Bant: Great interaction for data entry

April 8th, 2010

Bant is a free iPhone app developed by The Centre for Global eHealth Innovation for people with diabetes. I discovered it on Daring Fireball the other day, but only just had a chance to play around with it.

For some context, I did quite a bit of work with some diabetes meters and recording systems about a year back. People managing diabetes take their readings several times a day, and recording these readings is a difficult habit to maintain. What I love about Bant is that it makes the task of recording three points of data for every reading into a single efficient interaction. With a single drag on the phone, you have entered the meal, the time and the reading. It’s such a quick and efficient way of entering and tracking data, much faster than writing in a diary or using a mouse & keyboard could be.

One final nice touch is the use of the yellow line which represents now. This is makes it very easy to enter a record right now, because you can’t drag any further down than the yellow line.

I think this is the first time I have seen this specific interaction – noting that it should work just as well with a mouse – has anyone else seen something similar before?

Tags: design, interaction, iphone, user experience