Mediating Information – What Does That Mean?

By Vegard Sandvold on May 5, 2009 | 3 Responses

I’m very pleased with the discussions sparked by my last post about designing a topology of search concepts. Several people have raised questions about the 2 dimensions I selected as a way of characterizing search concepts in terms of business goals, user needs and technological capabilities. The post was intended to solicit discussion, and... Read More »

Help Me Design a Topology of Search Concepts

Help Me Design a Topology of Search Concepts

By Vegard Sandvold on May 4, 2009 | 24 Responses

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” – The long neck and spreading ideas online

By Thomas Kjelsrud on April 30, 2009 | 3 Responses

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)

Topic Pages – Content re-use and news site usability (part 1)

By Thomas Kjelsrud on April 2, 2009 | 4 Responses

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

Behavioral Economics Meets The Power of Defaults at Hunch

By Vegard Sandvold on March 31, 2009 | 2 Responses

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 »

Hunch!

By Vegard Sandvold on March 28, 2009 | 5 Responses

Hunch is a new website (in private beta) that helps you make decisions faster, and perhaps even better. Questions like "What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? What toe ring should I buy?" are broken down into a series of sub-questions, guiding you quickly through to the final conclusion. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. This is where I believe recommendation systems still have a way to go, for them to become efficient decision facilitators, and not merely option generators. Perhaps Hunch is the next step in that direction? I'm still waiting for my invite, and as soon as I get my hands on one, I'll let you know if my hunch is right.

Google’s Wonder Wheel Experiment

By Vegard Sandvold on March 26, 2009 | Leave a response

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)

Wikipedia - A Democratic Gold Standard for Topic Maps

Wikipedia – A Democratic Gold Standard for Topic Maps

By Vegard Sandvold on March 23, 2009 | 16 Responses

Topic Maps, an ISO standard for semantic networks, relies on authorities to create and maintain Published Subject Indicators (PSIs), uniquely linking single topics to single subjects out there in the real world. TopicMaps.Org has eg. published indicators for languages and countries. But who gets to claim authority over a particular set of topics? Conflicts... Read More »

A Hack Addressing a Flaw - Transparent Recommendations

A Hack Addressing a Flaw – Transparent Recommendations

By Vegard Sandvold on March 10, 2009 | 9 Responses

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

When Recommendations Become a Problem

By Vegard Sandvold on March 2, 2009 | 6 Responses

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 »

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