Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

While the press has been touting 2014 as "the year of wearable technology", many of us know about, and may already be using wearable technology that helps us improve many aspects of our health and our lives. For example, if you're a fitness enthusiast or a competitive athlete, you're probably already using a wireless heart rate monitor - a sensor that's worn around your upper torso - with a watch or an app on your phone that uses GPS to track your position, activity and effort.

Performing research for any disease takes hard work, but it is nearly impossible to conduct ground-breaking research and advance science in an expedient manner without a solid starting point--The specimens. The raw material for most of the good work to happen in the life sciences can likely be found in ample quantities of quality-controlled and well-catalogued specimens linked to information about the person from whom they came and their health status.

Here are some of 5AM’s best practices for incorporating User Experience (UX) design into your agile software development process.

Organisms are pretty complicated things, especially multicellular organisms. But what if I told you that, in some ways, single-celled organisms are even more complicated than multicellular organisms? Yet, when we talk about identifying things, this is exactly the case.

Here are some revisted thoughts about how mobile apps can serve people with health needs. As a user and developer of health-related mobile apps, I’ve identified five things that should be mindfully considered:

Picture it… 10 years ago, 5AM was a startup and the genome had just been mapped. Anyone who was paying attention knew -- just knew! -- that as surely as Mercator revolutionized the way the West saw the world, the newly mapped genome would usher in the next age of science and medicine. Software developers were thrilled at the prospect of wrangling all of that free-floating, wild genomic data into useful, meaningful information. A thing of beauty, to be sure!

A few weeks ago my colleague Chris Lasher gave a biologist's perspective of working for 5AM. I came to 5AM with no background in biology but I'm choosing to stay with a company that has figured out how to recruit great engineers, and knows how to get the absolute best work from them. These excellent results keep 5AM's clients extremely satisfied, and getting this output has nothing to do specifically with biology.

Need some quick tips on user experience (UX) design for your next project? Here are the top 7 most read UX design articles of 2013. Thank you for your support and continued readership. Let us know which article you liked most? 

2013 was an excellent year for our biobanking blog readership and we sincerely appreciate your support. We are truly excited about our future posts and look forward to your continued readership. In appreciation of your continued support, here are the top 5 most popular biobanking articles of 2013. Let us know which one is your favorite and make sure to check back in next week for our first biobanking article of 2014. 

Solid code. A core pursuit of 5AM, software engineers the world over and the multitude of stakeholders from end users to investors. The value of solid code is intrinsic to us, and a constant mantra with the understanding that software is more than code. We have shared often how we get our customers there in our postings and our methodology - glassbox. The value isn’t always apparent upfront and there are always trade-offs that change per situation, customer and even within project cycles. A customer related to us that “when your hair's on fire, call 5AM”. We appreciate the trust! We work to put the fire out and avoid future fires (that we can predict!). The 5AM environment helps. Here are 6 quick elements that help us help our customers get the fire out, the features done and the solution available … earlier.

Often when trying to convey an idea, we write, and write, and write some more. Though this is often the easiest and most accessible form of communication, it is not always the most effective or best user experience. In the first post of this multi post series “Beyond the Written Word: Showing, Not Telling” we will explore gamification.