Designed To Fail: Facebook Star Ratings on Pages

As a part of our service at CrystalMD we design and implement Facebook pages for medical practices, and integrate the management of the page in our platform.

Once we create the Facebook page, we make physicians or their practice managers the administrators of the page so that they can invite their friends and family to build the "seed pool" of likes. Over the course of the last year, we noticed a trend:

Several doctors were getting 1-star or 2-star ratings from their friends and family who were invited to like the page.

How strange is that? Why would any of your friends and family rate your practice as 1-star or 2-star? Several doctors called got alarmed and called us to find out what was going on. After doing some poking and usability testing among friends, we reached the conclusion that the star rating system on Facebook pages is prone to erroneous submissions .

“The way you currently give ratings on a Facebook Business Page is by simply hovering over the star and clicking on it. The flow is inherently flawed. Clicking the star submits the rating is not made apparent to the user.”

When you write a review, there is a "Review" button you have to hit in order to submit the review, but that is not made available to submit the star rating. This is likely by design, to encourage people to submit ratings. However, our belief is that this is flawed and designed to fail. People click on the star rating not knowing that the rating will be submitted, as by habit, we seek the submit / review button in order to complete that transaction.

I'm sure this impacts a lot of businesses on a daily basis and Facebook should immediately look into it.

Update as of January 17, 2014: I see that flow to submit star rating is fixed. Users now have to hit the "Review" button to submit the (anonymous) star rating. Thanks for listening & the quick fix Facebook!

Branding For Doctors

The way I see it now, this category does not exist.

Only a small number of doctors think of using their names to represent their brand.

A doctor is a service, represented by his/her name. 

For e.g., Dr. Shuaib Farooqui M.D. - represents his profession, his values, his accomplishments, and a lot more. Yet, when we look up a doctor online, this is what we find:

1) Vitals, HealthGrades, ZocDoc, + 100 other such 3rd party sites

2) The doctor's practice site, if it exists

3) Google Places listing

This content indirectly paints the doctor's image. The first page of any search engine is the most valuable asset of a business; specifically, a reputation- and referral-driven business like that of a Doctor's.

Highest clicked search results are the mostly the top four. Yet, over 75% of doctors have search listings that are not in their control. The search results are hijacked by 3rd party sites that aggregate and collect information from patients and other sources, to represent the doctor's name or brand online.  

Search for a doctor is the first doctor-patient interaction. Online doctor searches are increasingly being performed from smartphones/mobile devices. Most definitely, doctors need to take charge of this first interaction by taking ownership of their name and brand, and thus, exert control on patient interactions. At CrystalMD, the Mobile Doctor Portal helps doctors address exactly this pain-point, in a low effort, manageable way.

“Mobile & DoctorNameMD.com is the future of the Doctors’ brand and digital presence - how does yours rank?”

Smartphone User Experience Is Fundamentally Flawed

Over 95% of apps don't get used, or are abandoned after a few tries. Behavioral reasons aside, I wanted to zoom-in on one aspect of this outcome - the UX. The current smartphone UX does not provide the solution to be able to think and find the app for our needs.

The process of thought -> action -> app -> gratification is inefficient. 

The home screen of smartphones are dumb are do not utilize available data to add context to the screen/apps. Utilizing contextual data will push the boundaries of smartphone app efficiency and usage. 

I can draw some parallels to the healthcare industry. Caring for health is ongoing. Good health or bad health is happening as I type this. The missing piece in health care delivery right now is context - right place, right time, right channels for delivery of care. At present, the only channels available to individuals are 1)content search & the 2) visit to the doctor 3) Ask family and friends- all of which requires effort. But if I had an immediate question - for example - if a medication could have negative reaction with coffee, I'd like that information coming straight from my doctor, instead of a Google search. The next generation of healthcare apps/services will win if they are able to make health care intelligent using a mix of self tracking data and instant accessibility to a doctor or nurse. 

Healthcare Content & Tynt Copy-Paste

I like Tynt for its utility as a content publisher (in the process of activating it on my blog). For those of you not familiar with this utility, it helps publishers add an attribution link to content when someone shares it via. copy-paste. The top benefits are - more linkbacks, traffic, PVs and analytics around the content.

With comScore pointing out in their study - Healthcare is the fastest growing content category on the web, Tynt could play a very important role to give credit where it's due to content producers. Tynt also released a study which indicates copy-paste accounts for 82% of the sharing on the web. www.tynt.com

While typing this, I came across this post "Imitation is the Greatest form of Flattery, or is it?"  by Dr. Howard Luks who sheds light on an interesting incident that happened to a surgeon who copy-pasted another surgeon's Twitter profile, word-to-word. The surgeon, who blundered, eventually took the profile and related blog post down. However, this leaves us thinking about the bigger issues related to healthcare content and attribution.

// Disclaimer: Tynt is owned and operated by my former employer, an advertising company 33Across. Please use at your own risk, and verify HIPAA compliance prior to use//

Photo credits to TechCrunch article about Tynt. T'was too cute to not "Copy and Paste" :-)

Apple Spotlight Search

Why does the Apple spotlight search not include an option to Search App Store in addition to existing options Search Web and Search Wikipedia ? 

Quora Question Link

Twitter vs PeopleBrowsr

This could potentially become a landmark case! It will boil down to the interpretation of contracts and their TOS. Assuming Twitter legal has done its job in keeping the terms tight, this could fall in Twitters favor. We'll see what happens..

"PeopleBrowsr Wins Temporary Restraining Order Compelling Twitter to Provide Firehose Access"

San Francisco, CA (November 28, 2012)

PeopleBrowsr and Twitter appeared in San Francisco Superior Court today. PeopleBrowsr won a restraining order compelling Twitter to provide full Firehose access. The court rejected Twitter’s contention that the application was without merit. A hearing date for a preliminary injunction has been set for January 8th, 2013.

“Today’s decision was a good result,” said Jodee Rich, Founder and CEO of PeopleBrowsr. “We relied on Twitter’s promise of openness when we invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours of development time,” said Rich. “Long term supply is essential as this industry matures. We made this application to ensure full unrestricted access to the Firehose for our Enterprise and Government clients.”

Read more here:

http://blog.peoplebrowsr.com/2012/11/peoplebrowsr-wins-temporary-restraining-order-compelling-twitter-to-provide-firehose-access/

Product vs Experience

Have you thought about starting with delivering an amazing experience, and backing it with a product? In the "Means to Experience" approach as I like to call it, you back into a product from the lens of delivering an experience with a measurable threshold . To do this, you will literally have to sit for days, if not months and observe a business in action first hand.

With lean startup best practices, we are trained to think in terms or solving pain points, "vitamin vs painkiller", yet many companies fail to bring the "OOMPH" in overall experience. Similar to setting validations for each of product & features, objectively validating the overall experience surrounding the use of a product should not be an option for something to do at a later stage.

A perfect world would be without products - simple, clean and invisible. Make your product and experience so seamless such that it becomes a fabric of the businesses and behavior. That's what makes a powerful product, er... experience.

Doctors, Upgrade Your Desktops

I've observed many doctors' behavior while using their office computers. Nearly 50% of them, at some point, go into a frenzy with their mouse because their computer is too slow or verbally voice their disappointment with the machine.

In the age of instant, having to 'click-click-wait-wait' could mean many different things to a doctor, and to a patient. I have a hunch. If their computers had updated hardware or software that made their workflow 10% faster, it would have significant impact on patient satisfaction, and the bottom line. Time saved, bedside manner, demeanor, less errors, etc. - there are tangible and intangible benefits, outcomes of which are indirectly tied to the experience with technology. 

When doctors have their Windows XP PC, in one instance, the doctor had to to run a VPN, and then log into a terminal, then log in again to the portal - the experience is lost in clicking and waiting. There are plenty technology startups focusing on amazing products. 

For many doctors, their iPad and smartphone is the biggest update and satisfaction driver when considering speed, reliability and experience in inputting and retrieving information. So Doctors, replace those desktops for a seamless experience!

Values

"Judge yourself by the values you protect, less by money and accomplishments"

Ultimate Doctor Dashboard

Everybody has a dashboard. Consumers, businesses, plumbers, doctors - every individual has a screen or multiple screens that keeps them updated of things they care about. For most people, their email, facebook and twitter act as their social dashboards. Salesforce acts as an operational dashboard for many Fortune 500 organizations, while startups like Domo hope to pull data from various silos in one place, what they call the CEO dashboard.

So the question that has been on my mind for a long time is - What does the ultimate doctor dashboard look like? How does a doctor or practice manager with one touch or click know the most important metrics and variables that run their practice?

More on this soon...

75% of doctors own a smartphone or tablet