User Experience
Help Me Design a Topology of Search Concepts
Search is a wicked problem, with no apparent universal solution in sight. Different technologies and approaches to search exist side by side, serving a multitude of business goals and user needs. In my work with search user experience I find it important to understand the particular strengths and weaknesses of search concepts like Best... Read More »
“Gulltaggen” – The long neck and spreading ideas online
Gulltaggen claims “Norway’s premier event for digital marketing” (presentations by Seth Godin and Chris Anderson to mention a few) and it was held on the 28th and 29th of April. There’s also a steady stream of #gulltaggen tweets. We’ll give a quick recap on two talks: building successful websites through understanding what users want... Read More »
Topic Pages – Content re-use and news site usability (part 1)
Topics pages is a concept of combining site content with background information on a subject, seen on larger news sites like TimesOnline.co.uk and NYTimes.com, but equally important for other content driven sites like blogs or search portals like Kosmix. Focus could be on the people, the organizations involved, events in time, geographical regions or... Read More »
Behavioral Economics Meets The Power of Defaults at Hunch
I like Barack Obama, but that is not why I have put his face on my blog. I have been playing around with Hunch.com the last few days, both answering and creating questions. I have discovered that Obama is my 2008 US presidential candidate, that I should live in Portland, Oregon (partly because I... Read More »
Google’s Wonder Wheel Experiment
Want to participate in one of Google's user interface experiments? Google Blogoscoped tells you how to grant yourself access to the Google Wonder Wheel. Go to google.com, paste the Javascript into the address bar, and take the wonder wheel for a spin. The wheel displays a circle with your keyword, connected to other circles with related terms. There's also a timeline view, and options to show longer snippets and more images for each search result. You can also use filter the results on type (recent, videos, forums and reviews), as well as freshness (time and date). The related terms aren't based on Google's Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI), which you can access by prefixing your keyword with the tilda (~) operator. Google then expands you search with semantically (actually derived from statistics) related concepts. I wonder why they decided not to fuse the two related terms initiatives. (via http://thenoisychannel.com)
Google’s Wonder Wheel Experiment
Want to participate in one of Google’s user interface experiments? Google Blogoscoped tells you how to grant yourself access to the Google Wonder Wheel. Go to google.com, paste the Javascript into the address bar, and take the wonder wheel for a spin. The wheel displays a circle with your keyword, connected to other circles with related terms. There’s also a timeline view, and options to show longer snippets and more images for each search result. You can also use filter the results on type (recent, videos, forums and reviews), as well as freshness (time and date). The related terms aren’t based on Google’s Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI), which you can access by prefixing your keyword with the tilda (~) operator. Google then expands you search with semantically (actually derived from statistics) related concepts. I wonder why they decided not to fuse the two related terms initiatives. (via http://thenoisychannel.com)
A Hack Addressing a Flaw – Transparent Recommendations
Transparency and control is not the pinnacle of user experience design for recommender systems. Our ability to scrutinize the recommendations given to us by the system does not unanimously increase our ability to effectively choose the right option. Transparently knowing all the pros and cons of every recommended options may actually decrease our satisfaction... Read More »
When Recommendations Become a Problem
Some choice good – excessive choice bad. That is the (condensed) Paradox of Choice, according to Barry Schwartz. We need some choice in order to exercise our free will, but the abundance of options we’re facing today (when shopping for groceries, entertainment, education and more) is actually quite overwhelming and paralyzing. No matter how... Read More »
Cake is great, Twitter is good, short URLs can die
Twitter is becoming increasingly popular and mainstream. We’ll go into some possible and slightly novel uses of Twitter to route the stream of communication to your site or blog. Twitters short message format creates a focused form of communication, but the tight limit enforces the increased use of shortened URLs, through services like bit.ly... Read More »
All hail the information triumvirate!
Wikipedia has come to dominate Google web search results. It often ranks #1 for searches on common topics like Internet and Evolution. Is it true that Wikipedia articles are the very best source of information for all of these topics? Or are we witnessing the effects of a popularity feedback loop, fueled by the principles of least effort, and our tendency to stick with the first and obvious answers? The web link graph is fundamentally a product of socialization, and Google is fundamentally a social search engine. A popularity bias in inherent in all social information systems, leading us all down the same well-trod path. Could it be that, counter to our expectations, the natural dynamic of the web will lead to less diversity in information sources rather than more?
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