with varying levels of accuracy or “fuzziness” – the year (2008), the year and month (May 2008) or the full date (May 22, 2008). Whatever you can remember is better than no data at all!
Mobile InstantMe
Engineering Team Credits: Steve Hammond, Thomas Mayfield, Joe Rodriguez, Keenan Brock, James Kebinger and Doug Martila For InstantMe (our daily log of how you’re feeling) to be more instant, we needed an app, right? This mobile website/application uses HTML5 to support the tracking of your InstantMe scores on your iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone. Learn more about what it can do here. (Note that this feature is now open to all members, regardless of their star level.)
Are we right? Did these new tools and features add more “Wow” to your PatientsLikeMe experience? We’ve love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. And as always, stay tuned to our Release Notes page for the latest technology updates and innovations.
