21 Days; 7 Seconds

21 Days = The number of days in which if an activity is repeated it will become adopted by the person.
7 Seconds = The amount of time it takes for someone to form a first impression.

Though I haven't validated these to be the common school of thought, it is what an instructor had told us today.

So how does this relate to healthcare?  Well, I recently blogged about lack of user adoption for healthcare applications delivered on web and mobile technology.  So maybe we can try something here.  Let's get in the face of the users for 21 days to remind them about the benefits of these applications and also incent them to use the product for it's intention for 21 days and see if that helps with adoption.  And let's remember in the design of these applications that we have 7 seconds to catch the users' attention where they will decide if they will buy or fly.  So make sure the entry point to the application is one that quickly wow's the users to stick around.