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

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.

Higher Education and larger not for profit organizations have a unique opportunity to support the diverse needs of hundreds of departments or subsidiaries with a more efficient, dynamic and customizable Web content management system known as Drupal, one of the most popular Web publishing platforms in the world today.

All of my web projects, whether it be Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Information architecture, content development, design, or software selection, all revolve around a core philosophy for me.

ARCS: Attract, Retain, Connect, And Socialize. What can we do to attract users? What can we do to keep them on the site and keep them coming back? What can we do to connect them to “us”, and finally what social media aspects can we develop to seed our content to third party sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.

This fundamental approach has served me well; in not only the development of sites, but in the communication of site development to lay people.  By breaking down this philosophy in digestible terms, I have been able to foster collaboration with otherwise web-phobic people.

Attract
Attracting people to your site, or content can be done several different ways. Top most common are “Organic SEO”, Inorganic SEO, Traditional Marketing, and Social Websites or New Media.

Organic SEO
This is what you can do to your website without paying for advertising. in my mind, there are three categories you need to pay attention to for organic SEO. Your actual content, how your content is tagged, and how your content is structured within your website.

Content should be written objectively for the Internet, so that your readers can quickly grasp the meaning of the subject matter and process the information. Content should also be written so that a web robot, or search engine spider can read and understand it. This can be tedious, and requires a lot of skill. A basic way of reviewing content for search engine spiders, is to randomly highlight any paragraph on your website. You should be able to tell: What is the subject matter, what is this related to, where are you on the website, etc.  A common pitfall is for writers to assume the reader knows where they are and fails to address a paragraph or page with a title that is completely descriptive. For example in healthcare websites: “Before Surgery” should be “Before Lap Band Surgery”, etc.

The other side of Organic SEO is tagging, descriptions, linkage etc. This is all explained very well on http://www.seomoz.org/ Here you can find all of the nuances of this practice. The basics are: Relevant Title Tags, H1 Tags, links to and from your website.

Inorganic SEO: This is what you pay for. Google has a tremendous adwords program, and are currently the 500 lb gorilla in this market. Other methods are Facebook adds, NYTimes, and third parties that do all the grunt work for you like: http://www.appssavvy.com/

Retain

How can you write content without knowing your audience? Without knowing what people are really interested in finding out about. The mistakes most people make when providing content is making the assumption that everyone thinks like you, and everyone really cares about the nuances of what it is you have to say. (hey this is my blog, so this content doesn’t apply!)

This is very common in healthcare content. The days of vanity content are gone. I’m not saying you cant put factual information boosting your reputation on your website, just don’t keep it in the main stream.

Could you imagine walking into Target and having a person greet you at the front door and tell you all about their recent awards, and how great store manager is?

The same rules apply for a website. Get them quickly to what they are looking for and make the transaction. On a healthcare website the transaction could be picking up the phone and making an appointment, or walking away from your website with a better understanding of what they actually came for – Information on a disease and condition. The fundamentals: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment, How to talk to your doc etc.

A great way to figure out if you are retaining users is to look at your bounce rate and time visited for a specific page in Google analytics. See if people are leaving when they get to that page.

Connect

Your website should provide a service for you, or multiple services. If you are selling something, it should be obvious what the connect pieces are. If you are a company or health care institution, the connect pieces may be a bit more elusive to you.

Connect points should coincide with your return on investment strategy. What do you want people doing on your website that will increase sales, patient visits, or some form of participation.

Connecting is also not just about getting someone to contact you. Its about developing a relationship with your user – in a non creepy way. You might be collecting demographic info for later use (email marketing, event invite, etc).  For an admissions website you might simply be connecting to the potential student on a personal level. Showing them a video of real students talking about real experiences. This would be far more effective than 5 paragraphs describing what your institution did in 1812.

Socialize
Pull up your pant legs, and dip your feet in. There is no way to avoid social websites. People want their content pulled to them, they don’t want to have to go digging for it on various websites. Furthermore, information passed along from a friend is much more valuable than anything you pass along.

Enhancing your website in social media is an entirely new blog post — before you begin to socialize, you need to plant a few seeds on social websites to see where your users may be spending your time.

1. facebook is great for causes, but might be too decentralized for your demographic.
2. Youtube: youtube is a search engine… people are consuming videos en mass. I learned how to change my baby’s diaper on youtube!