I’ve been imagining a command line for working with places data, given the Labs Ubiquity project. I wrapped up the chats in a zooming presentation, via beta service ZuiPrezi, that walks through a chat with Dietrich on the nitty gritty. Click through for an impressive zooming UI experience with some unique use of rotation.

With a fresh revamp of the language parser and new install method via LINK tag, I’ve successfully crafted a Ubiquity command highlighting links with rel=nofollow. The install page has more info as well as Ubiquity installation details.

If you’re curious about why you’d care about nofollow beyond spam prevention, check this fresh guide to “sculpting pagerank” with an IA perspective.

Mozilla Labs has issued a Call for Participation for “Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes”. Alas, the post seemed to follow Techcrunch’s coverage and thus the one example versus the CFP is getting the buzz on techmeme.

Examples

Some recent work by a Mozilla intern on browser history is showcased as an example:

Adaptive Path steps up to the plate in the open source design arena with a compelling video. This is fully rendered scenario, from actors & setting to full screen capture of a rich interaction.

In this excerpt, we see a user working through a view of her browsing history by time to help a friend locate something.

In the second excerpt, an automated content clustering algorithm is conveyed in the organization of items on the x/y axis, where z is time.

Can Open Source UX Beat Commercial Alternatives?

It’s hardly fair to lump Firefox into the average open source UX project experience, given funding and a dedicated UX team and research lab, but MPT’s list of problems with open source usability stem from a long history of involvement in the Mozilla project. This effort by Mozilla labs seems to address several of Matthew’s top issues.

Numbers 3 & 5 are obviously addressed just by the CFP and Mozilla Lab’s existence.

3. Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.

5. Coding before design

Note, I’m really impressed increased upfront design that the Mozilla team is putting forth in the latest iterations, thanks to MikeB & a stellar UX team. In contrast to the original Firefox UI which was (skillfully) developer driven.

7. Chasing tail-lights.

While there is some really outstanding prior art along all of the dimensions shown in this video, it’s awesome to have a high profile open source project setting the bar against fierce, and highly business constrained, efforts by Apple (Safari) and Microsoft (IE).

The video included in the CFP that isn’t excerpted here, Aza Raskin’s mobile (Z)UI concept, is the most unique in terms of lack of historical precedent and sheer user interface engineering in combining zooming/panning with UI control access. That’s especially welcome, but there’s a lot of accumulated wisdom in the prior art on hypermedia that has yet to be brought to consumers. The ZuiPrezi team seems to share that same conclusion.

This blog’s archives are a veritable run-on sentence on the need and opportunities to enrich browser history. One that I haven’t dug up in a while is the MSR prototype “Data Mountain” which combined zIndex stacks of thumbnails with a topographical landscape model and innovated on the gestures for re-organizing. I had a history based RSS mashup running called “blog mountain” back in ‘04 before I joined the devil

12. Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth.

There may be a paradigm here for high fidelity concept videos, especially to garner the contributions of top design firms.

Yes, as much as I appreciate the videos, the technology-hacker/designer in me wants to find a satisfying incremental gain using the “zone of promixal development” within the current Mozilla technology.

It’s also challenging to pull out the real defining points from a video mockup. The Adaptive Path Aurora video packs a lot in for example. Collaboration, visual revisitation support, and some serious machine learning and statistical data mining tech.

Getting to Prototype Implementations

Functioning software in the history visualization space is much more feasible in Firefox 3 than ever before. The new places datastore and easy screen capture may create performance bottlenecks for a aspiring developer, but much of this is realizable at the prototype stage.

Screenshots, however, are not enough. We need to be able to extract assets, text or image or whatever, from browsing history to create better memory cues and representations. Imagine being shown the button images that you clicked on as well as the thumbnail. That would better differentiate the site you considered buying from versus the one you did buy from in a historical browsing session. I’ve filed a bug to add cache access support to the FUEL.js browser library.

One of the CFP commenters offers up this set of sketches of a trails implementation. I’m a big fan of the trails notion, and it address collaboration as well as revisitation support. The real magic is not just in the authoring, though Dgray@Xplane captures some of the illusive extracting and subsequent mashup that is missing from common authoring tools. A playback component is needed, ideally along with a standards based representation format, ala microformats?

Designing richly interactive UI controls for the iPhone and the web is an interesting challenge and much more feasible now that touch events are exposed in Safari for javascript hackery. Check out some examples.

On the iphone, you don’t have mousemove. Not much sooner than I had inked this draft, I discovered TLRobinson’s library that ports multitouch events to mouse events. This is one part of the equation, providing “down level” experience for user input in multi-touch designs. For the reverse, touch events can proxy mousedown and up.

With improved javascript perfomance, and toolsets like Aptana, looks like web apps for the iphone are going to be fun. Alas, Canvas is lame compared to SVG compound DOM for direct manipulation UI.

Following up on my first generation video on how to podcast with the iPhone, here’s a look at the 2.0 appstore options for recording, with an eye to podcasts.

The iPhone SDK doesn’t apparently make it easy to record and transfer audio files, so to make a long story short, jailbreaking and then SSH’ing to pull your podcasts is still the only way you’ll get full fluency with big files.

Transfer limited recorders

A bunch of apps haven’t figured out how to get their files off the iphone:

• VoiceNotes (free)
• Recordifier $4.99
• Quickvoice Recorder $1.99 given a favorable review by lifehacker.
• YouNote (free): email is coming soon, but this is picture, text, and audio note taker & manager. It’s likely too clunky for on the go recording, requiring immediate naming of audio recordings. Nifty free app nontheless with note geotagging.
• SpeakEasy Video Recorder: audio levels, playback scrubber, unique features include resumption after a call. Attach a pic. Organize in categories.

Of course, the no-transfer restriction is likely easily solved by Jailbreaking and accessing the iPhone filesystem directly.

Recorders with Email Transfer

Some contenders that do have the ability to transfer files include:

• Note 2 Self $4.99: interesting customization and unique controls (trigger recording by moving phone to ear). Email compressed or uncompressed.
• Recorder $.99: Email. Rename.
• Audio Recorder $2.99: Add to a recording, rename, email to self or contact, audio levels, playback scrubber. One of the slicker looking apps in the category. CAF core audio format, making email to contact somewhat wacky.

Hybrid web/iphone/operation system applications

• Evernote: Evernote gives 40mb of space per month free, with a subscription yielding 500mb at $5/mon. Audio files are auto-synched to the server in .wav format. While there’s no download button, the file is easy to find and there’s an easy greasemonkey fix. Note, no longer windows only! There’s a Leopard client now but audio files are stored in a fairly obfuscated library folder in a sequence of .reco files.
• Reqall: An integrated note consolidation web app like Evernote with the unique feature of transcribing audio.

So for short clips, typically under 10mb, you can get away with one of the contenders and email. With most email servers blocking attachments over 10mb, for serious interviews at a conference or routine meeting recordings, this solution is inadequate. Alternatively, an Evernote subscription might work for moderate monthly volume.

The right way to do this is synch recordings with iTunes in a special category.Given privacy concerns & legal restrictions, it makes sense to try and prevent the surreptious recording of audio calls, but hiding the music library from 3rd party apps is a user experience crippling profit inspired outcome.

I haven’t pwn’ed my freshly replaced iPhone 2.0 yet (old one had a broken screen), but is sure is tempting.

There’s been a lot of good research on tag clouds lately — from usage evaluation (>33% users surveyed) at IA Summit, layout at WWW’07 to visual processing at Hypertext ‘08.

I’m a bit fan of tag clouds, yet sense there’s much more to be done. Marti Hearst’s recent work on tag clouds challenges their usefulness as a true visualization or UI, while other acknowledging benefits. More on that some other time…

Here’s a sampling of the best / most-representative stuff I found in a quick run through of the search startup SearchMe’s results… displayed in their new Stacks widget.

About 80% of them are from a half dozen queries I ran. The other 20% (mainly research articles) I had to manually add. The widget is quite slick, though I wish there were a few more items onscreen at one time. I’ve already asked the SearchMe folks when the API will be available for creating “stacks”. I’d love to hook this up to my delicious feed or build a widget to auto-create a stack for all of the links in a blog post.

Rich document previews for the web are here! I can’t help but wish for more — but most of the best ideas of HCI over the last 20 years are yet to be deployed to the masses. Hats off to the folks at SearchMe for the acumen and perserverance to get this feature to market.

It’s been a long time since my hyperactive extension building days of ‘01-02. My first extension to make out of basic prototyping stage in 6 years is now available, timed to coincide with the new Firefox 3: StomperNet Ranker.

The tool features:

1. An interactive SVG-based visualization of result overlap in the top 20 results for Google, Yahoo, and Live Search
   • “Brushing” feedback highlighting same domain results and displaying a info panel
   • Click to preview the result page
2. Tabs for the full result views from each engine
3. Access to the 7 search markets

It also integrates the Scrutinizer browser, which simulates foveal and peripheral vision for design inspection and more informative observation of use, with a “Scrutinize This Page” option.

We used the Komodo IDE (howto pdf) to build it. It makes getting started pretty simple and I roped in two members of our StomperNet dev team who had no experience with extension development more easily because of it.

Parsing search results with the DOM is a breeze compared to using regular expressions, no matter how good a PERL hacker you are. The tool also features interactive SVG, sharing CSS between the XUL and SVG layers. I’ve long been a proponent of SVG in Firefox, notably in my MS Thesis on menu mousing behavior. It’s an under appreciated part of the Firefox UI toolkit.

Go Get Firefox 3 and then get StomperNet Ranker. And, if you’re in Atlanta, join us for a celebration of the best browser on the planet tonight.

Note: Updated from original post for improved accuracy.

Made a bit of progress tonight in using places to assess my personal success and use of the big 3 engines. I’m not quite ready to share the code, but using Firefox places sqlite database and the google visualization API I came up with the following:

One of the subleties of Google’s brand is the intense degree of trust users place in their results. This not only leads to a perceived advantage in quality, but also to a greater level of trust. This results in users returning to Google for another click as opposed to spending more time on the site they land on or one it links to.

My sql for this is:

select count(distinct s.session) as N, count(distinct s2.from_visit) as clicks, rev_host from moz_historyvisits s, moz_places p, moz_historyvisits s2 where s.place_id = p.id and s2.from_visit = s.id and( rev_host like ‘%moc.elgoog.www%’ or rev_host like ‘%moc.hcraes.nsm%’ or rev_host like ‘%moc.evil.hcraes%’ or rev_host = ‘moc.oohay.hcraes.’) and (p.url like ‘%q=%’ or p.url like ‘%p=%’) group by rev_host

If we exclude queries with no clicks, we get

My sql for this is:

select count(distinct s.session) as N, count(distinct s2.from_visit) as clicks, rev_host from moz_historyvisits s join moz_places p ON s.place_id = p.id LEFT OUTER JOIN moz_historyvisits s2 ON s2.from_visit = s.id where ( rev_host like ‘%moc.elgoog.www%’ or rev_host like ‘%moc.hcraes.nsm%’ or rev_host like ‘%moc.evil.hcraes%’ or rev_host = ‘moc.oohay.hcraes.’) and (p.url like ‘%q=%’ or p.url like ‘%p=%’) group by rev_host

So session abandonment is:

Another critical stat is the frequency of refinement activities. Looking at sequences, I see 36% of sessions involving query to query chains on Google, 8% on live, and and 40% on Yahoo (sql).

While my search behavior is rather abnormal, both through extreme geekitude and SEO activities, my goal with this work is to find a way for many users to contribute this data to form an independent analysis of search experience.

The Atlanta launch & download record shindig will be at Park Tavern in midtown, at the east corner of Piedmont park. Thanks to my employer, StomperNet and local startup Appcelerator for sponsoring refreshments.

It’s been a long time since the Mozilla 1.0 party in Boston, but I’m happy to say that the Mozilla manifesto animations I did back in 2001 still work today, even on the iPhone. The beauty of standards… one and two.

For more updated projector animation fodder, I did a quick adaptation of Dria’s Field Guide to an animated presentation. Dial it up at your party at surfmind.com/lab/mozilla/ff3fieldguide/.

I hope to add a bit more visual glitz and mouseover pause and navigation — Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 per Dria’s original content.

I’ve been excited about the new history and bookmarks system, Places, in Firefox 3 for a long while now. With the release impending, and some solid usage behind me, I can now look at some key metrics that the industry has been tracking in isolated research activities.

What percent of browser activity is spent on re-accessing information & sites versus consuming new experiences? A WWW’06 study by Harald Weinrich, et al. paper updated these stats, showing across studies 61% of pages visited were repeats in ‘94, 58% in ‘96, and only 45.6% in their 2006 study.

We know that 30% of searches are for revisiting. This is a lot of user experience and one that Firefox3 is addressing compellingly with the Awesome Bar using an algorithm that mimics human cognition using recency and frequency. The places a user might conceive of going are predicted by these two factors, as is much of cognition.

The nature of the effort executed in getting to the location is also predictive. This too is present in the Awesome Bar algorithm. From D.M.O The_Places_frecency_algorithm (more):

For the 10 most recent visits (where 10 is determined by places.frecency.numVisits):
.. Determine percentage bonus for type of visit (ie: the “transition type”):
…. 0 (places.frecency.embedVisitBonus)
…. 120 (places.frecency.linkVisitBonus)
…. 200 (places.frecency.typedVisitBonus)
…. 140 (places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.downloadVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.permRedirectVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.tempRedirectVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.defaultVisitBonus)

It’s also very cool that you’re rewarded by using your bookmarks with serendipitious improvement of the location bar. In short, there’s a heck of a lot of personal magic in this dataset, as well as potential insights into how humans interact with the web.

I’ve been doing some data exploration on my placesdb powered by sqlite, now 3 months old, with SAGE (a sort of matlab * python). Here’s what I found my revisitation rate to be (sql):

So that’s 42% of my page views are revisits — given an increasing usage of FF3 as my primary browser over 3 months.

Now it’s entirely possible the selective pruning for history is making these numbers not quite right. Comments pointing to how the places db is pruned with time appreciated. This analysis should also be informed by a more intelligent filter of visit types. In any event, this is just the tip of the iceberg on both the research and feature fuel that can be garnered from the Places db and the rich API around it. Drop me a line or comment if you’d like my SAGE “workbooks”.

Mozilla.org is starting to seriously think about wide scale user research & data collection, with the simple logging tool Spectator returning to compatibility recently and the Mozilla Labs participant pool (aka Test Pilot) incubating.

Regarding large scale data, in the vein of ComScore metrics, Mozilla.org is very concerned about the trust user’s have placed in them. Perhaps it’s actually appropriate for the market to determine what works within the open ecosystem of Firefox. In any event, I expect lots of interesting add-on work utilizing places and increasing user research enabled, data driven innovation from Mozilla.

One of the less appreciated features of the awesome Firebug extension it’s ability to edit HTML and CSS live.

I use this to do rapid prototyping, generate screen shots for bug reports, etc. in addition to the development tweak it til it’s right use case.

I did a quick screencast of doing a two state UI prototype for screencaptures:

The mozdev guys gave me a shoutout as they planned the tagging system for mozdev projects. We agreed we were using tags to provide a browsing UI, not facilitate search, meaning that no aspect that would never be shared across 2 or more projects was a good candidate for a tag.

I proposed two key semantic guidelines for tags:

• Tags should address the application component (bookmarks, attachments, history, etc)
• Tags should address the user goal/task (find,share,refind,search,forwarding)

This is pretty much what’s happening, with the addition of software product name identifiers. I’ve used the nifty kwout service to capture a clickable screenshot. Copying partial source doesn’t get the CSS on the tag cloud.

mozdev.org - free project hosting for the Mozilla community via kwout

I was also interested in a architectural level of tagging along the lines of a classification of wishlist bugs.

• feature addition (features)
• feature change (modification)
• feature tweak (enhancement)
• application (app)

There are lots of interesting enhancements happening over at Mozdev. The tagging system offers a much richer way to browser extensions at mozdev (needs more data tho!), and offers a nice organic alternative to the perhaps overly rigid addons.mozilla.org.

The tagcloud is not the end all of browsing UIs for tagged content. I’ve been impressed with some noodlings with a faceted-search module for Drupal by David Lesieur (.fr).

The latest in deep cogitation on tagClouds is from the IA Summit ‘08 (B&A podcasts). While the research found utilization of online video and customization high, only 35% of users reporting clicking on tagclouds. I think the jury’s out on tagclouds as a whole — I value them a lot for providing an aesthetic overview of a topic space.

The version of wordPress powering this site was massively out of date (v2.0) and I paid the price. Two spam infilitrations inserted links into older posts and created a whole directory of spam content.

The upgrade was smooth and mostly painless… as Dougal says “Upgrade or Else“. Indeed, while most of the spam was non-destructive, a handful of older posts seem to have been chopped.

The Web Search Data Mining conference held it’s inaugural meeting recently. This is a spinoff of SIGIR, WWW, and related conferences specifically dedicated to learning from user activity traces & web topology.

While I keep informed and occasionally learn new things from Ted talks, UIE podcasts, etc., that doesn’t compare to the density & sophistication of attending a research conference. In a great sign of the times, many of the WSDM talks are online at videoLectures.net.

Check out the wealth of vids on semantic web topics. Give up your daily YouTube’ng, and learn something!

As we wrote about in the PIKII paper (full text), the web has evolved to partially support most of the key tenets of traditional hypertext. A notable exception is trails, or maps through information space, that can be shared, followed, and augmented. For a indepth primer on the history here, see the web that wasn’t. Let’s look historically at efforts in this space.

Trailfire, a web 2.0 company, has a Firefox plugin that facilitates authoring and a playback mechanism with the claim of personalized topical recommendations. Trexy was an earlier foray that focuses on supporting search and uses search queries as starting points for trails. This type of parallel, collaborative search of an information space was most recently addressed with Microsoft’s Search Together prototype, scheduled for release soon.

The most interesting recent entry into the trails implementation space is PMOG. This pseudo role-playing game with it’s passive mode of operation and economy around user attention and web browsing may have realized the concept of trails more fully than anyone else at this stage. The notion of “passively multiplayer online games“, and especially pmog.com got some buzz this year at SXSW, fueled by a panel and strong attendance by the gaming community.

While PMOG has a lot going for it beyond just the notion of trails, let’s consider the history of popularity of trail-based systems with a graph from Alexa (yes, dubious source I know). The winner here is Walden Paths, an academic project that produces a useful tool for teaching with websites - while past it’s peek it’s still a defining project.

Alexa shows PMOG rising fast, Trexy with a small hayday years ago, Trailfire waning, and Waldens Paths also waning but with more reach than all the others combined.

Are trails a good idea? With the popularity of social bookmarking sites, my guess is yes. There is another precedent — third voice, which left annotations scattered around the web. The richer and more contiguous information provided by good trails could go beyond the random web graffiti that third voice generated.

Authoring

The annotations offered by the trail services described here are typically attached at the page level, not the page element level as the most robust specification of annotation requires. Even with simple page level annotations, PMOG and Trailfire take very different approaches to authoring.

I recreated the a PMOG Scrutinizer trail at “Understanding Vision & Web Design” on TrailFire for comparision purposes.

PMOG uses a 2 step authoring process, with step one being light posts and step two stitching them together into a mission. Trailfire has a more robust interface while browsing allowing annotations & sequencing to happen during the browsing activity.

I like that PMOG allows me to gel trails without a massive interruption in the browsing flow. No metadata is specified when you add the trail. That said, the UI for adding marked urls to specific trails (or missions in PMOG lingo) is clunky. This is partially due to the number of marked urls being tied to the currency of the land, so the expectation is that the set of marked URLs will remain relatively small. I crafted a trail/mission with PMOG as I did the research for this post, the buzz on PMOG, 3/15/07.

Playback Subtleties

The area of playback is also a key experience delta between Trailfire and PMOG. Partially due to the recasting of trails as missions, the contents of the trail are hidden from the user prior to playback in PMOG.

Some placeholder ideas for future playback systems:

• Branching: The natural solution for this is a visualization, with additional support for backtracking both from the subtrail and to the subtrail.
• Discovery of overlapping trails: either augmentations or unaffiliated. Trailfire does this aggressively, all the time when it’s active based upon current url.

Additionally, if annotations were attached to elements, there’s are some new challenges about helping the user orient to the site before deep diving to content. Due to cross-site security restrictions and the general weakness of frames, playback is likely to always require a browser mod.

Next?

I believe the key missing piece here for mass adoption is the ability to publish trails to a blog. Imagine a microformat for trails, with creation tools and blog posting integration. Ideally, this could support multiple representations (overview map, episodic rendering with visual previews). Existing efforts have added widgets, but the topical focus of trails makes this type of global include detrimental.

In the meantime, PMOG registration is wide open, though performance is suffering accordingly.

I’ve very happy to see innovation in web search in any fashion. The challenges of simply getting at scale search done creates a barrier to entry for innovators that might be one of the reasons search has remained so static over a decade on the web, while other interactions evolved. Progress has been varied in pace, but e-commerce, personal information management (aka bookmarks, etc), and browser UIs progressed more dramatically in interaction & UX than search has. If you consider the underlying technology, web coverage and the ever expanding challenge, relevance, structured information access, etc., search has advanced hugely.

But is the text box really the ultimate search UI… perhaps, but let’s not give up without a fight.

You can break down much of searching into the tasks of query formulation & result evaluation. Both of these activities happen in repeating cycles, changing in critical ways as the search continues. Query re-formulation has seen more work than supporting repeated selections from the same set of results, as in scenarios where the user returns from a clicked result to choose another. I’ll explore how this activity might be better supported below.

SearchMe

SearchMe is a seriously VC-backed implementation of Apple’s CoverFlow for search result pages — horizontal scrolling with a centered focus and perspective skew visual effect for thumbnail page previews. The site is vapor (aka private beta) at the moment, with only a YouTube video commonly available but the underlying technology is reported to be Adobe’s FLEX UI layer in Flash.

The advantage of thumbnails for recollection of already visited sites has long been proven (Greenberg & Cockburn, 1999). But for new sites, the full thumbnail is not necessarily the best indicator. For highly designed sites, or perhaps sites that are favorite destinations, recognizability is strong, but typically the company logo or even textual excerpts would be better proxies.

The visual preview has value as a “storefront” — is the site in a good neighborhood? e.g. are the proprieters competent in design and technical execution? How big is the building? What schema does it fit?

But for this feature, Ask.com’s on demand thumbnail and other smaller thumbnail view UIs do a better job of lowering expectation violations, *after* the semantic match has been validated with human natural language processing of the result summary. A thoughtful post from eliottng explores this issue in the context of the separate tasks that search enables.

Clustering and Query Refinement

Search me also offers a query filtering feature for choosing between clusters of content triggered by a keyword, named “Category Suggest”.

While “recognition not recall” is one of the most profound of the commandments of usability, many implementations of query suggestion, without the time savings of auto-complete, cost more effort than their worth. This isn’t the case given polysemy, words with multiple interpretations. Disambiguation, especially for lower frequency senses, is a great use case for query suggestions or filtering operations. The technologists in search I’ve known have always been kind of embarassed that technical topics overwhelm the common IRL interpretations of words like java, but the problem is far more widespread.

“Category Suggest” is also a nice spin on the historical query (re)forumation UIs. The query formulation part of the search task model has basically seen two major areas of experimentation: auto-complete and refinement suggestions / result clustering.

There has been more work in the academic industry and search construction UIs, for things like nested booleans. I don’t think this level of upfront user effort is the right approach for everyday search tasks. People are use to executing query refinement chains, and done right, suggestions of advanced query modifiers (like filters, as in category suggest, not simple keyword alteration) could really approach the fluency and generativity of a natural language UI without the gratuitous anthromorphism of conversational UIs.

Not every query needs this type of offering however. And it varies by user, and specifically user experience in the topic domain. Micah Alpern recounted some nice work on calibrating hesitation detection in query formulation for recent query assistance features at Yahoo in our SXSW panel for rapid detection of when to spend user attention on evaluating suggestions.

Prediction: Search UI Innovation Will Not Remain Slow

I’ve written a lot about how pagination affects the user behavior in search, and done much more proprietary investigations thereof. The process of result evaluation is super optimized by the user, though less so than commonly understood given the 30% navigational query percentage.

User engagement with SERPs will increase as innovations like the awesome bar in Firefox 3 take advantage of existing local persistence of routine navigation. A search engine’s ability to make more complex search problems fun and productive will become more critical.

Infinite scroll experiments (live search, humanized reader, etc) are one of the more gutsy innovations in search UI, but are really a move forward in pagination UIs that have some non-trivial challenges still to solve — notably how to suppport patterns other than simple feed forward.

Idea: Making SearchMe Better

Beyond the simple glitz of emulating the popular iphone, and other variants, coverflow UI, the core promise of the interaction style is more effective search that’s not simple read once, top down. Traditional search results pages (SERPs) make entertaining candidate choices and evaluating the relative value across candidates, prior to click, a very challenging prospect. Memorability for individual results is low, especially for novel topics, and can be improved with visual markers. This can help in both initial result selection and subsequent revisits to a result set for deeper exploration. More consistent deliberation and fluency in the result summary evaluation processes could really help users be more productive.

I’d add dwell time implicit feedback to the SearchMe UI, as well as keyboard shortcuts to nominate and demote result previews. This could directly impact the visual rendering of the results, reducing the real estate footprint of rejected alternatives and increasing the saliency of nominees. Visit status is also an obvious must have. There is a lot more potential for adding session state to search activities, but interface level state models for the SERP evaluation process is a good path of exploration.

Now, I really wonder what they’ve got under the hood!

Quick blog from an early evening pitstop at SXSW… Flickr / Fire Eagle shindig was a blast, as has been the entirety of SXSW.

Got some nice eyeball strays from my old Mozilla Hack shirt around the show today, pictured. Looking forward to the Mozilla WebDev Get-together tommorow after my panel on Metrics for Design at 11:30.

In addition to showing off Scrutinizer, I’ve demo’ed Seek a few times.

When a faceted browsing extension for Thunderbird called Seek hit planet.mozilla last week, I was jammed up at work and itching to try it for hours. It’s undoubtably useful and a step in the right direction for mail management.

The first precedent I know of in the faceted browsing for mail was Zoe, a Java POP importer that indexed with Lucene, now defunt. Microsoft Research also produce a useful tool in the space called Phlat. I really think this approach is years beyond the current gmail “flatness”.

There are some issues with day to day usability, notably the need to rebuild the index for every use — see feedback thread @mit or at mozilla.dev.apps. Go grab it and get involved — it could be a great kickoff of a new round of innovation in the Thunderbird world.

The industry is abuzz with a new Google Split test that offers a site search box underneath the first result, for a small set of navigational queries. The blogdom analysis has been rather shallow of this feature, so let me break it down for you.

First, 30% of all queries are navigational. However, in many cases, the actual user intent is more specific than simply visit. In reading thousands of end user “help us improve” reports while working at MSN/Live Search, I found that often users had a very specific intent behind their simple navigational query. They would come back to the search page and tell us about — after they failed to find it on the target site.

So this is the latent need aspect — it might actually be more useful for users to specify a refined, more targeted query and use the search UI that they’re comfortable with, rather than taking the first result and struggling with that sites UI & information architecture. The search engine simply says “Yep, I know *site name* — can I help you a bit more?” and lets the user choose.

So, that’s the UX side of things. This is a truly good idea, that has both positive UX and positive revenue impact. Heck, it might have been sustainable way that MSN/Live could have got a query share boost instead of the shortlived games effort.

On the revenue side, you can sell ads for “Microsoft CRM Solution” at a much higher volume and price than “Microsoft”. So, the SERP page views following a site search are bound to have a much greater revenue potential than the simple navigational queries. You do the math — if you identify 50% of the 30% of navigational queries (net 15%), and get users to use it even 10% of the time…

The implementation challenge here is identifying navigational queries for which sufficient index coverage exists to provide a good UX. Not so hard.

Bravo Google! Addendum: The official post on this feature calls it teleporting.

Back in the mid 90s when page layouts were much less complex and typically scaled with window size well, I used a 21″ monitor on a Mac and did a lot of link drag and dropping between windows.

With the arrival of my 17″ macbook, I managed to dust off the old extension skills and get something shipworthy done in a few hours.

The BigScreen extension adds a toolbar button (or rather lets you add it by contextual click on the toolbar, customize, and dragging it to a location). The button drop down will move a window to the left or right half of the screen, or take the current location and spawn a new window, resizing both to a dual pane full screen layout.

Updates aren’t configured yet, so I haven’t bothered with FF3, but grab it here. Track further progress at lab.mozilla.bigscreen.

While last year’s extend firefox contest’s winners were dominated by features involving thumbnail previews, this year’s winners are more in the style of mashups. I was happy to see FireGestures in the runner ups. It’s an interesting derivation (if rather lightly acknowledged) of Optimoz gestures. While author dropped my window stacking gestures, he did retain the hover gestures I invented for opening multiple links in new tabs. “Wap wap watah“.

Over on the AIR side of the house, with the 1.0 release approaching, developers are beginnning to find the platform weaknesses — like creating image files efficiently. There’s a real contrast to working from an open source platform in this example, but darn it, while the docs aren’t perfect for AIR, they’re well organized (and there are a lot more blogging coders). I’m finding myself more productive developing in AIR than I ever was in XUL/XPCOM and the sex appeal advantage of the graphics layer exceeds that benefit. Papervision is super slick.

An important aspect of parity, both within the browser space and in the rich internet app / mashup space, Full Page Zoom (the bug) has come to Firefox 3.

The always crafty Daniel Glazman writes:

The fullZoom feature of Firefox 3 is cool. Very cool. It’s so cool that combined with the marvelous extensibility of Firefox, I think many extensions are going to use it and offer a wide set of new features based on it.

The extension is for Firefox 3 betas and zooms to the region where your mouse is when you right-click and zoom.

Suprisingly, IE has had some really nice zoom capacities for years with *.style.zoom. I crafted a resolution tester back in ‘04. The IE implementation is a bit different than Firefox’s, seeming to render at scale and then reduce near the graphics layer.

In a potentially nifty implementation for custom reading solutions & accessibility, Firefox seems to scale the page atomically. The full scale and then manipulate approach is available and demo’ed by Mark Finkle in SVG using Foreign Object, but the rotated & scaled demo is still pretty slow on my current mbp and the latest nightly.

Hat’s off to Daniel for finding a great use case for using DOM boundaries to provide a valuable user feature. Recognizing meaningful content by layout schema is a pretty tractable problem, and the DOM extents are in general rich with information. Using IDs to recognize unique UI elements and repeated CSS classes to recognize UI components is a nicely generic solution – more in Edmonds, A., White, R., Morris, D., Drucker, S. Instrumenting the Dynamic Web. Journal of Web Engineering (JWE), Vol. 6, No. 3 (2007), 243-260.

With a 17″ MacBook coming my way on Monday, with the 1900×1200 screen upgrade, I’ll likely be a heavy zoom user. I do have a wide screen browsing Mozilla prototype deriviant hacked up in Adobe AIR (demo vid) with side scrolling.