I haven’t posted much about my own work lately, so I thought I’d take a few minutes and talk about one of the projects that’s been keeping me busy the past several months. This past spring, I signed on as a partner in a new company that offers a web-based service connecting people with their loved ones in long term care (ie. nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, etc.). Communication with families is a huge problem in these circumstances, making a highly-emotional situation even worse. Our service, Connect for Healthcare, aims to help families stay connected by easily allowing providers to send email and/or SMS text message updates to family members on a regular basis.
My partner, Neil Moore, has a many years of experience in the long-term healthcare industry and has the connections to get this thing off the ground. My job was to design and build the app, which I did - from top to bottom, from Photoshop to Engine Yard deployment. I enjoyed every phase of the project and I’m very proud of the results. The feedback we’ve been getting from our initial demos has been outstanding and our hopes are high that we have a strong and socially valuable business on our hands.
There’s always something new to learn during the course of working on a new project, especially with Rails. This was my first opportunity to play with sending SMS messages (using Clickatell and the clickatell gem) and with handling recurring subscription payments (by way of Authorize.net by way of ActiveMerchant by way of the excellent SaaS RailsKit as a starting point). I also became quite the Thoughtbot fanboy, utilizing Paperclip, Shoulda, and Factory Girl (all here).
But as usual, my favorite place to be is on the front-end, making smart and engaging interfaces. Since all of the good stuff is only seen by logged in subscribers or providers, I’ve taken a few screenshots and posted them in a Flickr set.
Provider Login
Provider Dashboard
Provider Update Performance
Resident Overview
Status Widgets
At a glimpse, you can see how many metrics each resident has (the number of little blocks) and how well they were on the last update (the colors). For a detailed look, a tooltip-type box appears when hovering over an individual status widget.
Status Entry
A provider entering a new status update. Clicking the Good/Fair/Not Very Good buttons immediately colors the entire row for quick visual feedback. The sidebar shows who will receive the update when saved and how they will receive it (email and/or SMS)
Edit Resident
Dynamic, graphical submit buttons
I wanted to use nicer looking submit buttons throughout the application, but I didn’t want the hassle of creating each one in Photoshop. We also want to minimize our work if/when we decide to internationalize the app. For this, I created some CSS and jQuery magic that allows for plain text submit buttons (sized appropriately for the text length) and near-native browser behavior - hover indication, keyboard-tabbing, etc. You can also specify an optional string in the “rel” attribute that gets displayed upon form submission. Perhaps I’ll clean this up and make it a jQuery plugin one of these days.
