Wednesday, November 3, 2010

SpoolCast: Luke Wroblewski and Innovations in Web Input

Nod to Sophia Petrillo

Question begs to be asked – What does a Golden Girl have to do with Luke Wroblewski & Web Design and Usability? Picture this: Atlanta – the year 2010. Find yourself at a Web Conference on Usability. You got there at the crack of dawn and are as hungry as a lark. You along with some guys are carrying on a discussion. Some guy is hogging the conversation and you're looking for a break without sounding rude. All your senses are drawn to the food that's just been placed at the catering table on the other side of the room. You, after all paid $300+ so you might as well get your food's worth. So, in an effort to mute the never-ending-chatter-person, you decide to finish said annoying guy's sentence in the hope of interjecting and moseying on along to the smell good table, but alas! Said guy is quick to inform you that you got it all wrong and that is not what he meant to say…. and now goes into another tangent and all you think is Why? Why? Why? [if you did not get the Sophia P joke too bad!].

Competition. A word I love when companies duke it out in an effort to garner customer loyalty [among other things]. Google recently added Google Instant. Real time search results as you type. Results update as you type. Woo hoo for Google right?! Well, according to Luke W., Yahoo! actually had this technology as far back as 2005. Makes me glad to know that the customer [me] is at the forefront of innovation. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, Google worked out all the kinks and rolled it out before they did. So this round goes to Google. However, what if, as you type, the results brought back were irrelevant to what you wanted – much like finishing somebody's sentence thinking you know exactly what they are going to say only to find out you were wrong? This feature would be totally irrelevant if not annoying. As Luke W. said, "there is a fine line between relevance and distraction..." Any results that are apart from your match criteria only detract from and could possibly lose you customers.  Another consideration is server load implications, which is the reason Yahoo! did not include it on their search. Real time searches mean that two or three searches are being carried out concurrently and can increase server load ten fold. This drastically increases server load and considerations have to be taken into account.


Mr. Wroblewski listed 3 innovations in Web Usability that would enhance user experience:
  1. Rich Interactions:
  2. Input can come from anywhere.
    Users are spending more time off your site than on.  E.g. Email clients, chat windows, bookmarks, browser extensions, calendars, e.t.c.  As opposed to previous experience that required user visits and filling in forms as a way to capture information.  Case in point - this blog is typed in Microsoft Word and published by a click of a button.
  3. Providing information to Social Networking Systems.
    Since these networks already have the platforms that allow users to input information, many types of forms such as sign up , profile creation and any form that requires inputting information can be done away with.  User experience connections would only require hitting a button/link and make connections [case in point: uploading images to a website.  A practice that users do not like doing].
His metaphor at the end is not only funny but serves as a cautionary tale as well: " If a 160 million are driving down a road and I put a pile of dog poop on that road, chances are 1 million people will drive through it.  Numbers alone are not an indicator that you have a good product." 


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