Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if…
The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride’s party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and –in a supreme affront to the “vitality” of the art– will don a bright red…
The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. —Alan…
—Web Site Usability (Mind Tracks) A good collection of links introducing usability and web design. I’ll keep it in mind for the next time I teach “Writing for the Internet“. Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its jou…By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion /…
The X-Monkey comes from a line of monkeys originally bred by the military for the purpose of driving tanks. It’s a good fit, because the modern Apple sedan is actually a tank in a fancy shell. The X-Monkey’s only drawback is that he can only drive a car from Apple. Show him any other vehicle,…
Tips Using blurbs with headlines rather than headlines-only seems to help disperse interest throughout a homepage (down the page). Recognize that a list of headlines-only high on the page might not get people to look as much on lower portions of the page. The use of blurbs does not appear to affect the number of…
The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle. —Jakob Nielsen —Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Alertbox) Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule…
In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google’s latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but…
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which…
Firefox 1.0 has excellent bookmark-management features, some of which were present in earlier versions of the browser. Users can, with one click, sort bookmarks according to site name, location, date last visited, etc. The newest bookmark feature is Live Bookmarks, which allows users to browse RSS feeds from their favorite websites directly from the site’s…
And for roughly thirty years, almost any description of mailing lists of any length has mentioned flaming, the tendency of list members to forgo standards of public decorum when attempting to communicate with some ignorant moron whose to stupid to know how too spell and deserves to DIE, die a PAINFUL DEATH, you PINKO SCUMBAG!!!…
Tim Russert’s Electronic Whiteboard (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) “Florida, Florida, Florida,” wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election. Russert has levelled up to a fancy schmancy digital whiteboard. He filled up the columns with data in red and blue, which was a nice touch, but the displays seemed more static than I…
Eve[r] wondered how low-tech we can seem in a high-tech society? Three words: wire punching tool. —Karissa Kilgore —Fancy Absenteeism (Sugarpacket) “Definetly NOT a hoax! I was there when the picture was taken!!!” says Karissa. See “Why Usability Testing Matters — Palm Beach County Ballot Design Raises Questions about Election 2000“ Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White…
One of the recurring problems that users face is that computers…well…don’t always work quite as well as expected (and sometimes not at all.) But that doesn’t make it any easier for developers and vendors to fix computer problems. For developers to fix the problems, they need to understand what the problem is. Here’s where the…
Google’s desktop search is integrated with the familiar Web search, with a new Desktop tab appearing at Google.com, and results culled from a search of the local drive are added to the top of any search through the Web. The local results are displayed at the top of the list, marked with a new logo…
As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we’re all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won’t haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can…
My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I’ve used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses. But…
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world’s information isn’t yet online, we’re helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results. To use Google Print, just…
Self-service has been around for decades, ever since Clarence Saunders, an American entrepreneur, opened the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders’s idea was simple, but revolutionary: shoppers would enter the store, help themselves to whatever they needed and then carry their purchases to the check-out counter to pay for them. Previously,…
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars).…