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Healthy Software
We talk of green products that are your typical products such as cars or clothing that happens to have the additional product attribute of being good for the environment.  'Green' is a secondary product benefit that acts as a differentiator. 

As we steadily enter into a world of motion controlled activities and continually aware biometrics, we open up a new area of product differentiation, 'Healthy software'.  

Physical prowess as productivity
Imagine a world where Kinect-style devices are built into every screen. They use how you move as one key element of their interfaces. With a motion controlled device, the user skills are often highly physical and can have a strong performance attribute.  A fit individual should be able to play longer and pull off moves that someone who rarely exercises does not.  A fit individual is arguably already a more productive individual and that will be expressed in the details of how they use future physical interfaces. 

Designing for skill acquisition
In games, we are concerned about skill acquisition curves and find that they are incredibly useful for turning new users into skilled users that understand the value of our products. People do not come with instinctual knowledge of how new-fangled computers work.  Designers must grow our user skills. Human-centric UX will naturally adopt the learning-focused designs invented in games as motion controls make their way into broader, non-game markets. 

In a competitive service-based market, it pays for companies to measure and optimize these skill curves with extreme rigor.  We are at the start of this particular revolution, but what we are currently doing with metrics pales compared to the class of data we'll be collecting in the future.  Imagine high resolution cameras dumping visual, depth and heat information into behavioral models at 120 FPS.  Such will be your webcam and we'll be mining that data as a matter of course. 

This data gets fed back into the product.  The skill curves are turned.  The software adapts to the individuals. So we will know exactly how to lead you on a path to physical mastery. 

Ergonomics first
At the most basic implementation of healthy software, we care about ergonomics; do the motions of this activity harm the user?  The reward is improved retention if we program software that makes motions that are sustainable. This will be enough for most customers. 

Health next
However, there is another audience that asks that their software offer a secondary product benefit.  If software can train us to competence, can it also push us in physical activities that are hidden exercises?   Can the algorithms nudge us to move 10% further or 5% faster?

*Health as a fat free, sugar free, green attribute* 
Like 'green' is today, healthy software is not a thing that is intended primarily for exercise.  Green detergent is not a job working on a subsistence farm.  It is a detergent that you feel good about.   You've heard the horrors that are occurring due to your previous non-green habits. And you are making a change for the better. 

Healthy software is software you feel good about using.  All those warnings about the dangers of sitting at a desk 10 hours a day sink in for a certain audience. A thing that is feared demands a solution. And that creates a market.  A market of people that still wants to use software and computer.  They still want to earn the income of a knowledge workers, but now...they want to feel good about it.  They want to feel healthy.  Healthy software gives them that promise. 

take care, 
Danc. ﻿
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