Socializing cancer cases with the ease of collaborative media
Peercase is an interesting new web service that offers oncology specialist the ability to collaborate on their cases, poll each other for best practices, and develop virtual communities to share knowledge. It's a great idea that was born from necessity, and built on an existing practice by many medical practitioners.
This kind of platform supplementation is a great example of emerging tools being used to make life easier. At the same time, cancer patients stand to benefit greatly from the shared knowledge and interaction. My role on the project was to clean up the usability of the project, develop a way to find relevant cases based on something beyond filters and faceted search, and then to level out functionality across native iPad and desktop implementations.
What makes Peercase work is that it brings automation and social interaction to an existing practice already used by many doctors. The process involves their collaboration and consultancy of one another on a case they are treating. Much like a developers IRC channel, the oncologists would talk to one another on the phone at the end of their day, asking questions about relevant experience, past treatments, maybe a miracle case that they've come across.
Designing for iPad had its usual challenges, but the application felt so natural on a tablet that the problems quickly became features that I was able to exploit by pushing some of the simplicity back to the desktop implementation. For example the hover. Desktop developers still cling to the tooltip as a means of explaining the interface. Instead, by reducing the number of things that the user could do incorrectly - essentially breaking down the sequentiality of the interaction - the user simply found the flow that best suited the way they thought about the work.
This project had existing development ongoing, so part of my role was also in connecting the disparate development efforts, deal with code escrow issues, and provide some broader process alignment work.
