Is Facebook on the iPhone causing unneeded stresses? How iconic notifications might be too much information over time

I am a fan of my iPhone. I am still using my "old" first generation iPhone and am thrilled that I am now able to run custom applications on the device without having to Jailbreak it first. This is good stuff.

I did notice something today that concerns me though. It's about the use of and best practices around the numeric indicators that are attached to my iPhone icons.

Like many of you, I am pretty busy. I get hundreds of emails a day, my calendar is constantly being updated by our Roundarch exchange server, and because I spend half my day in meetings, I tend to miss calls and have voicemails backing up on me. There is no doubt that the iPhone has helped keep me on track and made me more organized, and I appreciate being able to glance at my phone and get a real-time picture of all of the things I need to respond to (missed calls, calendar appointments, emails). I see these as primary functions of my iPhone, and critical bits of information that I need to be paying attention to.

I am no stranger to the Mac Operating System, and love the fact that Apple carried over these indicators from my laptop's icon-bar to my phone. It provides me with a consistent experience and provides a quick view of all of the critical things that I need to take care of.

Enter Facebook

So, I installed the facebook application on my phone, along with a handful of other free and pay-for downloads from the Apple App Store. As I had mentioned, this is fantastic stuff, and I am thrilled that I can now run applications on my phone that add value to my life outside of
the "important" things such as my calendar, emails and phone calls/voicemail.

Facebook, however, took an approach that I haven't yet seen any of the other App Store software downloads take... They've incorporated Apple's Icon-based "alerts" into their own Facebook application icon.

If I was a heavy facebooker, I'd probably appreciate this. If I cared so much about my virtual friendships that I really needed to know when one of my friends sent me a request to eat zombies, plant a virtual flower or figure out how much more "like" others I am, then I'd really be into knowing the moment that a new request was sent to my Facebook account.

The problem is... I don't really care that much.

I don't question the value of having these numeric indicators on my screen. I do, however, question the necessity of having them displayed, with no way of being able to disable them... simply telling the Facebook application that "I don't really care that much about you, so STOP stressing me out!".

Logically, you'd think that Facebook's application design team would have thought to put a preference in the application that allowed me to turn these numeric notifications on or off.





The Bigger Problem

I guess that when it comes down to it, the Facebook application forcing me to view how many things I have to attend to doesn't bother me "that much". I like the overall Facebook experience and do find value in sharing things with people I am friends with.

The real usability / design problem will surface when more and more application developers decide to utilize this icon-based numeric indicator for things that they assume are important to me (and you!), without giving us the ability to set a preference that gives me the option to display or not display them.

Many of the people I've talked to about their iPhone experiences so far have commented on how nice the iPhone experience is overall. How it feels "soft", and "responsive" and that the iPhone splits their most important activities (calling, calendar, email, text) from other functionality.

Should this over-use of the numeric status indicators continue, we run the risk of creating a digital stress machine that doubles as a phone. From a user's point of view, the use of the device becomes less of a positive thing, and more of a reminder of all of the things that need to be done.

It could potentially take a departure from being a great gadget & lifestyle accessory that allows users to be proactive in these upwardly mobile times, and move to more of a digital stress creator that does nothing but remind you that you are behind on most of the things in your life... even if those things are for the most part trivial and not important to you.

How about a Plea?

To everyone developing iPhone applications... design for the users! Give us an option to decide how important your product or service is to us, and don't force us to pay attention to you all of the time! I am not asking that you stop using numeric indicators that remind me of all the things I need to do, however give me the choice to pay attention or not to pay attention to you.

If my funwall is overflowing with kindness from the cosmos of interlinked online friends, it is probably "ok" and not something I need to react to right away.

The use of these types of visual cues and UI messages should be to call out what the user considers to be "critical" bits of information.

At all costs, let's work to keep our iPhones free and clear of multitudes of little red circles that point out just exactly how far users are falling behind in their non-essential online chit-chat and whatnot.

Adobe Flex Architecture & Frameworks Overview plus Merapi Preview at Chicago Flex / AIR Developers Group

Last week I teamed up with Rhazes Spell to give a talk to the Chicago Flex and Adobe AIR Developers Group. First off, it is great to finally see a user group in Chicago dedicated to Adobe-based RIA technology... It's been a long time in the coming!

I've been involved in the Adobe RIA community for quite some time, and have always been a little dissapointed in my own fair city's lack of organization around an RIA development community (and I suppose by saying that, I am equally at fault!) Granted Chicago isn't a total Flex community virgin... I do recognize the unparalleled efforts of Igor Ilyinsky who's been running the Chicago Cold Fusion and Flex User Group for several years. It probably makes a lot of sense for these guys to gang up and unify in some way, as there is strength in numbers and a solid community of developers should have as much representation as possible.

Anyway, I was asked to give a presentation to the Flex & AIR Group at an event that was hosted at our Roundarch offices. The week leading up to this presentation was pretty jam packed with client obligations and a trip to our New York office, so to get a little help, I asked Rhazes to join me and contribute his thoughts.

Because the Chicago group is quite new, and we anticipated there to be a wide array of folks in the audience, we decided to generalize our presentation and cover some basics on Flex RIA application architecture and an overview of Flex frameworks. After all, when you are new to a technology, getting started on the right foot makes all the difference in the world, and we thought this topic would help the group adopt Flex with fewer introductory frustrations and development dead-ends.

Borrowing some insight from Ali Mills and Luke Bayes's great presentation (and research) on the various Flex frameworks floating around the Internet, Rhazes and I broke things down and gave a "What are frameworks 101" along with an overview of items to consider when defining the architecture your Adobe Flex application(s).

We wrapped up the presentation in about 40 minutes and then I took about 10 minutes to talk about The Merapi Project. It was also great to have some of our friends from Digital Primates at the event, including Louie Penafor who is also on the Merapi team. Louie's created the coolest AIR/Merapi example (I think) to date, which is an AIR application that allows you to acquire images from a scanner using TWAIN. Good stuff, big brain, and a really nice guy at that.
It was also nice to see Mike Nimer, who I consider to be one of the longest-standing members of the Flex community and now one of the primary brains over at Digital Primates.

I gave an overview of Merapi, showed off our pretty nifty MacBook Pro "Gyro" example, also known as "Merapi and Physics". People were interested in the project, and it looks like some of the attendees will come and sign up for the Alpha program for Merapi.

It was great to be able to talk about pretty deep technology with this group, and finish up making the point that all of the bits and bytes would be for nothing if it weren't for the user's that we need to design for.

I can't help but to share my enthusiasm for creative technology and my thoughts around design thinking as it applies to technology and how "we" use technology in our daily lives.

It is the people that make up these local community groups that are going to be the ones that build the applications of the future, and it really is important to help foster the community so that it incubates innovation benefits all of us.

Here is a copy of our presentation slides

View the Video of our Presentation

Data Visualization Presentation at IxDA Chicago

Every few months we (Roundarch) host the IxDA meetings here in our Chicago office. This month's meeting provided the opportunity for Scott Judy, Rhazes Spell and myself to present some thoughts about and answer questions pertaining to Data Visualization.

We decided to craft our presentation a bit differently than one might expect, as we realize that Data Visualization can be somewhat of a dry topic, and far too often thought about only in the context of charts, graphs and the occasional heat-map.

In an effort to stir things up a bit, show a different perspective on Data Visualization and stimulate a wide range of conversation on the topic, we decided to present things in a bit more of a free-form manner. Scott kicked things off and gave a demo of some of the work that Roundarch has done for the US Air Force.

Next-Generation Data Visualization Example: US Airforce
We have a big team at Roundarch that works on project for the United States Air Force. As you can imagine, there is a lot going on at the Air Force these days, and all of that activity means an incredible amount of data that can be leveraged for dashboard reporting, etc. For obvious reasons, we couldn't share any actual Air Force system with the audience, but our team was gracious enough to give us access to a prototype application that sits on top of a real data environment (with mocked-up/fake data of course).

Once Scott gave a healthy dose of serious data visualization and dashboard/score-carding in Adobe Flex, he moved on to several other applications that others have built. The rest of the presentation was peppered with out of the ordinary examples of how people are helping users to visualize information... "data", if you will.

Other examples that Scott shared included:

• Getty Moodstream (search imagery and video by mood)
• Digg Labs (various visualizations of Digg analytics)
• Baby Name Wizard (names over time visualization)
• Shape of Song (music visualization)
• We Feel Fine (human emotion on the Web visualization)
• Voyage (visual RSS feed reader)
• Kartoo (visual search results)
• oSkope (visual search of Flickr, eBay, Amazon, YouTube, etc.)
• Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (good for inspiration)

When Scott was done and he handed the floor over to me. I simply played middle-man between Scott and Rhazes. I really just wanted to keep it simple and segue from Scott's examples to some of the conceptual and theoretical examples that Rhazes was going to talk about.

I took about 5 minutes and shared a fantastic example of geo-centered, real-time, streaming data that has been created by my friends at Universal Mind, and Doug McCune... one of the most wicked Flex developers on the planet. This sample application demonstrates how a rich client interface could be used to assist police dispatcher's or other public safety officials with directing first responders (police in this case) to the scene of an accident, crime or other situation. This demo, called LAUNCHpad is pretty interesting and a great example of actionable data visualization.

I then introduce Rhazes by leading in with the topic of passive data visualization, something I believe will become more prevalent over time as hardware gets less expensive and ipv6 becomes more of a reality. Living in Chicago, I can see the top of the John Hancock building from my back deck. As you may know, the lights that form a band across the top of the building change color based on events, celebrations, calendar dates, and (I think anyway) the weather.
By just glancing towards downtown, I am given a visual cue about something. I think this gets really interesting when you think about how it could be applied to things in the future, and on a micro level.

Turning things over to Rhazes, the group got about a half-hour brain dump from one of the brightest guys that I know. Not only do I admire Rhazes Spell for his aptitude regarding really complex things... the guy is going to be in my wedding... so I gotta love him for that. Anyway, Rhazes really blew people's minds I think. I listen to this guy talk all the time and he never ceases to bring a fresh perspective on just about any topic.

Rhazes talked about data visualization from his own unique perspective: a guy who really started developing software so that he could create his own views of repeating patterns in gene sequences while working towards his PhD. He showed his own work, and then went wild with examples of different types of data visualizations that have inspired him.

Here's a list of some of the examples that he showed and talked about. (warning: these are very cool and can consume many hours of your time!)

• Biological Arc Diagrams:
• Genome Valence
• The listening post
• In the future digital sculpture
• The Shape of Song
• World without Oil game
• Mondrian bus map

After Rhazes finished up, we answered questions from the great group of Chicago design professionals in the room and eventually broke out of any sort of form and had a fairly lively group discussion related to not only data visualization, but the challenges of implementing more robust data visualization client technologies... from initial design to development and throughout deployment, including analytics and trend measurement.

I find it interesting that every time I end up giving a presentation about user experience design and "next generation" online applications, there always seems to be more questions from the audience related to business aspects than those of design or technology. When I say this, I mean that majority of the questions seem to be about how you can convince your clients to be forward thinking, how to get your boss to allow you to innovate, and how to express the importance of user experience and experience design over the existing stack of "approved" technologies within corporate organizations.

All in all, it was a fun experience and I think it was pretty valuable for everyone who came out to participate. The IxDA group here in Chicago has a pretty strong representation from most of the "players" in the interactive/web/user experience community, and it is a pleasure being able to host meetings at the Roundarch office.

View Video of our Presentation

Microformats, A Primer - Simple Semantics for the Web

In a recent write-up about the "Semantic Web", I ended my thoughts with the following:

"A fully realized Semantic Web will be quite amazing indeed, but it is going to take a long time to get to the point where the technology regularly intersects with our daily lives.

It is going to take a long time to annotate the world's information and then to capture personal information in the right way in order to really make it work the way it is supposed to.

We are a few years away before we really start to see real traction in terms of Semantic Web technology."

Introducing A Different Kind of Meaning

So, we already know that the term "semantic" stands for "meaning of." We also know that to achieve a "true" semantic Web, a great deal of work is going to need to get done.

This not only includes an outpouring of time and money, but will also require education, training and change s in operations in hundreds of thousands of systems world-wide.

Ouch!

What stinks about this is two-fold:

1. If those behind the W3C's master theory of a Semantic Web have their way, this huge investment in business and technology change will be inevitable and someone is going to have to pay for it.
   
   
2. The whole concept of, and what user experiences will be enabled due to a Semantic Web is WAY TOO COOL to wait around for!

Enter Microformats

True Semantic Web technology would enable computers to exchange/share, read and understand the meaning of data, and provide a mechanism for developers to create applications that provide for truly "next generation" user experiences. The concept of The Semantic Web is mostly about machine-to-machine data exchange and "behind the scenes" indexing, searching, storing and sharing.

Microformats, however, allow information that is actually intended for and consumed by human users to also be understood by software applications, similar to this Semantic Web concept.

Microformats emerged due to necessity.

For a quick peek back at the roots of Microformats, let's think back about 10 years ago when the "browser wars" were full-on and Web developers finally began to think of Web site user interfaces as they should be.

This ideological approach to the Web is what we essentially have today: A "markup" applied to underlying data to give it a specific look and feel or visual design. Back then, Cascading Style Sheets were the next big thing, and XML was blessed by the W3C as something official.

Both CSS and XML addressed the desire to separate underlying data from display or use of that data. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the necessity for applications that share meaningful data caused the invention of Microformats, which can be looked at as a unique merger of XML and CSS.

Here + Now = Good

Perhaps the reason that a semantic concept like Microformats has become "real" at this stage in the game stems from the fact that implementing Microformats doesn't require a savvy Web developer to learn anything that they don't already know.

• Microformats are not vaporware.
• They are simple to implement.
• They are based on familiar, standards-based technologies.

Microformats are the end-result of the approach of formatting existing Web content by tagging it with CSS-like tags, that describe the content's metadata. This approach uses only simple XHTML and HTML classes and attributes.

Tagging content in this manner allows information that was created and published online (and intended for end-users) to just as easily be understood by software applications.

Since the inception of the World Wide Web, it has been possible to load, scan and parse HTML documents.

We call this "screen scraping", and in reality, it is pretty clunky and never really a perfect solution. Programmers can create software applications that follow URLS, download page content, read through that content, and either store it, or act upon it.

Even if a program successfully scrapes content from a Web page, the content itself doesn't really have any independent meaning to it. A screen-scraping application just knows that text is text and knows where to get it, and where to store it, and maybe what to do with specific things that it finds. It's a dumb technology really. (stupid screen scrapers!)

The traditional means of creating Web pages so that they display nicely in Web browsers doesn't do much of anything to help software understand their content (or context of that content). There is simply no meaning to the data.

Microformats are intended to change all of that. They do so by enabling the attachment of semantics (semantic data) to online content as we currently know it. (Or think of it).

By using Microformats, data can be indexed & stored, searched and cross-referenced allowing information from many places about many things to be reused and recycled.

Using Microformats

Microformats started as a grass-roots effort, and have been defined based on common needs of those involved in the development community.

Because of this, it is no surprise that the most wide-spread uses of Microformats today mirror the types of online applications that are most pervasive and common types of data found in those applications.

Because of this, the Microformats that we currently see implemented include those that describe:

• Event Listings
• Atom Feeds
• Contact Information
• Addresses
• Geographic Information
• Content Reviews
• Resumes / CVs
• Social Networks
• Lists and Outlines
• Currency
• Species (Living Things)
• Measurements

Mozilla's Firefox 3 Web browser has native implementation of Microformat handling and implements a global Microformats object and associated API that provide developers an easy way to find and consume Microformats.

The out-of-the-box Microformat support in Firefox includes:

• Addresses (adr - street or mailing address).
• Geography (geo - geographical locations: latitude & longitude)
• Human Contact Information (hCard - contact information for a person)
• Events/Calendar (hCalendar - calendar appointment entries)

Firefox 3 also allows you to extend things a bit and add tags to other Microformats using one named... "tag".

It isn't just the Open Source community that is embracing Microformats. Community rumblings have lead to almost-certain speculation that Microsoft will offer native support for Microformats within Internet Explorer 8.0 and other future software application releases.

This isn't meant to be a technical article, so I am not going to get into the specifics of implementing Microformats. With that, a simple example will help to add a bit of context and help make it easier to understand how Microformats can be implemented.

How About A Date?

Sounds good to me hot stuff!

Let's use the example of a calendar appointment.

Let's say I made an item in my calendar that reminded me that I needed to write this blog posting today. If I we were to look at the underlying structure of that appointment in my calendar, it might look something like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//myCalendar//EN
VERSION:3.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
URL:http://whatanexperience.org/
DTSTART:20080414
DTEND:20080414
SUMMARY:Write Blog Post About Microformats
LOCATION:Your Office\, Chicago\, IL
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Now, let's look at HTML that could be displayed in a Web browser that represents the exact same information:

whatanexperience.org Write Blog Post About Microformats: 20080414- 20080414, at My Office, Chicago, IL

Finally, let's look at the hCalendar Microformat markup behind that, which not only displays as above in the user interface, but contains the same computer-readable data as the Mac Calendar appointment file:

<div class=\"vevent\">
<a class=\"url\" href="http://whatanexperience.org/\">http://whatanexperience.org/</a>
<span class=\"summary\">Write Blog Post About Microformats</span>:
<span class=\"dtstart\">20080414</span>-
<span class=\"dtend\">20080414</span>,at <span class=\"location\">My Office, Chicago,IL</span>
</div>

This example is about as simple as it gets, but I hope that it opens your mind to the futue possibilities of what Microformats, or a technology like Microformats could bring to the publishing and consumption of web-based data.


Where does this go?

If Microformats were the holy grail of online data than the chatter of the Semantic Web and other competing theories would be almost silent. There is, however, a loud argument that XML by itself makes more sense than Microformats, and that ultimately "Web" data will be radically different when new technologies like related to the Semantic Web become more widely understood (and used).

These additional technologies include XML & RDF along with associated schemas, as well as OWL (web ontology language), SPQRQL (a query language) and business rules driven by RIF (rules interchange format).

The adoption of Microformats by companies like Microsoft and Mozilla is encouraging though, but as we've seen before... just because they put the functionality in the browser, doesn't mean it is going to be the next big thing. (Remember "channels" in IE 4 or "push content?" Ouch.)

It is ultimately up to the hordes of Web application developers and users who will decide whether or not Microformats secure their spot as a reliable and widely used bit of technology.
Users are thirsty for the additional functionality that Microformats could enable in online experiences, but developers have to bite the bullet first and implement Microformats prior to user adoption.

In order to do so, technology leaders, software developers, information architects and user experience professionals need to educate business owners and client stake-holders about the inevitable approach of the Semantic Web, the benefits of structuring data in this fashion, and how Microformats can be immediately leveraged to improve their customer/user experiences.

Improved user experiences mean happier, more loyal, and engaged customers, clients, partners and employees... And that's a fact Jack.

For more information about Microformats, the Semantic Web and groovy things like that, check out the following:

• Microformats.org - The "official" site of the Microformat community.
  
  
• spacenamespace - An interesting site is about annotating space with metadata, building semantic models of places, and exchanging geospatial data in RDF.
  
  
• Magpie - a plugin for web browsers and application development framework for emerging Semantic Web tools.
  
  
• OTN Semantic Web Beta from Oracle - A proof-of-concept Web application that demonstrates the use of RDF-based technology as the basis for a rich user experience that relies on dynamic relational navigation.
  
  
• Alex Faaborg @ Mozilla - Alex has a great 4-part series on Microformats, UI issues, and implementation in Firefox 3.

Searchme = Thrill Me! A quick review of the searchme.com RIA experience

Last weekend I received an email from a good friend, long-time business associate, regarding the launch of a new Web application that he and the team at Adobe Consulting have helped to produce.

This new Web property is called "Searchme". As described on their Web site, "Searchme lets you see what you're searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. 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."

Clearly this email email stimulated some interest in me, and after reading Searchme's self-description, I was rather interested. After signing up for the public beta, I ended up getting fast-tracked with a user account. Having played with the tool for a week now, I am quite impressed with Searchme's overall experience.

Let's break the Beta down:

When thinking about why I liked the searchme.com experience so much, I decided to break things down into the following high-level categories. I suppose these also apply to "search" in general.

• Quality of Results
• Efficiency
• Enjoyability

Searchme.com scores very well in all three categories, as far as I am concerned. Let's start with the most important topic, being the quality of the search results.

Quality of Results

We all know that Google climbed to the top of the search engine mountain because they learned how to return rock-solid results to users on each and every search. This is no trivial task, and Searchme seems to be doing a fairly good job at it also. There is, however, a difference between Searchme.com's search user scenario and that of Google.

Searchme is visual, playful and enjoyable. Searchme allows the user to type a query, and upon doing so, returns a list of category matches. The user then clicks a the category that most closely relates to the concept that they were searching for, and then the results load on the screen.

This secondary search step could potentially be a very bad experience, however because of the "rich" nature of the user interface and the elegant way in which it is delivered, the potential for annoyance is reduced to a minimum. The fact that this pre-filtering happens means that your actual search results are generally right in line with the type of information you are seeking out.


Efficiency

Even if an online search application were to provide perfect results, I doubt it would gain wide acceptance by the online community if it wasn't fast. For today's search user, speed is almost as important as accuracy.

Searchme.com is blazing fast. This might be what impressed me the most. This thing is speedy!
So fast, in fact, that even with the heavier (than HTML) Flex user interface (Flash player), the application performed search queries and returned results in a split second. This is especially impressive when considering the graphical nature of the user interface.

Without knowing the system's architecture, I can only make assumptions as to what contributes to the speed at which it performs. I have to believe that we are talking about a highly optimized back-end, and a very, very, very tweaked Flex GUI.

I love Flex, but I also know that something that is this sophisticated has had to have gone through a lot of iterations of performance tuning to make it perform this well.

Kudos to both Adobe Labs and Searchme's engineering folks. The reason nobody has been able to launch a search engine with an interface this clever before is most likely due to performance.

Who cares how "cool" the UI is. If it drags your computer down or performs so slowly it is just annoying to use, all of the eye candy associated with the look and feel becomes secondary.


Enjoyability

I know. I know. It's a weird and subjective term. I use it though, and personally that the enjoyability factor behind digital experiences summarizes the overall value that they bring to users. If people "like it", they will use it, they will connect with it, and they will recommend it to others.

Searchme.com is enjoyable. Of course the speed of use and quality of search results lend to the overall enjoyability rating. Searchme, however, takes search to a new level by presenting the search results in a rich, visual and playful way.

Similar to, but not a direct copy of Apple's "Coverflow", this application shows results as page thumbnails and allows the user to page through them.

This was a risky approach, but it paid off.

The challenge from a technology perspective is to make the flipping action as fast and fluid as possible. Dare I say that this needs to exceed the expectations of the user in order to become a real winner. The 3-d pages fly through the interface, and are loaded in batches so the user can immediately begin exploring search results while the entire list of results loads in the background.

It isn't a new concept, but the team at Adobe really pulled it off in the most perfect of ways. It is smooth, fluid, quick, and works better than expected. I can't say that I envy the developer(s) that had to work on this, because it is apparent that a lot of time went into iterating through this until it was perfect.


Let's take a look

Initial Screen: Search Box

Just as you'd expect: A single text input box and a very fitting marketing tagline "You'll know it when you see it". They nailed a complete overview of the application in that single line. The genius behind searchme.com is the visual nature of the search results...


Secondary Action: Select Category

The "rich" experience gets underway! As soon as you type your query into the search box, a list of matching potential category matches is displayed. For this example, I typed in "Roundarch" as the search query. As soon as I did, the following category icons appeared: "software, architecture, work & career, web development, advertising & marketing". In this example, I chose "web development".

View Search Results

Once the user clicks on a category, the user inteface changes to what you see here. It is expanded by default, and provides a very nice, clean and visual way for the end-user to view screen shots of the pages in the search result collection. This initial display shows off the 3-d perspective view of the search results pages, where a user can "flip" through them, much like the ever popular Apple Coverflow UI.

View Search Results (part 2)

In this view, all I've done is grab the "scrubber" below the screen shot and pulled it towards the top of the screen. This shrinks the search result thumbnails and reveals a text-based search result panel that directly correlates to the visual results at the top of the UI.

View Search Results (part 3)

This screen shot shows the UI after the user scrolls into the search results. The UI now displays the screen shots on both the left and right of the selected search result item, along with the corresponding text-based results below. As you move the top of the screen left or right, the bottom area scrolls through results creating a 1-to-1 match between the visual results and the text results.

Launch a Page

Finally, now that the user has chosen an item that looks right to them, they click the captured image of the Web page, or they can click the hyperlink in the text-based list of search results. This loads the new page in the same browser window, bringing the user to the content that they've selected for viewing.


Watch the Searchme.com Demo

User Experience Highlights

Lastly, I wanted to just recap some of the things that Searchme.com has incorporated into the experience that I feel make it such a refined rich internet application:

1. Capturing the "back" and "forward" buttons within the browser so users can use them to control the experience. Many RIAs forget this, leading to a potentially annoying experience.
2. Displays search results in both visual and textual forms.
   
3. The visual nature of the display allows users to easily seek out, identify and confirm that a "page" in the results contains the content that they are seeking. While not 100% accurate, a user can visually relate the page layout, etc to what they were after when typing the search query.
4. The screen captures actually display the highlighted search term on top of the image itself. this is fascinating and I don't know how they've accomplished this, but it works.

Here are a handful of other articles and information resources regarding the Searchme.com application:

• http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080311/aqtu068.html?.v=37
  
  
• http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/11/paidcontent/main3926431.shtml
  
  
• http://www.betanews.com/article/Searchme_launches_private_beta_with_help_from_Adobe/1205254500
  
  
• http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9890911-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
  
  
• http://www.searchme.com/press/releases/Searchme_Launches_Private_Beta_of_New_Visual_Search_Engine.php
  
  
• http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080311/searchme-a-new-visual-search-engine/

Color Blind Considerations for UI Design

I've been doing a bit of research for a project where I am mixing and matching colors for the user interface of a web site. This project is not unique that it has the requirement to match the brand's colors, but as an application, the look and feel of the brand needs to be able to also be experienced in the color of icons and supporting UI graphics that appear as part of the site's User Interface.

In addition, as the the site is going to have ad-serving capabilities that will drive both "off site" as well as on-site promotional images that should "fit" into the design of the site. All basic issues of design for the Web when you are creating a heavily branded, yet sophisticated "utility-like" Web application. Our team is working under the best-practices principal that color-only should not be used as a solo visual indicator. As we get closer to finalizing the user interface, I've been doing a bit of thinking and additional research on the topic.

Ironically, today, while browsing my google home page, I came across an article that appeared on Wired.com about the subject. This piece, which is actually an Associated Press article deals with the problem faced by those with color blindness when using computers and a new software product called EyePilot that is going to be aimed at helping to take accessibility to yet another level.

I understand the frustration that can be encountered by those who suffer from color vision defects, as my Dad has been slightly affected by red-green color blindness since I was a kid. While it never caused any major issues, it was sometimes a source of comedy as he and my mom would pick out furniture, rugs or paint. I do wonder, however, how his interpretation of financial charts, graphs and business data could have been impacted over time... At least made less frustrating if color blindness was taken into consideration more often when designing digital content (and especially for the make audience).

Color vision defects usually affect people in one of two ways: red-green confusion and blue-yellow confusion. These common forms are inherited as a sex-lined recessive trait, making females carriers and makes more likely to be affected. While only 1 in 100 females are color blind, 1 in 8 men are colorblind to some extent.

This raises two rather interesting issues for usability professionals as well as user interface and creative digital designers. The first of these points is just a question: How often do you or your teams take this into consideration when user interface color schemes or artwork? This obviously is much more of a consideration with male-centered content as well as for brands that have either a "red-green" or "blue yellow" color palette, however even in the design of icons, link & text colors, and other UI elements should see this as a consideration during the creative design strategy and conceptualization.

The second issue is that software such as what they talk about in the Wired article (EyePilot), can offer even more challenges for design teams as users may eventually end up with full control over the colors that are being displayed on their own computer monitors. I realize that this sounds a little "far out", however almost as soon as we had "desktop /windows-based' operating systems, users showed a desire to be able to customize and personalize their digital environment. For many computer users customizing icons, desktops, color palettes, and fonts has become a regular practice for them on their mac, windows and linux-based computers.

This most definitely carries over to mobile devices as well. Screen savers, ring-tones and phone background pictures account for one of the fastest growing segments of personalized content and is now a huge source of revenue for mobile providers as well as 3rd party content creators.

I question whether or not the evolution of both accessibility as well as user customization for digital platforms will introduce the wide-spread ability for users to control how their computers, phones and other screens display color information. Will operating systems eventually have a "color control kit" built in? Will users eventually be able to control the color schemes of any user interface that they work with? Could a user who just loves orange and brown make every piece of content that they view on-screen take on their favorite color palette? Will users eventually have control over things to an extent that the colors picked by design professionals be as easily overridden by ambitious users as the fonts on a web page?

Whatever the future holds, I think that both of these points raise interesting points:

1. Should usability and design teams take color blind users into special consideration when designing user interfaces?
   
   
2. Will the adoption by users of their ability to customize the output of their digital displays (computers, phones, handhelds, tvs) eventually create the expectation that users will override branding and intentional use of colors for those that the prefer?

I feel that the answer to the first point is a loud and clear "yes", especially when designing content that will be geared towards men who are much more likely to suffer from the impairment. I am not saying that this should be a major focus of design efforts by any means, however taking it into consideration is truly a best-practice consideration of both accessibility and usability for digital design.

Point number 2? I suppose only time will be able to tell us the outcome. I suppose that the experts at Apple and Microsoft have aired this out during previous operating system designs, and have done their own research into the topic. Because of this, I also assume that they've determined that the current maturity of user behavior doesn't warrant the ability to override colors in this manner. One thing that is clear is that both Apple and Microsoft spend a ton of time and money researching color.

Then again, it could be hiding in the "Field of Dreams" effect: "If you build it, they will come" (or customize their colors if you will).

Some links of interest on the subject:

• Designing for the Color-Challenged: A Challenge
  
  
• How do Things Look to Color Blind People
  
  
• Why Color Should Never be the Only Visual Cue in Design

This micro-test for color blindness consists of a set of five images. Each image shows a number in one color on a different backgound color.



People with normal color vision will have no problem seeing the numbers contained within, but people with color blindness will see only random colored dots. What do you see?

Seventy-five percent of color blind people have poor green perception. Of the remaining, 24% have poor red perception, and one percent are affected by a rare tritan type.