Various attempts at creating better visual search interfaces have emerged, but none have grabbed lion share of the market as the major engines.

Potential challenges:

• Retraining users to think in more visual terms after so many years of being accustomed to text-based search.
• The results displayed may lack the details that help decision making. Seeing screenshots of home pages does not necessarily give confidence that the correct answer will be found on the page/site.
• Visual search results take longer to display on the end-user’s computer than text. Although 70-80% of U.S. households may have some level of broadband connection, it doesn’t mean that results are snappy in all instances.
• Visual search interfaces don’t often translate well to mobile devices that operate on slower network connection speeds.

Regardless of how the results are displayed, if the search tactics and algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough, the results wont be relevant and the user experience will be poor. Greater care needs to be put into quality of the user experience to get the user where he/she needs to go as swiftly and accurately as possible.

I encourage you to check out the search engines below. They may not replace what you are currently comfortable with, but they are surely inspiring.

Searchme
http://www.searchme.com
Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you’re looking for, before you click through. Skimming through the website images is very similar to Apple’s “cover flow” interface.

RedZee
http://www.redzee.com
Like Searchme, a user scans through screenshots of website home pages.

Ms. Dewey
http://msdewey.com/
Certainly not new. This experiment has been around at least two years that I recall. Perhaps you haven’t come across it yet. Ms. Dewey interacts with the user and gets impatient while waiting for you to interact with her.

Hint: Try typing in “art” or “E-40″ or just click the “Best of Dewey” button to see some of the personality shine through.
By the way, the “MS” stands for Microsoft. (Get it?)

Quintura
http://www.quintura.com
A visual “find” engine, the user visually navigates a cloud of keywords and drills down to find relevant information. It’s sort of like clicking on tag clouds that have several layers of depth to niche down the topic.

KartOO
http://www.kartoo.com
A meta search engine with results presented as an interactive map.

Like.com
http://www.like.com
Shop visually for shoes, clothing and jewelry by using shapes, styles, colors and more.

oSkope
http://www.oskope.com
A visual search assistant that lets the user browse and organize items from Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo! and YouTube in an intuitive way.

Have a favorite search engine you’d like to share? Please add your comment below.
Thanks.
-Roland

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• A Soldier’s: Final Post
  Major Andrew Olmsted. Olmsted had pre-arranged for his final blog post to be published in the event of his death. Olmsted began blogging after his unit was sent to Iraq with the mission of helping train the Iraqi Army. A sniper killed Olmsted on January 3rd as he was trying to talk three suspected insurgents into surrendering.
• Confessions of an online ad buyer
• The fine art of the brainstorm meeting
• Social, work lives collide on networking websites
• How to Market Yourself & Your Company on Facebook – 11 Steps & Strategies
• Pizza Hut rolls out nationwide mobile ordering
• How to avoid landmines on integrated campaigns
• 4 must-have components of brand experience banners
• Podcast: Accessibility with Derek Featherstone
• And finally, from the “well isn’t it about time” department:
  Chicago Tribune Dumps Print Classifieds, Drives Job-Hunters Online — it baffles me that more major newspapers haven’t done this already. In my household, we chuck the unopened classifieds immediately into the recycle pile. To reduce the waste, they certainly should scale back the number of days the classifieds are distributed and provide incentives to advertisers to place their ads online instead.

I hope you find this useful. Please feel free to send me links to relevant articles.

Have a great week!
-Roland

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• Build a social network in less than 60 minutes
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• Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says
• 18 Strategies and Tools for Naming Your Business or Product
• And finally, something that Mac enthusiasts should enjoy: The Joy of Tech

I hope you find this useful. Please feel free to send me links to relevant articles.

Have a great week!
-Roland

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When the smoke clears, I emerge with a twenty-slide document of digital dreck.

Feeling frustrated, I dug out something I remembered by Seth Godin. (Seth is a marketing subject matter expert that I’ve followed since the 90′s.)

Here are Seth’s five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

• No more than six words on a slide. EVER.
• No cheesy images. Use professional images from corbis.com instead. They cost $3 each, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use’.
• No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.
• Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never (ever) use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have.
• Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They’re emotional, and they won’t work without you there. If someone wants your slides to show “the boss,” tell them that the slides go if you go.

I used to have this mentality that as a document, it needed to act like documentation – citing every detail for historical reference. Truth be told, I’ve improved, but I know I can do much better.

In real world practice, I realize that the clients I present to are so overwhelmed that they never open the document again. Sometimes never at all to begin with.

So here are my PowerPoint writing tips:

• Write, re-write and re-write again. Brevity is key. Be ruthless to distill down your thoughts to a simple sound bite. Embellish with spoken word.
• Come up with creative ways to display your ideas graphically instead of as bullets — A chart, graph, funnel, Venn Diagram — whatever it takes. Edward Tufte is an excellent source of inspiration for expressing details in a visually comprehensive way.
• Have a cover sheet with a title, date and name of the person(s) it’s for. It drives me crazy looking at old decks and not having a clue who they were for.
• Include a Next Steps slide with specific action items, dates and responsibilities.
• Include all the contact information for the relevant team on the last slide. That makes it easier for the client to figure out who to talk to.

Please add your suggestions and let me know if you find this useful.
Thanks.
-Roland

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“Nordstrom, for example, has a reputation for delivering extremely personalized and attentive customer service for people visiting their stores. That high-touch attribute is quite difficult to replicate online, setting the company up to disappoint online visitors. Those disappointed online visitors could then potentially punish the brick-and-mortar locations.”

“Retailers have been very slow to understand that, to the consumer, it’s one brand.”

“The retail brand today transcends the channel. When [customers] have a poor Web experience, as in poor page loads [or] unsuccessful transactions, it’s taken out on the storefronts, too. Consumers don’t understand the complexity of delivering an optimal Web experience.”

Key take away: A company must work hard in both the physical and online worlds to deliver a consistent message and high user experience. Failing in one environment will discourage the consumer to interact with the brand in the other.

-Roland

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I’ve had this arguement many times. Plain and simple, putting a barrier between your visitor and the Web site creates a bad user experience and impacts your ability to index properly for natural search.

-Roland

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Several months after 9/11, I came across an article that left a long term impression on me. It described how the FBI went about connecting relationships between all the terrorists involved in executing the plot.

The investigators began to feed all the data they had into a software program. The data included all the communications between the terrorists, their in-person interactions and transactions. This began to create a visual chart with lines showing the relationshops. As the investigators tweaked the data based on confirmed data or strong assumptions, different relationships and leadership began to become apparent.

I found this absolutely fascinating and have described this often to colleagues in the years that followed.

In the last few months, I’ve came across similar applications of this visualization method. For example, News.com has certain subjects defined in their “The Big Picture” feature. They color code stories vs topics vs companies that are all related to the core news article you started on.

Live Plasma is an interesting visualization tool that allows the user to search on musicians/artists, actors, movies. Here’s an example of a search for relations to the movie “.”

I’ve also had the good fortune of being exposed to teachings of Edward Tufte. Check out his Web site for many interesting examples of how to present complex information. Better yet, attend his training course.

The point to all this is to start thinking in different ways. Consider your audience. Think about the story you want to tell. Examine your data and come up with a creative way of presenting the information.

Enjoy the challenge!
-Roland

10/13/2006 update: Check out these visualization videos of air traffic flight patterns over the U.S., elapsed over time and set to music.

10/31/2006 update: Check out 3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life.

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I visited the Mobile Marketing Association Web site and found their site search function to be very odd.

The advanced site search explicitly states “Keywords shorter than 5 characters will be ignored”

Well, typical keywords for mobile marketing include: SMS, MMS, WAP, PSMS, TXT, text — all of which are 3-4 characters long. Plus, if a user tries some sort of natural language phrase like “how to …” or “new law” or “opt in rules”, he/she will get the same obnoxious message.

This just struck me as lacking in common sense and not very user friendly.

Marketers, be sure to check out your Web sites. Put a reminder in your To Do list to check it thoroughly, at least once a month. Click on random links. Search for common and obscure terms. Put yourself into the shoes of your user. You might be suprised what you find.

-Roland

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Usability Principles
• Know your users.
• Know the tasks your users perform.
• Know what performance means to your users.

Check out this Usability Checklist for Site Developers

Also, be sure to check out the ongoing dialogue on Web site usability and research at: Jakob Nielsen’s Web site

So, don’t let a closed-minded individual bully you out of it. The success of the Web site may depend on it.

What do you think? Please post your comments. Thanks.
-Roland

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