User Experience Monitor

About the User Experience Monitor

The User Experience Monitor is a blog by Enervision Media consultants. We work with clients to create world-class user experiences for the Web, mobile, and social media channels.

Blog Authors:Meryl Enerson (Listening to the User); Catherine Sherwood (Social Media); and Susan Sechrist (Content and Language).

Find out more about the services Enervision offers

How Seeing a Visual Puts Google in Perspective

Having heard about the vastness of Google's operations, and how difficult it is to get to see them, I was pleasantly surprised to see Google "opening the kimono" with this new visual tour of their data centers. They are so huge, it adds a visual yardstick on the size of the Google operation. I doesn't take a geek, though, to be slightly in awe of them - it's like admiring the Great Wall of China.

An Ode to Search Innovation

You may not think of Amazon as a Search Engine, but of course it is on many levels.

Anthony Grafton's interesting (and wistful) discussion in The Nation about Amazon: "Search Gets Lost," reveals how Amazon has changed its focus from innovation to commercialization.

Amazon once allowed users to access something called SIPs, or statistically improbable phrases in any book, which got the essence of a book across (thus, SIPs of Karl Marx's "Labor" would be "average social labour," "Labour fund," or "abstract human labour.")  Capitalized Phrases, on the other hand, were people, places, things or topics most frequenlty mentioned (such as the word "time" in T.S. Eliot's "Collected Poems."

What was cool about these features was that they had no commercial value (or not enough commercial value).

Today, according to Grafton, these features have been phased out in favor of the ubiquitous customer-generated content (tags, reviews, etc.) that help monetize the product.  It's only natural for a giant of industry to have changed its course in favor of monetization (I think), but Grafton makes a good case for mourning the transition.

Browse vs Search - The Evolution Away from Serendipity

There's an interesting aricle in The Economist's Online Magazine "Intelligent Life" by Ian Leslie on how Internet may be hampering innovation.  He points out that as search engines like Google and social networks like Facebook give us back more of what they guess we want (rather than what we may need) we end up in a less varied and diverse world - at least online.  Many innovations come about by serendipity, and the Web is moving away from that, and more towards a tailored, personalized experience.

I am not sure I buy the entire argument, as many Web users (including myself) find a way to "discover" information in innovative ways, even using Search alone.  But it is interesting as a framework for the larger issue - the move towards Search and away from Browse as a model for behavior on the Web.

Do we want tailored? Is personalized always good?  Possibly not.  Check out Leslie's article and see for yourself:

The Search for Serendipity

Tracking Google's Influence: A Review of 3 Books on the Search Giant

This is an interesting article  by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books about the influence of Google.  He reviews three books out this year: "The Googlisation of Everything (and Why We Should Worry)" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy, and "I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edward, and analyzes what they're saying collectively about the search gian.

I love his assertion near the end of this article that: "Google is getting cleverer precisely because it is so big."  This is the antithesis of what most analysts think about Google!  How does he come to this conclusion?  You'll just have to read the article.

 

US Digital Trends in 2010

Comscore just released their report on trends in the US digital marketplace - "U.S. Digital Year in Review."

Top trends reported incude in this latest report include:

• Although portals are still large in online (measured by total time spent online/day), the general shift away from portals to social media and entertainment sites is a major trend.
• Facebook takes the lead on Engagement (no surprise), with 180 million visitors/month. Facebook now accounts for over 12% of the time spent online in the US.
• Smartphone adoption surges past 25 percent penetration in the US. One third of Americans now access mobile browsers and applications.
• In the area of search, 2010 saw the integration of real- time search, improved blended search results and other new search modules, all of which have enriched the search experience.
• Online TV viewing is showing significant growth in 2010.  On an average day in December 2010, more than 88 million Americans watched online video, up 32 % from a year earlier.

Download a copy of the report on comScore's Website.

 

A Targeted Site for Usability

The User Experience Monitor is now part of the "pond" known as the UX Pond.  This interesting new site has a targeted (they call it "acute") sesarch feature that lets you find listings of usability-related blogs, discussions, articles, events, tools, and other resources.

Or, as UX Pond puts it, "why search the ocean when the answer's in the pond?"

Next time you're looking for an answer related to User Experience, check out UX Pond's specialized usability search feature.

QuickLook: Google's New 'Search as You Type' Feature

Google has recently launched a new feature that may shake the Web industry, from how search happens on sites, to how users across the Web get to sites, and it looks like this:

The feature, known as Google Instant allows a user entering a keyword term to see a dynamically changing screen as s/he types in the search text field.

Unlike other iterations of "type ahead" search that simply show the user most popular search terms through a pull-down menu, this feature has much more going on under the hood: the entire screen of search results change as you type.

Now, a dynamically changing screen can either be a great thing, or a not-so-great thing. Will users adapt to it? Like it? Hate it? The good aspect is that you can instantly fine-tune your search to get something...well..different than you had originally intended.  The negative aspect is that users may or may not understand what is happening right away.  Also, my experience in usability testing has shown me that many adult users are bothered when an interface changes rapidly, especially if they don't understand why it is changing.  It could potentially make some users nervous.

Nevertheless, I believe Google's latest feature  will have many long-term implications for search engine optimization and search advertising, as well as how competitors view the whole "search animal."

Follow more coverage about Google Instant on: PC World

 

 

What the Search Engine Wars Teach Us About Web Design

Recently, Google and Bing have been feeding off each other's design work. Well, let's say Google has been feeding off of Bing. The New York Times, among other publications, have been in turn feeding off the "Search Engine Wars."

Case in point: Google "lifted" the idea for the left-navigation of results from Microsoft's Bing a few months ago. My question is: is this so bad? I think this kind of derivative one-upmanship is at the core of the growth of the Web - everybody uses everybody else as a stepping stone to get where they want to go.

In the case of the Internet, that kind of strategy advances the collective user experience of the Web, provided the features and design used represent a good user experience. 

 

via www.nytimes.com

 

What's in a Look? Google's Recent Changes Make Waves

Anyone using Google consistently in the last few months realized at some point, things had changed when they introduced the new "Bing-like" look and feel - the left-hand column of options. Google added tiny little icons and categories for a search term, to presumably help the user navigate the vast array of choices s/he faces when doing a text search.  

The questions I have are: 1) Is this an improvement? (does it actually help you as user of Google search find what you're looking for, and 2) Will it impact how users become used to seeing search options presented in the future, within a site?  The Web world seems to move in synch with Google, and it would be hard to imagine this doesn't have an impact (even though Microsoft's Bing did it first).

A recent article on PC World points out that there isn't anything terribly earth-shaking about the recent change to Google's home page: they simply cribbed off the idea of the photographic background from Bing.  But the outcries are numerous:

Google's New Look: Why is Everybody So Upset?