JESS3 / The State of The Internet

Some pretty mind-blowing statistics compiled by Jesse Thomas. Enjoy.

News Pulse

A couple of months back CNN launched a new site design, which has turned out to be quite a game changer for news sites. The site got a much-needed facelift with emphasis on video content and imagery and a new distinctive red header was introduced among other things. However, the section that stands out the most is News Pulse, where you can instantly find out what stories have the most buzz, in real time. Digg, Reddit and other sites use a similar structure, but this is the first time I have seen a traditional media outlet embrace such technology. Well done.

Apple Store’s New Checkout

There is an art to designing forms. Forms are one of the most central parts to an online business. You only have the users’ attention for some seconds and in that time you need to engage them to start the process. Usually the step process paradigm is used to explain that there are only a few steps that need to be taken. However, I have sometimes seen that showing the steps can be quite daunting to certain types of users.

To stir things up, Apple has yet again reinvented the check out process with their new redesign. It scraps the steps pattern and instead uses an accordion style structure with a lot of neat innovations in terms of input functionality.

I suggest you read Luke Wroblewski’s, Yahoo!’s Chief Design Architect’s, detailed post about the redesign.

Do you think this will reinvent how e-commerce sites handle their check out processes?

The future of news reading?

Bonnier’s R&D department caused quite a stir on the web last week when launching a video of their new magazine prototype. Will this be how we read news in the future?

10/GUI

This week, Apple made big headlines when they launched their new Mighty Mouse. It is the first mouse that I have seen, which uses touch screen-like gestures to swipe through and scroll content. This is a ground-breaking improvement to the mouse, which originally shipped to consumers in 1981 with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System.

However, even Apple’s new mouse does not improve the fact that users cannot click on multiple elements at the same time. Clayton Miller, a Chicago-based designer, sees potential for improvement, and designed the 10/GUI interface, which uses all 10 fingers to interact within an interface. 10/GUI also neatly updates the way one interacts with open windows. The windows paradigm has been around for more than 20 years, and it has not significantly evolved its fundamental structure since its inception. 10 GUI uses a system named Con10uum, which puts all open windows in a linear interface, enabling users to scroll through all of them at the same time.

I applaud Miller’s efforts. Hopefully his concepts serve as food for thought when new operating systems and navigational artifacts are conceptualized. Who knows, maybe even Apple will use similar technology?

How To Engage and Sustain Your User Base

What emotional rewards do your users walk away with when they visit your site/s?

That is thought-provoking question that will be good to ask yourself once in a while. The question was originally posed by Kevin Rose of Digg, Diggnation and We Follow fame, when he presented at this year’s The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in London. The title of his talk was “9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users” and Rose touched upon some really useful ideas on how to grow a user base.

Some of the main take aways from his keynote are:

Social currency

• Create a social currency that gets users involved and engaged. Examples are Twitter’s follower count and the now defunct leader board of Digg

Simplicity

• Pick 2-3 things to focus on and stick to them. When developing an interface, ask yourself: “Is there anything I can take out?”

“Hack the press”

• Develop an invite only system to fuel publicity
• Don’t focus on the Michael Arringtons of the world. Talk to junior bloggers instead

Engage

• Be an active participant in your own community

Zappos – Function Over Design?

Zappos is one of my favorite Internet-based companies. The shoe retailer is not only known for its amazing customer service, lenient return policies, rapid logistics but also for its quirky and cluttered user experience. The site’s interface always puzzles me: how come an e-commerce platform that surpassed $1 billion in sales last year, has such a busy and chaotic layout?

Andrew Wilkinson, the founder and Creative Director of Meta Lab, a well-respected interface design agency, posted an open letter to Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, this week venting his complaints with the site’s interface and user experience. The letter is entitled “You’re Killing Me Zappos.” It raises many viable points, albeit snarky at times, that the website should be updated with clearer iconography, a more distinct visual hierarchy, more unified link styles and sharper imagery.

To illustrate his points, Wilkinson attached a mock-up of his suggested changes. In my opinion, contrary to the current design, Wilkinson’s mock-up is clean, concise and uses best practices when it comes to user experience. The main improvements are that the content is:

- More clearly delineated;
- The shopping cart is visually emphasized and flushed right;
- The search box is bigger; and
- Information about Zappos’ company culture is put front and center

These are on-point recommendations. However, I would make a few slight modifications to Wilkinson’s design criteria. For instance, some of the additional search mechanisms such as finding “narrow shoes” and “wide shoes” have been removed from the search function.

Additionally, I do not particularly like the customer testimonials at the top of the page. I think users are more focused on finding shoes rather than reading about what other customers think about their experiences with the shoes/and or company. These customer testimonials can be trickled in other states of the user experience and do not necessarily need to be the first aspect you see.

Wilkinson promoted his article by submitting the link to his post to Hacker News, a renowned news aggregation site. The post sparked a fiery discussion, debating the fundamentals of user interface design and discussing the importance of “design vs. functionality.” Below are quotes from some of the responses that tended to focus on Zappos’ functionality rather than the design.

“Ultimately, customer satisfaction comes from getting the greatest value/deal in the least amount of time”
- jaytee_clone

“What is the point of ‘user experience’ on an ecommerce site if it doesn’t boost sales?”
- japherwocky

“…’clean’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’ – despite many UX people’s unfounded insistence.”
- Potatolicious

To a certain extent, I agree with these statements. Of course, an interface should foremost provide a function. This is especially true for e-commerce websites.

A user has two general objectives when visiting an e-commerce website: 1) to purchase an item(s) or 2) to research about an item(s). Successful e-commerce websites are the ones that provide a user with a clear path to finding what they are looking for and do so fast.

The main issues with Zappos’ site do not relate to the functionality. Rather they relate to the design, which Wilkinson’s mock-up eloquently illustrate.

“the better designed web site (both usability and aesthetics) will always win.”
- jmtame

“Good design and functionality are the same thing. The saying goes form over function, not design over function. If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design.”
- wesruv

I could not have said it better myself – “If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design.” Function and design go hand in hand. If the functionality is flawed, the design cannot make it better and vice versa. Fortunately, Zappos’ functionality is not flawed: the design can only enhance the experience and I hope that Zappos take some of Wilkinson’s suggestions into consideration. Zappos is number one in customer service, but can it be number one in user experience? I hope so.

The world’s first music video in an Excel Spreadsheet

Who said that Excel spreadsheets can’t be fun? Kudos to Sony/BMG for this remarkable advertisement.

Microsoft – Productivity Future Vision

Dan Saffer last year coined the term “tap is the new click” at one of his keynotes. It seems that Dan could be right, we’re heading towards more and more “gestural interfaces” where users can interact with an interface by using hand gestures. Apple’s iPhone and lesser known projects as the Attigo TT and Jeff Han’s groundbreaking touch screen prototype are pushing the envelope.

Microsoft, the 800 pound gorilla, is also embracing this movement and recently developed Microsoft Surface a touch screen product that gives “access to digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects”. What is also impressive is the video they released called “Productivity Future Vision” that portrays a not-so-distant future where touch screen artifacts are surrounding us from newspapers, to coffee mugs and tables. Some of these will probably not be realized, but it’s definitely food for thought. Tap is becoming the new click.

Bringing Design to Life

Bill Scott, the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, gave a presentation entitled “Bringing Design to Life – What Engineers Wish Designers Knew” at the WebVisions conference last week. Essentially, the presentation was about bridging the gap between designers and engineers and how to bring designs to life by prototyping. One of the main points that Scott makes is that designers and engineers are in many ways wired differently. Scott says that engineers are “implementation focused” and designers are “ideation focused” and wants designers and engineers to work more closely together and think from the other role’s point of view. Looking at Netflix interface, it seems that this approach has been really successful and I fully agree with his statements. However, this also goes for User Experience professionals. We also need to think more like designers and engineers to create projects that everybody enjoys working on.