Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

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.

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 :)

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.

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:

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 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?

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: /

Hopefully that does the trick. Let me know if I have to change it.

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?

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.

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.

(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.

Cloudvox looks awesome. (via Simon)

Youtube has a new logo.

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).

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.

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.”

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.

The new Amazon Cloudwatch monitoring ($0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance, so that’s about 10 US$/month per server) graphs in the (free) AWS console for ec2 instances are AWESOME:

(Yea, that’s a strange disk read spike there…) Now I just have to learn to interpret these and understand what’s going on there.

What happens to user behavior when we tweak the site to be slower in various degrees for them? It turns out that over a large gradient of site slowdowns, users in general spend around the same amount of time on Facebook, as measured by session time (user activity up until a certain period of idleness). Logically, page views suffer as a result.

Typical upload/download speeds at the farm with TATA.

Test

Installed blogging client on new laptop. Ready to go.Tesssssst.

Wij hebben 2 katten ter adoptie: 1 witte en 1 zwarte. Ze zijn 4 jaar oud, we hebben ze meegebracht uit New York 2 jaar geleden. Over 1 maand vertrekken we naar Colombia en we kunnen ze (spijtig genoeg!!) onmogelijk meenemen, dus we zoeken iemand om 1 van de poezen (of beiden) te adopteren.

Het zijn 2 vrouwtjes. Ze woonden de eerste 2 jaar in het appartement in New York, maar zijn nu gewoon buiten te wonen, dus ze kunnen binnen of buiten. Ze zijn beiden gesteriliseerd en gevaccineerd en hebben een chip ingeplant. Ze zijn ook zindelijk (binnenshuis). Het zijn heel lieve katten, vriendelijk in de omgang.

We kunnen ze spijtig genoeg dus onmogelijk meenemen, bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com als je meer informatie wil.

Stuur deze webpagina ook door naar je vrienden, alvast bedankt!

Foto van toen ze nog klein waren:

Foto’s van nu:

Bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com

Still not great but I like the idea of collaborative UI design:

Eurostar confirmation page: “Unless you have a photographic memory, you might want to print this page for your records.” :)

Jared Spool interviews Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com.

Podcasting isn’t hip anymore (and most of the companies founded during the hype have done really badly), but it’s still a very useful thing.

In Arambol, India, I came across a small travelers’ library where you could borrow and exchange books, with about 100 books organized in the following 4 categories: English, Dutch, German and Funny Languages. Unfortunately I got a picture of the library but not one of the classification:

The Journal of IA is up. It’s a peer-reviewed journal, which is fantastic, because it not only makes IA more serious and research-driven (which it needs), but mainly because it encourages the creation of this kind of research. I don’t particularly care if IA as a discipline survives or goes the way of “knowledge management”, which drowned in unscientific blabla and became pretty much irrelevant (with apologies to everyone who identifies with this). But I do care a lot about good research in my field, and this will hopefully encourag that.

One thing though: content is only available in PDF format. Guys! This is ironic in more ways than I can count.

• Continuing the ear-infection: sick on the Konkan express (Poorbuthappy in India!)
  (tags: india sick ear-infection travel with kids children)

There’s a great discussion going on on the IXDA mailing list about what we call mobile phones (and what we call sending SMS messages) in different countries. I’m trying to summarize here, please leave a comment with info on your country and also note where this list may be wrong:

• USA: Cellphone or cell, texting.
• China: “Handy phone” (?)
• Iran: mobile. (landlines are called “telephone”).
• Spain: "teléfono móvil" or "móvil".
• Denmark: mobile phone.
• UK: mobile or mobile phone.
• Philipines: cellphone.
• New Zealand: “mobile” (but cellphone is also used).
• India: mobile. Telephone or landline for a landline.
• Korea: “handphone”
• Japan: keita.
• Dutch (Netherlands): mobiele telefoon.
• Dutch (Belgium): GSM.
• France: "téléphone portable" or "portable" but since "portable" is used for laptop too some people call them "mobile".
• Germany: handy http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handy
• Indonesia, they call it hand phone or simply abbreviated as "hp" pronounced "ha-pe". "*Ha*" as if in *ha*m and "*pe*" as if in*Pe*psi. In terms of texting, they use "SMS".
• Turkey: "pocket phone" ("cep telefonu")?

In general, “text message” is more widely understood than “SMS”.

I also created a Google survey, I’ll open up the results. Fill in the form about what phones are called in your country here.

Apple’s Belgium language gateway has “Apple” as a language option :)