What about the users that use touch screens? What about the delay while waiting to load? Especially for people with slower Internet, Google is really killing it for them. The company has a User Experience department, why don’t they listen to the users?

For a search I would usually hit my homepage and without even looking I would immediately start typing, enter and there I am. Now I’m typing alright, but I find the search field catching on mid first or second keyword. It’s extremely annoying. I am hard pressed to find workarounds since Google ignores the wishes of its users and refuses to provide a disable option. If no workarounds work to my satisfaction I am sorry to say I will have to change my search engine for the first time in nearly a decade. How sad…

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

In the end, it’s hard to speculate without the test data. I often feel envious of the kind of resources they have access to, especially traffic-wise, when it comes to multivariate testing.

Thought about this a bit last night and realized that a majority of users that I’ve observed (read average users) that come to Google to conduct a search tend use their mouse to highlight the input field. This behaviour seems to be deeply rooted and occurs regardless if the input field already is highlighted or not when the page in questions finishes loading.

Having that in mind, the new approach to the Google start page could have a negative effect with user being distraced and end up wandering off somewhere else.

/A.

Windows 7 is a cubicle?

Here I was, thinking my “question” example was excellent, but I should perhaps have elaborated a bit more. Think about it – what would your answer to that question be? You don’t even know what a “Prolikate Gurb” is, right? You’re simply not qualified to to answer, and that’s the where most users find themselves when confronted with those kinds of dialogs.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

The information balloons could be, dare I say, less obtrusive by default though, for example when plugging in an ums. Important issues after install is funny indeed. Regarding antivirus I think there is a problem for ms to include it by default, but lots of oems will probably add that (and lots of other junk for that matter).

The most crippling aspect would do better with an example…don’t you think? My example of annoyance would be all prompts when downloading files from ie, but luckely for me I use chrome.

Btw, win + p is my favourite.

These days, I’m philosophizing about Umbraco 5, and one of the things I see is a separate development of UI and business logic. The examples you name are good, and I actually thought of both of them.

I think indeed we can take the lead here. I strongly believe in Niels’ capacities as a UI visionary.

But I won’t talk too much about that… right now it’s 4.0 and these thoughts are just mine.

Jag känner igen nästan varje sak Loe gör. Min 2,5 åriga son har samma beteende. Han tittar på film/tv via datorn. Han navigerar vant bland menyerna i iPhonen (snacka om användarvänlighet). Hans favorit är programmet Scribble där man kan rita på skärmen och sedan skaka telefonen för att börja om. Han älskar att titta på olika djur på Youtube och minns söktermerna som jag ska söka efter. Han brukar springa omkring med vår IXUS kamera och säga “säg cheese” innan han tar kort. Vi Skypar med morföräldrarna titt som tätt.

Internet har förändrat allt och inget blir sig likt. Jag undrar hur man kommer definiera stress framöver.

@ruben – Implementational model software is where the underlying technical implementation is directly represented in the GUI. E-mail software is a an excellent example of this – messages arrive chronologically, are stored as individual messages and displayed chronologically even though they are part of conversations. Umbraco is far from alone here, it’s what goes for pretty much all publishing platforms.

examples:
*Separate fields etc for page content that is displayed uniformly

*To preview a post, you have to save it, then preview it.

* Umbracos url model relys on “pages” – If you run a blog and publish a blog post at 2008-12-30, you have to create structure pages “2008″, “12″ and “30″ in order have your post show up at /2008/12/30/this-post. (regardless of action handlers that do it for you). Comments are stored as individual pages underneath each page etc.

I’m not saying leaving the classic implementational model behind is easy. But I’d love to see the Umbraco-team take the lead. Canvas is a good start!

—-

Thanks for your feedback!

Could you clarify “a goodbye to the implementational model for even better editorial usability”?

We’ll never have the multi-lingual support you’re asking for. Our research shows that almost no multi-lingual sites are 1:1 translated but often represent different markets and culture, which means different product portfolios, marketing angles and legislation. In a very few and rare cases 1:1 make sense and there are other products that excels for that. One of the things that makes Umbraco great is the courage to be a product that doesn’t try to do it all.

Better media management is a big wish though and something we’ll work on next.