Diabetes apps have to adapt to each user

The day after our beta release went out the door we brought our ThoughtWorks development team together with users to hear their feedback.

User feedback

Like any early beta release, this one is pretty minimal, so we were all pretty surprised to see how useful people are finding it already. The time they took — and the thoughtfulness of their feedback — showed how much they believe our app will make a material difference to their lives. They’re committed to making it happen.

As expected, there was a lot of feedback on the user experience. The poor understanding of diabetes means there are a lot of variations in self-care approaches, and we have to make our app adapt to each user’s way. It’s a development team’s dream, or nightmare, depending upon how curious, tenacious and creative they are.

The poor understanding of diabetes means there are a lot of variations in self-care approaches, and we have to make us adapt to each user’s way.

Customer-driven

For our team, call it a dream. Our lead analyst summed up one user-feedback session nicely: “We have strong assurance that we’re on the right path. The vision is right. The main thing now is to keep the customer in the driver’s seat.”

We all have so many ideas for our app. But that means rigorous prioritisation and disciplined engineering, but it also means having the courage to kill our darlings. Here we go…