My new favorite page on Amazon: The Talentless Tag.
This is just hilarious. Now that Amazon has product tagging ability, you can get great views on their data that would have never been possible without the folksonomy.
I personally really like the section called: "Products NOT tagged "talentless", but should be?".
What makes a really great service a really great service? This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. But, we do know that really great services exist. I would consider Amazon one of these really great services. That's why I was so surprised to see what they did with their mobile service.
Just to keep things light around here, a little Usability Man video!
Who knew other usability specialists were into Zeppelin?
From: makinglifeeasy.org
The wisdom of crowds is an interesting topic that is very open to debate. Does it actually work? Can groups of people, experts and non-experts, really work together to create a good prediction market? James Surowiecki put together a great explanation, and a really good read, in his aptly named book, The Wisdom of Crowds.
One of the interesting differences between the mobile web and the desktop web, is that page weight is even more important on mobile devices. You can't just slap on a bunch of information and call it a home page. The information needs to be the most important, no more, no less.
"Individuals and businesses in more than 100 countries around the world registered more than 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain’s general availability, demonstrating a strong demand for the next evolution of the Internet." [Mobile Monday][1]
This is great. It means that there is a demand for the mobile web. Not that it was all that much in question, but this type of growth is a good thing, or is it?
I have to say, in my limited time of surfing the mobile web, Yahoo!'s mobile site is the best that I have seen (this includes flickr).
It seems like they are putting a lot of effort into making a good user experience online. I just thought that I would share some screenshots of what it looks like on my mobile device (Cingular 8126).
Good use of icons to show navigation items. Also, the navigation list is simple, uncluttered and easy to navigate with a keyboard.
Another style of listings, but also easy to navigate. Short titles allow for very little text link wrapping which makes the list easier to navigate.
Longer titles, but because they are numbered, they are visually distinct enough to make it easy to navigate. Also, only the essential information is shown allowing for quick download and less clutter.
Simple and elegant in classic flickr style.
Yesterday, I wrote about my research question. Today, I would like to look at some of the task categories people are completing on their cell phones and pda's using the web.
This list is more of a starting point for discussions than a finished product. I will be using this list to start having discussions with people to find out what types of sites they are visiting on their mobile devices.
My starting list:
For my research, I plan on narrowing this list down to 8 - 10 clearly distinct categories.
To me, the category of e-commerce can be blown apart into many smaller categories that would be far more directed in terms of a study. The smaller categories could also be more representative of what users are actually doing online. For example, you may want to look up a review of a book on amazon, and possibly buy it, but you probably wouldn't be browsing through their entire listing of housewares for your new set of pots and pans.
So, the plan is to narrow this list down to what users are actually doing online with mobile devices.
This year at school I will doing research and usability testing on websites viewed on mobile devices. I am extremely interested in how information architects and visual designers are currently designing web sites for small screens and how the small screen experience can be made better.
The first part of my research will be looking at the current state of the mobile web and figuring out what type of visual standards have emerged. I have drafted a research question, with the help from Karyn Zuidinga, that I think nails what I am trying to accomplish.
Research question: What display standards (graphic design, information design, interaction design, and content) exist for websites and web based applications on mobile, hand-held devices?
I plan on looking at sites and recording data in regards to each of the display standards mentioned above.
My next step is to figure out what sites to include in the research. I am currently working on a list of site categories that I would like to deal with, then I will try to find 5 - 10 sites for each category. I hope to look at about 75-80 sites.
If you know any cool mobile research or are interested in this topic, leave me a comment and we can chat.
If this isn't a quality usage of ambient signifiers I just don't know what is: The Remember Ring. When the date that you set is coming up, the ring will heat up for short periods of times to remind you. What a great concept!
I would love to see somebody take it one step further and couple it with some initial ubiquitous computing concepts. For example, all of my meeting reminders could be synced (without actually having to dock it) with my ring. I would then know, without looking at my clock, that the time has come to change tasks.
Between The Remember Ring and the soon to be released Phone Watch, tech geeks may just be getting somewhere.
