World's first Free Drug Formulary App

We are pleased to announce the release of world's first Drug Formulary App. You can check it out here...

The App has some features which we hope our users will find useful. These include:
• Search entire NFI instantly
• 431 drugs with concise product monographs
• Listed by Generic name and categories
• 15 Appendices
• Option for Create and show bookmarks
• Personalize with font sizes and backgrounds

In addition, we have tried to make it interactive for the end users to set font sizes and contrast so that they can see a setting's impact before saving it.

Give it a whirl if you or someone you know has an Android phone, and let us know if you have any thoughts on it.

Thanks!

An awesome resource for human centered design

Here at thinktwo we try to incorporate a lot of human centered design thinking into our day to day tasks.

Recently a colleague was looking for a resource / design toolkit that we can use to explain some of the design research and thinking to a new colleague.

We figured we can probably google up something that explains this stuff in a simple and comprehensive manner, and we ran into this brilliant resources offered free by IDEO.

So, from hear and create

to implement and deliver...BTW, we love the twist on the HCD acronym :-)

While this toolkit may look like it is targeted for emerging markets / base of the pyramid etc., this is actually pretty much how we would do design research in US or Europe as well. This toolkit can be downloaded here.

Thanks to the IDEO folks for freely sharing this nugget of knowledge.

A tribute to Steve Jobs

We have always admired Steve Jobs for what he did, but more than that for what he enabled the rest of the world to do, including us.

We salute you Steve, and may you rest in peace.

Designing mobile apps? Start by unlearning desktop thinking

"Unlearn English to learn French."
My French teacher in college used to say, and it was so true. Most of the class was thinking in English and translating it to French, often with hilarious results.

Folks transitioning from conventional desktop/web to mobile development suffer from this challenge too (as I have discovered lately).

Mobile development needs a completely different way of thinking. What works on the desktop/web mostly does not work on mobile devices. In some ways, mobile apps epitomize the notion of progressive disclosure, show enough to maintain users interest / relevance, and let them tap to the next view / detail. The limited real estate on the mobile device almost demands that type of design thinking.

To put it simply, if we were to take the MS Office user interface design that has menu bars with lots of options and functions and turn it upside down, we will be close to a mobile interface / interaction design model. So, offering very just what is absolutely needed in terms of options and functions at each level , and have the user tap (click) to different levels to progressively reveal these functions and options is probably closer to the mobile device user experience.

One of those interesting areas where form does drive the function, I guess.