The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

OrganizedWisdom Launches Improved Site Navigation and WisdomCollections

Sometimes small innovations make the biggest difference. The OrganizedWisdom team tries to make tweaks and enhancements each week that hopefully translate to better results for our users.

I'm happy to announce two such features that we're beta testing.

Navigation Frames: Making It Easy to Search Multiple Health Resources
Frames? Yes, they were big early in Web 1.0, and we're bringing them back. Why? Well, for an "assisted search" site, we realized that once users clicked on one of the resources on our pages, we weren't really assisting them as they continued their research.  Since we know that people searching for health information often visit 10 Web sites or more, we wanted to make this process as easy as possible. So now, if you visit a WisdomCard on any topic, and click on one of the many links to great resources, you'll find we've added a navigation frame that helps users quickly and easily search, or return to our site, for more information.

Our goal is to provide a health search service that is like having a doctor in the family.  So design changes and improvements like this are intended to make for good "deskside manner." We're holding a user's hand through the research process, and making it even easier to get to the next great resource on our list.

WisdomCollections: Making It Simple to Research Your Condition
OrganizedWisdom helps people do health research by creating hand-crafted WisdomCards--full of expert-selected online resources--on thousands of popular search terms. One of our challenges has always been to make it as easy as possible for people to find all of the WisdomCards we have to offer on a particular subject matter, especially now that we cover more than 16,000 topics. So we've just launched WisdomCollections to address this issue. 

Our new WisdomCollections round up all of the assorted WisdomCards related to a common condition or health issue, and display those resources in groupings that are easy to browse and navigate. You can jump from getting the latest news on your condition, to looking up drugs, to investigating various surgeries and procedures, to finding out which celebrities have the same illness. We now offer WisdomCollections on popular topics like breast cancer, HPV, high cholesterol, anxiety, and diabetes, and plan to roll out several hundred WisdomCollections in the coming weeks and months.

As always, we'd love to hear from you so we can keep making improvements to our service. Please share your comments below or email me.

WisdomCards Get Footnotes and Citations to Enhance Credibility

Every week we ask our product team and Health Guides these questions:

How can we improve the quality of our service? And what can we do to make our content better, more useful, and more credible for our users?

And each week, we try to implement at least one innovation or improvement based on this feedback, the various suggestions from our users, and trends we glean from various usability tests and data analysis.

One area we've spent the most time working on is finding ways to improve the quality and credibility of each fact referenced on our WisdomCards.  Of course we already review each WisdomCard and link to useful and credible resources.  But we're making one major adjustment that we think adds a tremendous amount of credibility and transparency to the content on our WisdomCards: we've just unveiled (and our Guides are now hard at work at implementing across the OrganizedWisdom Library of over 10,000 WisdomCards) references, citations and footnotes to our WisdomCards.

This is a work in progress and will take some time to implement site wide, but you can see some examples on these WisdomCards:

• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
• Pick's Disease Treatment
• Vitamin C

As always, thanks for your feedback and if you have other suggestions for how we can keep improving the quality of our service please let us know.

OrganizedWisdom Launches Search Box Widgets; Any Site Can Now Feature Co-Branded WisdomCards

We're excited to share several new OrganizedWisdom Search Box Widgets and Badges anyone can use to feature WisdomCards on your site, blog, or myspace page.  This makes it easy for your users to find the most useful resources on any health topic directly from your site.

We've already been working with several health sites, hospital portals and health foundations to make our WisdomCards easily accessible from their Web sites, but now anyone can easily link to a WisdomCard or feature our WisdomCard Library on their own blog, health site or social networking profile.

These badges and widgets only take a few seconds to embed.  They are as easy to upload as popping up a YouTube video.  And if you want a co-branded version all you have to do is send us your logo and domain name and we will add co-branding to the WisdomCards so they also feature your logo.

Here are some examples of the badges, but check this page for a complete list and to grab the code for your site today.

Check here for additional options and sizes.

Easy Access to Related WisdomCards

Every WisdomCard on OrganizedWisdom features a handy list of related WisdomCards to help you explore topics that may shed light on your original search.

Now we've moved the top three up to the right column, so you can move right away if you realize that one of these terms is closer to the one you want.

It's a little change, but we like it -- and we hope you will too.

Find What You're Looking For With OW Search Suggest

OrganizedWisdom now offers a "search suggest" feature to help you refine your searches and point you toward WisdomCards you might not even know we had! I could explain how it works, but a picture does a better job:

Give it a try and see for yourself -- I find it makes my searches on OW a lot faster!

Test Our Newest Widget

Put OrganizedWisdom Health Feeds on Your Site

We have recently launched a new widget that enables you to feed WisdomCards and health content on over 30 major health topics directly to your site, blog, or health group.  You can see an example of this widget on the right column of this blog.

Putting the code on your site is a snap. To get the code to put this widget on your site, click here.

New Symptom Checker on OrganizedWisdom

We've recently added a very useful symptom checker to OrganizedWisdom.com.  Find it here or on our homepage:

You Shared Feedback...We Listened!

We just launched several new features on OrganizedWisdom. We'll be tweaking and improving the site over the coming hours and days, so we appreciate your continued feedback.

We're really excited to share with you some great new features that we think will provide a lot of value to our members:

Create Your Own Health Topic (New!)
Now you can create a WisdomCard on any health topic.  You can either search our library of 6,500 pre-loaded health topics including most health conditions, diseases, drugs, treatments and other health issues.  If you don't find your health topic, you can easily create your own topic and begin sharing.

Private Messaging Let's You Connect With Others (New!)
You can now connect with other members using our private messaging system. This system makes it easy for people to offer advice and support without giving their real email address.  You can quickly contact anyone you are linked to directly, or anyone who has granted permission on their published WisdomCards.

Post Public Comments on WisdomCards (New!)
All registered members can now comment on other WisdomCards to add value to others wisdom by providing support, answering questions, and posting helpful feedback.  It's now as easy as posting a comment on a blog to get involved and help others.

Advanced Profile Features (New!)
We've added additional content fields to help you improve your personal profile page.  Share your experience level, more Web site links, and contact details if you are ok with people contacting you directly. Don't worry, only you decide what information you want to share. And you can choose to keep all of your information private and anonymous if you prefer.

Link Friends On Your Personal Profile (New!)
Invite your friends to join your personal health network and save their personal profile to yours. You can also connect to other people in the OrganizedWisdom community who have published public WisdomCards. Simply press the Save Author Profile icon on any WisdomCard or Profile Page.

New Privacy Features (New!)
Respecting personal privacy and creating a safe environment is our number one priority.  You are in total control on OrganizedWisdom.  You can decide to create an anonymous profile, make all of your saved WisdomCards, Medical References, and linked friends private, and you can decide to publish WisdomCards anonymously. 

Inviting Friends and Family Is Easy (New!)
Use our new Invite feature to quickly invite yoru friends and family to join the OrganizedWisdom community and your personal network.

Clean New Homepage (New!)
A lot of people have suggested we do a better job of showing more of the great content, features, and community that is hiding behind the homepage.  So, we've started by adding a welcome video, and featuring some member profiles, popular WisdomCards and some of the top health topics on the site. 

Easy Search On Every Page (New!)
We've redesigned our site header to make it easy to search for user WisdomCards and expert medical research from any page on the site. Enter any health term and you will get the top three WisdomCards, and top three health articles on that topic.  If you want more, click one button to see all the best content available, or search our A-Z health guides.

To keep you updated on our new and upcoming features you can read our Change Log.

You can also take our site tour here, which we will be updating shortly: http://tour.organizedwisdom.com