There’s been a lot of buzz around ‘user centricity’ lately, as a technology megatrend that will unite all others before it.
It stems from an excellent post by Andy Weissman of USV, where he expands on the theme of people being the CEO of their own health, with doctors as their consultants.
As he says, and we agree wholeheartedly with, technology is becoming more and more personal – and people expect that to extend to every area of their lives, including how they manage their health.
In short, they want to be at the centre of their medical universe – and with an increasing number of phone apps that can do actual medical tests and track the likes of fertility, there’s clear evidence that this is already starting to happen.
Aggregrating different streams of information to provide a whole more useful and insightful than the sum of its parts is our guiding vision here at digi.me.
As part of that, we will shortly be giving users the ability to add full health and financial data to their personal data libraries, making them a more rounded and complete picture of their owners’ lives. And with it the ability to do more with that data as well as be in control of it. More data streams will then follow.
Uniting lots of common technological themes and magnifying them is what makes user centricity a megatrend. So platforms such as digi.me, which unlocks the power of personal data for the benefit of users and consumers, and the Internet of Me which seeks to put users at the centre of their connected lives are both prime examples of user centricity, writ large and actually in existence in lives today.
Andy goes on to note: “What is happening may be that the components of medical care are being reordered into something new – patient demanded and patient centric. Defined by the user and user needs…The thing that ties all these together is putting the user – the consumer of the healthcare – at the center of the universe and building out from there.”
User centricity is a growing trend and belief that we can expect to see and hear more and more of in every aspect of our lives, as industries of all kinds acknowledge the power people have in their phones, their data and the associated personal data stores they create, and work with that rather than against it.
And because user centricity is a trend that each of us will be part of and benefit from, we look forward to that happening sooner rather than later.