Project Philosophy, Usability and ToDo's

Much of the Internets development has been a direct result of geeks trying to solve their information sharing and retrieval needs.  Netscape’s “What’s Cool” pages, Yahoo circa 1996, Usenet, and AltaVista.  Each, at one time, was the pinnacle of achievement and allowed a small community of leading edge users to satisfy their need for information.  But then, the rest of us arrived.

 
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

As the early adopters and early majority got clued these methods became over welled.  As more data was added the signal to noise ratio began to plummet and finding the answers to questions became impossible.  Some of these problems were caused by the shier quantity of information but another source of difficulty is varying viewpoints.  If you ask the majority of the population about Radio they’d think you were referring to the device on wish they listen to National Public Radio.  But most searches I do are in reference to Radio the weblogging tool.  Google does a reasonable job putting both meanings in the top 10 results, but with only space for 10 items on the first page some of the best results in each viewpoint may have to be sacrificed.

When it gets bad enough, and searches for Perl start turning up more jewelry than code the geeks will sigh and start again.  The real trick is providing context to limit the search while minimizing user effort.  Yes, Google has advanced operators but less than 5% of searchers use these options.  The beauty of Google is the simplicity of its UI.

Breaking down the BlogSphere

Since Google’s purchase of Blogger I’ve been thinking about the connection between search and weblogs.  The reason I find books listed on AllConsuming interesting is that the blogsphere is currently populated by early adopters, and alpha geeks who share similar interests.  As the popularity of weblogs grows how long will it be until references to William Gibson’s sci-fi are replaced by John Grisham and Daniel Steel?  Google Zeitgeist shows us that the most popular searches (“flowers”, “Michele Jackson”) are rarely the most interesting.

As the quote by Alex Halavais at the top of this article notes, there are multiple blogsphere’s.  These intersecting spheres are broken down by, among other things, interests, associations, geography, and responsibilities.  We each live in several sphere’s simultaneously.  Identifying and exploiting these sphere will require technical infrastructure in identify and reputation that are still being developed.  As always the failure of geeks to find what they’re looking for will drive this development.

Usability Touches

As a masters student in Human Computer Interaction, I wanted to point out a few of the heuristics I used to make things more usable.

·         Keep it simple

·         If there are no results for a site, don’t show it

·         Jump the cursor focus to the input form

·         Hide the details

·         The Google license key and Subscription file preferences are hidden until they’re needed

·         Speak the users language

·         Call it a subscription file not OMPL file

·         Rapid feedback

·         it can take a while for all the SOAP calls to complete so provide immediate feedback (“searching…”)

·         Provide Help

·         Hovering over the preference label or input boxes provides help

·         Make options visible

·         I also included the   so users would know help was available

·         Can chose radio buttons by clicking on the button or the label

How it could be better

1. I’d like to try using the new ActiveRender and OPML, XSLT transforms to create a result set in outline form.
   
   
2. Replace the PHP code with a Userland Plug-in
   
   
3. I can’t do this without Google’s help, but it would be nice if I could use Google to rank results across sites rather than just within.  I want a way to specify a sub-set of sites to search.