We’d all like to be more successful.

Whether that’s at work or in our personal lives – seeking success is a natural human instinct.

I’d like to be a successful businessman, a successful blogger, a successful parent, and even a successful tennis player (albeit in a smaller pond than the one Novak Djokovic plays in).

While actually achieving success isn’t the be all and end all – striving for it is part of the journey, part of the “race of life”.  Settling for the status quo shouldn’t be an option when there’s always scope for small improvements.

“We look for 1% improvements, everywhere” – Dave Brailsford, British Cycling Coach

At Rise we take tracking your success seriously. We’d like you to be more successful, we want you to flourish. By providing the tracking tools you need to be successful, we help you achieve your goals.

It’s our mission to help you and your organisation flourish through the spread of trustworthy, transparent, success tracking.

As part of that, today we’re launching the Success Tracking University.  It’s our new online training and education web site teaching you how to be more successful using the principles of success tracking – whether that’s for yourself or your team, there’s lots to learn.

Over the next few years we’ll be offering the success tracking courses and learning events your need (mostly for free) to help you improve your success tracking skills.

You can sign up as a new student and take one of the courses – I’d give you a discount but it would be like buying you a drink at a free bar, it’s all free!

Here’s to your greater success!

ps. if you’re interested in producing a course at Success Tracking University – for example in in your area of specialism – e.g. success tracking for sales professionals, success tracking for crossfit organisers then please do get in touch.

AR headsets like DAQRI‘s above are clearly going to be very useful in lots of environments.

One of the customary use cases for AR headsets is to bring dashboards to users inside the headset.

This is great, however it is important for dashboard designers to design the experience with the three different types of dashboards in mind:

• Operational dashboards — focused on raw metrics to monitor what’s happening now (as in a car or plane dashboard)
• Tactical dashboards — focused on summary metrics to analyse and comparing performance over time
• Strategic dashboards — monitoring execution of overall goals

It is these first two that are so easily muddled up.

This is because tactical dashboards are often left to the end of the design process and as a result are very poorly designed. Typically you end up with a screen full of unrelated charts and numbers which the user is expected to make sense of.

It would be great if the tactical dashboard design team for a smart helmets took on board the key principles of success tracking (which is personal dashboard design 2.0) rather than ape tired old traditional tactical dashboard design.

By doing so, they will associate Smart Helmets with the growing trend of motivation 3.0 (autonomy, mastery & purpose) as defined by Daniel Pink and so drive self-optimisation and self-management behaviours.

Here are the key differences:

Traditional Tactical Dashboard Design

• Mandatory — all users must have the dashboard as designed by managers / experience designers
• Multi-score— users are forced to choose between multiple scores which are not prioritised
• Real Time — users are expected to behave like robots — always on, always adapting, leading to butterfly-like attention spans.

It is wrong to believe that real time is better when it comes to tactical dashboard design. Human beings need fixed metrics and results to be able to analyse properly. Imagine trying to have a meeting to decide tactics and next steps related to performance results only to have the numbers you are discussing keep changing while you do it!

Success Tracking Dashboard Design

• Opt-in — users control what dashboards they use and what data they share
• Single score — designers weight different metrics and combine into a single score, so simplifying the user (player) experience and allowing easy benchmarking
• Storified — metric changes are wrapped up into fixed time periods and presented as human accessible stories (“personal best this week”, “hey you passed Phil last week on the leaderboard”) etc.
• Positive — instinctively we want to increase numbers, so track the stuff we want more of
• No rewards — it should go without saying but any additional incentives or prizes will break the motivational model. (incentives turn things into work)

AR headsets are an exciting development — let’s hope the dashboards inside them keep up with modern best practice too.

This article originally appeared as a medium post.

The healthcare gamification market which covers brands like FitBit, Strava and Weightwatchers is set to grow to $3.7bn by 2022 according to  Meticulous Research Pvt.

This is being driven by the growing use of smartphones across the world and the increasing digitisation in all sectors, including our health.

The typical Success Tracking use cases in healthcare include:

• Fitness management – getting fitter by tracking your activity
• Medication management – tracking your compliance taking your prescribed medicines (particularly applicable in pediatric and geriatric care).
• Disease management – improving health for chronic conditions by tracking key positive symptoms (e.g. lower blood pressure, lower resting heart rate) and readings (e.g. glycogen)

Of these, fitness management is by far and away the category leader right now despite issues with the clinical accuracy of the devices themselves (Fitness trackers are largely inaccurate when counting calories, Stanford researchers say) it is clear that they are continuing to improve.

Each fitness device provides a dashboard for the end-user to track their success in becoming fitter. This regular feedback is essential to a good success tracking program (what is success tracking?) – also essential is the fact that the user opts in and that there are no prizes to be won.

These dashboards however, are fixed by the device vendor, it is difficult to innovate around them and create your own program. This innovation is a particularly need within clinical settings where multiple tracking devices and plans may be being applied simultaneously for specific conditions.

For instance, in weight management, you might ask patients to track their steps on a pedometer, record their weight and keep a food diary.  Bringing all three sources of data together in a single program is a headache.

That’s where Rise comes in.

At the PRISM series healthcare innovation event, hosted by One Nucleus, last week Rise was there to demonstrate how to create your own healthcare success tracking program on the Rise.global platform.

One of the examples we showed of Rise in action was a CrossFit leaderboard. Crossfit is a modern form of multi disciplinary fitness.

A CrossFit score pulls together results across multiple disciplines (each CrossFit organiser chooses different disciplines to test their “box” of players) and combines into a single score.

The complexity of a Crossfit scoring algorithm and multiple player categories is fully supported using Rise.

When you combine this with Rise’s advanced privacy features that allow patients to control their own data, to choose whether to appear on the leaderboard as identified, anonymous or not to appear at all, you have a powerful tool.

Rise provides a tool for clinicians, therapists and coaches to create a score card for their patients to opt into and track their personal journey to better health.

We’re looking forward to seeing more healthcare programs on Rise.global.

A Rise “Board” is the atomic unit of Rise.global.

You can “follow” a board, “join” a board to become a player on it and you can of course create and manage your own board.

But what is a board really?

The term “board” originates as a way of combining the facets of:

• a leaderboard (a list of players ranked by score)
• a scoreboard (a place to see the score)
• a dashboard (a place to see your current stats)

A Rise Board is a combination of all of these but at its core it is a shared way of calculating, keeping and sharing the score.

On each board everyone is scored in the same way. Each board can only have one Score Algorithm – the scoring rules applied to make a score for each player.

We cannot do otherwise, you cannot meaningfully compare two players who are scored using different rules.

So, if the score algorithm is fixed, what is flexible?

• a Rise Board can have multiple inputs – called Data Sources. For example, a Rise Board could collect data from Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce, and combine the results into one score for each player.
• a Rise Board can have multiple outputs – called Output Channels. Rise results can be distributed across Twitter, Email, or embedded on a Web page.
• a Rise Board can have multiple Players. As long as all the players are being scored in the same way, they can all appear on the same Rise Board.
• you can store results for different time periods on the same board (e.g. weekly and month releases)
• a Rise board can be subdivided into different leagues and divisions (so generating multiple leaderboards)

When you log in to Rise you’ll see the term “Board” everywhere – a list of boards in the public gallery, your list of boards that you are playing in and a list of boards you are managing. That’s because boards are what the Rise user interface lets you manage.

It’s also how Rise is priced – per board. Not per player or per manager, per board.

Each board on Rise is logically separate from any other board.  Inside each board we have:

• the list of players on that board (whether included or excluded)
• current data entries for those players
• all “releases” of the board (calculated scores for a specific period)
• the board settings that determine how the board is released and viewed

So now when you are asked the question “what is a Rise Board” hopefully you have the answer – a shared way of calculating, keeping and sharing the score.