Notch Summary Deck from 2014

1. contact:
Eli Holder
eli@notch.me
visualize your health

5. About Notch
Notch, Inc. is a Delaware C-Corp,
Founded January 2012 in San Francisco.
Founded & Funded by Eli Holder (owns 100%)
Goals:
- Explore & create positive, emotional health experiences
using self-tracking & data visualization
- Encourage wide consumer audiences towards healthier lives
- Offer as B2B service to consumer self-tracking services
Progress:
- Launched experimental site Notch.me in May, 2012
- Integrates Fitbit, BodyMedia, RunKeeper, & Jawbone
- Published 8 dynamically personalized data visualizations
- Based on interaction metrics & exceedingly positive
feedback from Notch.me’s 26,000 sign-ups, Notch has
discovered many great ways to visualize personal activity
data, create consumer engagement, and encourage the
socialization of healthy accomplishments.

6. Problems the Self-Tracking Industry must
overcome (that Notch aims to solve)
Big Problems
Losing Users’ Attention
Maintaining long term engagement (& staying top of mind)
Ineffective Communication of Data
Finding context & shedding our (data) geeky past.
Supporting Behavior Change
Enabling, targeting, & measuring the BCT du jour.
Mainstream Adoption
Moving past early adopters.

7. example:
1. User tracks 10,000
steps per day for 28 days
2. User receives colorful visualization
congratulating her achievement
Applying principles of positive
psychology through emotionally
charged data visualizations that
induce positive affect, encourage
engagement, and promote
behavior change.
Engagement through Positive Psychology
Solution:

8. ‘self-visualization’
personalized visualizations for
each individual user

9. “Until I saw your graphics
and your ‘result stories’, I
really wasn't that dissatisfied.
Now, I want to view all of my
data this way.”
"I LOVE the style of
the Infographics,
fun, interesting and
informative"
“When I saw the infographics
I was fully roped in - I love
data and really enjoy seeing it
in interesting new ways”
"This is a pretty awesome idea.
Love the "you ran further than a
panda but a grizzly ate you"
infographic...that pushes me to
run further tomorrow!"
Why choose ?

10. High Share-ability. All Notch content is designed to create
conversation and gather positive feedback. This drives social support
from users’ friends and family. 1 out of every 10 visualizations
created on Notch are shared to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
sharing creates:
public commitment
social support
positive social norms
10%share rates
1.0
per post
1.2% posts+likes+tweets
per view for visual.ly top 10vs
high share-ability:
Why choose ?

11. Achievement Visualizations
for RunKeeper
case study:
RunKeeper is one of the top self-tracking
apps in the world. Over 20 million
runners, walkers, hikers, and cyclists log
into RunKeeper to track their activity.
Whenever a RunKeeper user breaks a
personal record (e.g. fastest mile time),
RunKeeper sends them an email
congratulating them.
By replacing these text emails with an
Achievement Visualization, Notch helped
RunKeeper increase email CTR by 200%,
achieved 10% share rates to Facebook &
Twitter, and, for 7 consecutive days, 0%
unsubscribes.

12. Notch.me is the ‘petri dish’ for
creating engaging visualizations.
.me fun facts:
Holy Guacamole!
Purpose: To experiment with small, scalable
emotional triggers, making users more receptive
to positive behavior change.
What: Allows users to connect 4 different external
sources (Fitbit, RunKeeper, BodyMedia, Jawbone
UP). Data is pulled from these devices, cached
locally, then used to generate dynamic,
personalized data visualizations.
Sharing/Snapshot system allows users to share
visualizations (e.g. to Facebook/Twitter) for a
single point in time.
Visualizations: 8 visualizations published to date
(out of 100s of concepts). Visualization production
time reduced from 3 months to ~2 weeks. All
visualizations built for both Mobile and Desktop.
Technology: Front: 25,000 lines of Javascript
(using Google Closure & D3). Back: 10,000 lines of
Clojure, backed by EC2 and DynamoDB.
Visualization architecture: compiled Javascript
runs entirely from AWS CDN (= runs on remote
websites, scales to ∞).
Uptime since Launch: 100%
Work began: January, 2012
Launched: May 9th, 2012

13. Eli is the founder of Notch.me. He’s a research-
driven designer (who also happens to be a full-
stack engineer).
While studying computer science at UNC, Eli did
various research projects, ranging from developing
a 3d interface for computerized microscopes, to
applying artificial intelligence algorithms to games
(Hierarchical Task Networks and Temporal
Difference Learning).
In 2008, Eli founded Unblab, which provided a
machine learning service for identifying personally
important email messages (like Gmail’s Priority
Inbox). Over the 2.5 years working on Unblab, Eli
raised seed financing from 5 local angel investors,
invented/implemented its email classification
system (based on 60+ signals of importance), and,
ultimately sold the company to AOL in 2010.
After Unblab was acquired, Eli spent a year as a
product manger at AOL, where he lead a small
team in creating a highly differentiated email client
called Project Oh.
Eli began work on Notch in January 2012.
Eli Holder,
and his many hats.
Eli’s work on Notch includes:
Design/Creative:
- concepts, architecture, copywriting, & art
direction for all visualizations;
- sourced & directed an international team of
artists, illustrators, and visual-designers;
- developed collaborative processes to reliably
combine world-class art and aesthetics (right brain)
with algorithmically generated data visualizations
(left brain). production time from 3mo -> 10 days.
Business:
- developed relationships across the mHealth
industry, leading to 4 major Notch.me integrations
- direct integration with RunKeeper, resulting in
100s of thousands of unique visitors to Notch.me
- many, many partner pitches, resulting in a deep
sense of humility (& appreciation for wide funnels..)
Engineering:
- wrote all code for Notch.me

14. Eli Holder.
a skillful venn diagram
Approachable Data Viz
(data visualization for the everyman)
Affective, Emotional Design
(affect & it’s effect on behavior change)
User Research & Insights
(data science & applied machine learning)
Technology/Engineering
(aws, clojure, google closure, d3)
User-Centric UX Design
(empathetic, humanistic software design)
Art & Creative Direction
(art, illustration & aesthetic design)
Scalable Creative Processes
(left-brain + right-brain design thinking)
Writing Witty Copy
(hilarious!)
Things I love
Things I’m good at
Other Things

15. Thoughts/ideas on the Future of Self Tracking
(i.e. the Notch Thesis)
Visuals as
Self-Identity
Visualizations will be the most
visible part of self-tracking.
Service’s visual output will be
anchor for users’ self-identity
(think Instagram).
Visualizations + Facebook
Photos = the new face of
health-tracking.
Voice of a
Generation.
For Millennials, “‘Smart and
funny’ is the new ‘rock ‘n’
roll’” (Nick Shore, MTV Research).
Creating a voice that’s smart,
approachable, optimistic, and
not-taking-itself-too-seriously.
Feel Good, Inc.
Positive affect drives engagement.
Uncovering the ‘human’ side of data
finding self-tracking’s ‘Like’ button to
create daily positive health
experiences.
Quantified Us.
Tracking ( visualizing) data at the
aggregated group level.