Michael Mainiero's Blog

We set up a great blog yesterday for the team of physicians and staff that went down to Haiti to offer much needed relief. They are using an iPhone application to update a Drupal blog at http://heart.med.nyu.edu

1. find one product and type “product name vs [hit space bar]” in google or yahoo. Take a look at the auto completed suggestions — your new leads will appear

2. Take a few of the names you have compiled and do a Google or Yahoo search using the words conference and seminar. Find the keynote speakers at these conferences and spend some time reading their websites and blogs

3. From the various websites you should have visited by now you should be compiling a best of breed feature list. Sure, obviously you should know what you need with business objectives before even starting the process — however you may find some great common best practice features and correlations. Begin a comparison matrix as soon as possible.

4. Take a look at your top vendors (you should know the industry best by now) make a list of customers who use their software in your vertical market. Try and reach out to a few of them on Linked in. With a well constructed email, you should be able to find someone willing to share candid information about the product

5. Play buzzword bingo. Try and cut through the hype. You will start to see a lot of buzz words that really don’t have much to do with the quality or effectiveness of the software as it pertains to your business needs and or budget.

OK, so this is not a novel idea — but it struck a chord with me nonetheless.

I was driving up to my parents and decided to try out the voice command system on the iphone. Pretty darn slick, it recognized my multiple vowel last name when calling my mother. The weird thing though, it required me to manually select speakerphone after using a handsfree voice command. Why wouldn’t this default to hands free?

is this by design? A bug? An overlooked feature?

The funny thing is, I didn’t really care. It didn’t bother me that the phone didn’t have this feature. Then i began to wonder “why don’t i care”.

I began to list the potential reasons:

1. I am brainwashed into thinking apple can do no wrong

2. I am willing to over look minor inconveniences

Nope, none of these.

3. I am confident that apple will fix this – they are constantly improving their software

Yep, I think its this one.

Can confidence in a software development team mitigate the frustration of an end user? the thought that there are iterations, or incremental improvements based on user feed back is something I think we underestimate as developers. As I think about how i interact with people I am developing websites and applications for, I think about how I can mitigate frustration. I think the ability to deliver improvements and instill this confidence in the people who use software may go a long way.

The new york times had an interesting article on how yahoo finance visits compare to google. I found a particular snippet very interesting.

James Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo’s audience group, said, “In our research with users, we found that the more information that was displayed on the page, the greater the anxiety.”

He said Yahoo deliberately adopted what he calls “the Apple model — simplicity in design; a clean, simple look, not overburdening our users with too much information on the page.”

This is a brilliant concept that we sometimes overlook as designers. “less is more”. When designing applications, or interactive websites I usually go through an exercise of labeling items on a page with a question mark. The question that needs to be answered is, is this a distraction? Does it really need to be on this page. Sometimes we tend to provide to much information on a page. I never put the term anxiety to what users are actually thinking, but I think it makes perfect sense. Sure, people can be exaustive when navigating a page, but if they are subconciously anxious — then you are not doing your job as a designer.

A great book that articulates this point is “Dont Make Me Think”

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/dp/0789723107

This fall I will be teaching another class at NYU: Apache Web server. There are not a lot of opportunities to learn Apache in a hands on setting. This course is applicable to all types of web developers. From front end designers, content management system operators, and back end systems admins. I will discuss several real world scenarios with the web server as it pertains to topics such as search engine optimization or security. For more details check out the course listing.

http://www.scps.nyu.edu/course-detail/X52.9805/20093/apache-web-server

So there I was…giving another presentation in our conference room at work. I was using the controlled desktop which uses windows Vista. Every time I opened up a new browser, it defaulted to Bing. Now, this is clearly an obvious form of pitching a product. We see it all the time with google built into firefox and the iphone.

What is interesting to me, is that Microsoft still has complete ownership of the corporate desktop. Sure, I use a mac at work, and I am not a zealot. I use windows when I need to, and there is no ill will.

Over the past few weeks i have seen Bing in a number of places, it just sort of snuck up on me. I personally dont think this will squash google, because it has to absolutely crush google in order to replace it as a search engine. Its just the ubiquitous corporate nature of Microsoft’s products that I find interesting. They have a tremendous advantage here and i suspect they will be cashing in on it.

After months of anticipation, i was accepted to google voice. The significance of this product has not been fully realized.

In April 2009, NY Times wrote  about the death of voicemail. For me, as a Software and Digital Media professional, 500 emails + 20 voicemail’s per day create a communications bottleneck. Whats worse, I have become lackluster in returning calls, creating frustration and problems with my personal life. Not good.

This triage table of getting back to people was simply not working. I just dont have the time to process hundreds of emails and dozens of voicemail’s.

So why am I so excited? Among dozens of features you can read about on their webiste, voice to text transcription is a godsend. I had a hard time explaining the signifigance of this to family and friends. In a nutshell, when someone calls you and leaves a voicemail, it gets transcribed into text, not just visual voicemail, not somewhere on the web, but text. Granted the translation misses a few words here and there, but I get a lot more out of this transcript than wading through voicemail messages of the past. I dont have to log into google voice, this text transcription is pushed directly to my cell phone, blackberry, etc.

Speaking to someone on the phone or on video chat are very powerful forms of communcation. For me, voicemail is a completely antiquated and i look forward to its demise.

The folks over at Smashing magazine have a great article on social media design. A lot of these principles should apply to portal and web 2.0 development. The main points are, if something is on the page it should be relevant, and connecting to more information from different sources needs to be simple.

Digital Doctors are nothing new really. The ability to message and communicate with patients securely has been around for years, but really has not matured. There are obvious advantages to this, and I think just as obvious complications. I think people in general will try and avoid an in person visit. I think maturation of this will come with telemedicine and state level standards around compliance and insurance.

I for one would like to see development around low cost video conferencing equipment sent to patients homes who have chronic diseases or disabilities.

“The Doctor Will Text You Now” article in the wall street journal describes best practices, such as online interactive questionnaires