"The real culprit, the real cause of their economic problems isn't the Internet, it isn't the wires that connect computers. It's the under-$100 terabyte hard drive."
Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days and ever-so-slightly shifted the earth's axis :)
The evolution of Google’s left-hand filters
I don’t really have time to analyze this today, but it’s always interesting to see how companies that measure change stuff. I noticed Google’s new filters (a crucial feature) changed today, now it looks like this:
As you might expect, I like the “Everything” label, although “Everything – more” is a bit weird; how can I get more than everything? (Although I also love the “more” label).
When you open it, it looks like this:
And the search tools look like this:
Let’s see how this iteration fares. I don’t think they’ve nailed it yet. The greyed-out icons in particular don’t feel right, and having 2 separate “more” actions doesn’t feel right either.
For reference, here is my previous analysis of the filters (and their big redesign) when they launched.
Every Buzz gets a permalink
Hey, it turns out that every Buzz gets a permalink, just like a tweet. Nice. With an SEO-optimized URL too ;)
How to post from Google Buzz to Twitter and Facebook
Here’s an easy way to post from Google Buzz to Twitter and Facebook. They should really build this in, but until they do, here are the steps.
First, find your Google profile. In Google Buzz, you can click here to get there:
Once you’re on your Google profile page, which in my case is http://www.google.com/profiles/petervandijck (because I set it up to have a friendly URL, but it could also contain a bunch of numbers), you need to look in the code to find an RSS feed of your Google Buzz posts. This is a little geeky, but easy enough, the Google docs explain where to find this feed (they should really make it easier to find!). In your browser, look for “View Source”. In Firefox, view source in the menus looks like this:
In the source, you can find the RSS feed that publishes your posts in Google buzz. It looks like this http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/113278766329192120580/public/posted (that’s my feed), and here’s a screenshot of where to find it:
OK. Now you have a public RSS feed with content (from your Google Buzz). From now on it’s easy – there are many ways to get RSS feeds published into Twitter or Facebook. One great way that you can use for both services is Twitterfeed, just go sign up and point your feed to Twitter and Facebook. And you’re done, your posts will now (with a short delay of half an hour or so) be crossposted to Facebook and Twitter.
Google should really make this easier though.
Lightweight advocacy. Interesting.
Automatically adding textfields upon type
Google has, on the edit profile page, a wonderfully simple UI convention I don’t remember seeing before.
Click on a textbox, and you can start typing. From the moment you start typing, it will add another textbox below it, so you can keep adding items. It doesn’t do that when you put the focus on the textbox though, only once you start typing in it. Wonderfully unobtrusive and effective. A jQuery plugin that does this (getting the details right) would be lovely.
“more even more” pattern: more storage
Another example of the more-even more pattern:
More “more – even more”
I noticed the “more – even more” pattern again today, on the BBC this time:
Awesome, although I like Google’s wording better – less words :)
Photo sharing innovation has slowed down again. Flickr is still good, but isn't innovating aggressively, and it's starting to show its age. Picassa kinda sucks. iPhoto is very nice but doesn't have a strong online component. Facebook has a great photo app but it's still Facebook - too closed. I think the space might be opening up again, let's hope someone has a good go at it.
"You’ll be able to connect your choice of storage devices directly to the Box using USB" - awesome. That's exactly what I've been wanting.
Control is not discipline
Via Anne Galloway: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and 'freely' without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.”
Awesome quote, it made me think. So so-called “freedom” can be used to impose control. Made me think of travelguides.
Tastespotting is pretty awesome.
The second issue of the Journal of Information Architecture is out :) (via Lou on FB, which I can't link to, which is one of the reasons that makes me think that whole FB thing is gonna blow over, just another walled garden, which is why I keep blogging, which is why this is here, although it gets crossposted I believe.)
Design research useless for innovation?
Don Norman: "I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs."
I don't think that's so disconcerting, although it goes against much of the common UX babble.
“The fluffy marketing version”
I wonder why they felt they had to add that?
Confusing features with explanatory UI
When a feature is confusing enough to warrant you having to add rather heavy explanatory UI, you might wanna rethink it.
Lou is thinking about a combined index for his books, I think that's an awesome idea.
How physical mail used to be like email
Mail used to be like email! "By the late 19th century, there were between six and twelve mail deliveries per day in London, permitting correspondents to exchange multiple letters within a single day." Six to twelve times a day checking your mail, sound familiar?
Fascinating: "The approach taken at Facebook is to set a cookie on user update requests that will redirect all subsequent requests from that user to the West coast master for some configurable time period to ensure that read operations do not return inconsistent results."
Google real-time search funny screenshot
Google realtime results are pretty interesting. Just goes to show how fast Google moves. I’m very curious to see how this evolves over time, I don’t think they have the UI and relevance stuff totally correct just yet.
Categories and labels: more and even more
The same way that I am a fan of the “everything else” label, I am becoming a fan of the “more – even more” label as its being pioneered (as far as I can tell) by Google:
As the Nielsman says: progressive disclosure is awesome!
A world without grandparents
Kevin Kelly on hunter-gatherer tribes: (because they didn't live beyond 30-ish) "Imagine a world without grandparents: there's nobody to pass on what you do learn."
Received two emails in the past few days asking about reprints or second editions of my IA book. No reprints or second editions planned though.
Quirky information architecture
After quirky (“crave”) and funky (“crap”) categories, we now also have funny sorting (from Google reader):
Yes, in general your labels should be clear and probably as basic-level as possible, but it’s ok to have some fun here and there :)
Removing features
About removing features that don't prove super succesful: "While developing Gmail, we implemented a lot of features that were either not released, or not released until much later. Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn't find simple enough interfaces. Other ideas sounded good, but in practice weren't useful enough to justify the added complexity (such as multiple stars)."
Some good comments on my Google redesign post earlier today. I've felt for a while there's too little IA/UX blogging being done, maybe I should get back into it.
The new Google design: nothing between me and my search bar
Google is playing with perhaps the biggest redesign they ever did. There are a lot of little changes, and some really big ones too, mainly: a new right-hand column in the search results page.
Most people won’t see this new redesign yet, they’re rolling it out for some users only. And it’ll be interesting to see what they change before the complete rollout. Here are some instructions on how to try it out. Compare with older versions of the Google homepage on archive.org.
First big difference: the buttons! Big and white-on-blue, instead of the old default look. Nicely color-coordinated with the logo. It seems Google is finally moving towards a button style all of their own after years of using the standard browser button look. Perhaps the designers are finally getting some power within Google? I remember Douglas Bowman complaining about the lack of respect designers get at Google, this seems like a step forward for “design” though. Buttons! Then again, that might not be enough for a designer who likes to flex his design muscles.
In any case, the homepage looks more distinctive now, with these big blue buttons.
Compare with an older screenshot from Jan 2005 (even today the buttons look like this):
The search suggestions are prominent, as they were before. Particularly interesting are the buttons embedded in the dropdown, I can’t immediately imagine why they’re there. Thoughts welcome. The only reason that I can think of is that some people still just want to search on their original term and click the search button.
The buttons weren’t there before, as you can see in this screenshot of the current view. Also notice how they simplified the list (removed the results count), and made the words you haven’t typed yet more prominent. It’s better, I like it. Who cares about result counts anyway, those take way too long to parse and think about, I’m sure Steve Krug will be happy with this change, much better than the old design:
But the meaty part of the new design is of course the new results page. It now shows filtering options on the left.
Holy shit, a whole new column!
Woooow!
I wonder how that affects clickthroughs on the right column. The whole page now looks much more busy. Let’s have a closer look:
First thoughts:
- The “Everything” default selection is awesome. Good choice of words, and that’s what you’ll want most of the time.
- The icons suck. First of all, Google isn’t known for using icons (they usually don’t), and second, they’re really bad icons. I mean, look at this:
! You couldn’t find a better icon for photos? Search for it! I predict they’ll drop those. Don’t want to give those designers too much power either, Google! The only icon that’s useful is the “+” sign. And if they don’t drop them, please make them nicer. - The “See also” section kind of clutters up this design. Especially because it’s mixed in between the filters (Time filter is below, other filters are above).
The options that are visible (not hidden behind “more”) depend on your search – smart, as I’d expect from Google. I assume they show the ones with the most relevant results, or something.
Here’s a screenshot for a different query (Colombia), showing more filtering options by default:
Man, you gotta work on those icons though! News and blogs look identical. And they all just look real dodgy.
When you open more, the animation is smooth and the close button is called “Less”. Again, excellent labeling. This shows the “More” button open, turning into “Less”:
Once you select an option, it’s highlighted like this. Below the main option, what I think of as the “poweruser” filters are shown: filter by time, sort by relevance, results display method.
If I were to design this off the top of my head, I’d place the results display method (“standard results, …”, ie. not changing the results list but changing how it’s shown) at the top of the page using icons (that tends to be the standard way of doing it).
The “reset tools” (I guess “tools” is how they refer to these powerfilters) button makes sense, I found myself wanting to do this while using it, but I didn’t actually find the link until I started writing this blogpost. It seems to go back to the default “Everything” view. I don’t like the label - “reset tools” sounds way to geeky, and I don’t like the way it looks like just another filter, visually.
And finally, a big advantage of adding this left column is that they can now make the main column even cleaner. The new design has nothing between the search bar and the first result. They were clearly hot for this; they even moved the results count (“About … results”) to the right of the search bar, a rather akward position. (I also wonder why they haven’t dropped the 0.35 seconds indicator, I mean, really!)
New design:
Old design:
So what are your thoughts? Will they go through with this fairly radical redesign and roll it out for everyone? Will they make any changes?
For comparison, here’s the old design:
More details on the effect of speed
Google research: "the cost of slower performance increases over time and persists". In other words, if your website is a little slower, users will use it less (we knew that), but they'll also use it less and less over time, and when it speeds up again, they'll still use it less than before the slowdown.
And an interesting insight into how Google thinks about speed: "Because the cost of slower performance increases over time and persists, we encourage site designers to think twice about adding a feature that hurts performance if the benefit of the feature is unproven."
You can buy the excellent book "Selling Usability" (I reviewed it before) right here.
Bing gets more evil
Bing just gets more and more evil: now they're setting cookies so that online shops sometimes charge users MORE because they come from Bing: "Any product I look at for the next three months may show a different price than I’d get by going there directly. Just clicking a Bing link means three months of potentially negative cashback, without me ever realizing it."
Seriously, I was a fan of Bing. But they are like Microsoft's 90s evil-ness all over again. Who the hell is product manager there?
This one’s for free, Bing.com.
I was pretty happy the past year or so that someone was finally putting up a good fight against Google’s monopoly in search. We need competition. But now what? Bing is paying sites to block Google from indexing them? Really?
Fuck that.
As of today, I’m blocking Bing.
It’s not that I love Google’s monopoly that much (I think it’s great that they have competition), but how EVIL can you get? Paying companies to block a competitor’s searchbot? 1990s Microsoft playbook anyone? Not with my internet you’re not! Let the backlash begin.
I added a robots.txt file to my root folder (here), this is the code that I put in it:
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
Here’s a screenshot of Bing’s percentage in my traffic by the way, blocking them won’t hurt me much. Even if it did, I’d block them:
Now someone wants to register and set up blockbing.org with easy instructions or something?
Simple explanations
This explanation (Slideshare presentation by Simon Willison) of web servers and their limits for some types of apps and how new types of web servers can fix that actually worked for me.
Umberto Eco loves lists, but Joho disagrees.
Umberto Eco is an information architect! (On lists)
I notice a lot of people have stopped blogging, they're all on Smazebook and Tweeter I suppose. They'll be back in a few years.
Awesome, Google upgraded my storage to 87 Gigs!
I was paying before for 10 gigs of extra storage, but now that Google dropped their prices they’ve auto-upgraded my Gmail storage to 87 gigs.
They didn’t even send me an email, I guess for them it’s no biggie?
"The amount of leverage available to a modern Internet entrepreneur is far, far greater than was available to entrepreneurs of previous generations."
If you use gmail, apparently you can change myusername@gmail.com into myusername+spamsite@gmail.com or my.username@gmail.com and it will still go to your email. Didn't know that.
Map blankets
(Anne Galloway) These are awesome: blankets with a map on them, I want one now too. Get to know your neighborhood while getting comfy. You can have them made in Brooklyn, they take about 200 hours to make, pretty expensive I would wager.
Nathan explaining some Androidy stuff: "CyanogenMod exists because Android is an open-source mobile operating system – in fact, it is the only commercially viable open-source mobile operating system. When the words “open-source” and “commercially viable” exist in close proximity to each other, I usually start talking too fast and wave my arms excitedly."
So this is exactly why Google shouldn't be in the content business. They're not even any good at the content business (they are good at algorythms and UI).
New layout for forum results in Google
I noticed Google is using a new (?) layout for forum results. Google has since long identified certain sites as “forums” and given them a different layout in their search results, but this layout is new I believe.
Practically, this means that forums can get 5 links instead of the usual 1 or 2 in a search results page.
More quoting of Dave Winer: "I read the article about this Sidebar Wiki thing and their product manager said it was just like blogging. I suppose if you have no soul it's just like blogging."
Agree on this one. Google's Sidebar Wiki thing is a terrible, terrible idea, and will be overrun with SEO spammers just like their other content wiki initiatives were. It's not just that Google sucks at content, it's that content is the wrong place for them to be in the internet ecosystem. They point people to content. They shouldn't manage content sites themselves. Youtube is an edgecase, this wikithing is way over the edge.
Quoteworthy: buying an iPhone is like buying a beautiful coat made of the skins of endagered species
Back to the good old blogging and linking to other blogs. Dave Winer: "the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won't use iPhone apps for ecological reasons."
Error messages in loosely coupled systems
Loosely coupled systems scale more easily and are easier to maintain, but they can cause some unusual error messages when one of the parts of the system is down. I understood this message, but I imagine most users wouldn’t.
