Week 12 Blog

One specific question I have about my group’s design is “will users find the new layout easier to navigate than the old one?”

I hope and know our paper prototype study will answer this question. I’ll be able to witness firsthand how users evaluate each part of our new design and hear their thinking process when we ask them specific questions. If users have a problem or trouble with a specific feature or design, we can see why they are having trouble with it and even ask them how we could change it to make it easier and more efficient.

To ensure that we get the best results from the proto typing test, we will conduct a post-test interview that will ask users how they compare our overall design, versus that of the current searchme.com design. If users find our design better, than we know we are heading in the right direction.

Feedback on Concepts:

First off: Props to those that did the hand sketching, I thought it was amazing, and definitely had the vibes of organic design. (The computer sketches were also nice, but were missing that natural/quick feeling.)

Ok the good:

Overall I really enjoyed the sketches and the feedback I saw. As a crew, you all seem to work together nicely. I saw evidence that this activity was enjoyable and fun. (Yeah!)

There was plenty of evidence that suggested and directly stated that you were thinking about how a person would use this application. I saw that you were thinking about the user and their needs. User empathy is great for designing; it helps you understand what the user needs and wants.

The other thing that I saw that I was pleased with is that there were things that were optional and things were thought through to streamline and make processes easier for the user.

The areas of improvement:

Some folks, brought up technical details, which are good, but not needed this early in the design process. With design, feasibility/implementation is a concern, but is not truly focused on until later in the process.

Also, concepts should be wild and crazy. If you can let go of what is considered normal, you might just find some amazing ideas can be found this and only this way.

Overall, nice job.

Searchme.com launches visual search app for iPhone

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/18/searchmes-visual-search-for-the-iphone-finally-launches/

Granted, it’s TechCrunch so the actual article is worthless, but hey, it happened.  Finally, apparently.  Not sure exactly who was anticipating this.

I think the design style of searchme makes more sense on the iPhone since it’s a touch-based platform with limited screen real estate.  At the same time the iPhone isn’t going to be faster than the computers on which searchme seemed slow and laggy, and the issue of sites not being readable on the searchme page doesn’t seem to have been fixed either.

Thought you guys might be interested in this.

Also, now that it’s served its purpose TechCrunch finally gets the boot from my RSS reader.

I’m Awesome.

Here is the search engine UI that I was talking about (for reiteration, what Jacob and I were thinking about) in pre-pre-alpha mode.

I have two renditions:

1. 2 static frames

or

2. 1 static and n amount of dynamic frames

I am leaning more toward the dynamic frames, for convenience’s sake. Here are the two sandbox’s I have setup. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

1. http://gtse.freehostia.com/sandbox/

2. http://gtse.freehostia.com/ <— Preferred

So… that’s my submission for an idea in terms of a concept that we need to choose. Win.

Pukinski

Predisposition: Users can find information more efficiently by seeing a picture of the  search rather than reading a description.

Research: Most users like the search because they can find relevant results without actually going to the site.

Research: Some users also preferred a textual search because they found it more efficient.

Insight: Having both visual and textual in a flexible interface would make more users switch to the site.

Concepts:

1. SearchMe.com has a lot of great features but most of them aren’t easily accessible. By putting these features into a more intuitive interface more people would use the site as the additional features would give a more personalized search experience.

2. By having both textual and visual searching the user would be able to use whatever search type they find most efficient. The hardest part of this would to be have both forms of search in an intuitive and relevant interface.

Pukinskis has an “s” on the end of it.

That extra “s” on the end stands for Science.

Predisposition:  Users want, rather than a list of names of search results, to see and then select from the webpages comprising the results themselves.

Research:  Users wanted not only to be able to see but to use the results.

Research:  Users wanted to be able to select from results while viewing more than one page at a time.

Research:  Users liked the concept of visual search but, for a variety of reasons, would not switch to it from Google (though some lied about that).

Insight:  Because of the drawbacks of pure visual search, users will not make a transition from the current model, sacrificing the positive aspects of visual search.

CONCEPTEMUNDOS

UNO! Some sort of hybrid between traditional text search and search with a visual representation of the website appeals to both ideas with minimal detraction from either’s functionality.  This is a fairly easy modification to make to Searchme.com and is probably available just as we want hidden somewhere within the labyrinth of preference options, no doubt guarded by two men, one of which lies and the other of which always tells the truth, who will answer only one of your quesitons.  They guard two buttons, one of which will save your preferences and the other of which will, lets say, kill you.  Just to make it more dramatic.  The obvious choice is of course to ask which button the other guard would say you should choose if you want to save your preferences, and the select the button opposite from that which they gave in their reply, but this is a huge hassle just to get a website to be how you think it should have been in the first place.  Plus it will no doubt lead to a lot of unnecessary lawsuits.

DOS! Search engines are all about giving choice to users, helping them to find and choose the best website for them.  But, as I think will be illustrated by number of dead web users we’ll have after trying out option one, users are dumb and can’t handle choices.  Almost no one goes past the first page of Google results anyway- why not just give them a few things to enjoy with no choice and if they don’t like it, they can refine the search terms.  Essentially, we’d rip off Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” and just throw the website right in their face.  Actually, on second thought, that’s a terrible idea, but maybe I wrote something useful in there, who knows.

Fourwinds is Indiana’s only tropical Resort (Union Ad)

SearchMe needs to advertise their SearchMe light in a better way. They have to show that they have the picture and text results that many of the people we interviewed want. I think it would be smart to have a choice under the search box. This will make people not have to make a choice when they first visit the site, and they can go from search to search using a different version of SearchMe.

I also think it would be smart to have a click able link at the homepage, making you choose between SearchMe and SearchMe Light. This will also have a brief paragraph or sentence about the differences between the two types. Having the users educated on the diffreneces will illiminate the confusion and misdirection.

These are just two ideas that I have come up with that may make SearchMe.com a more user friendly place, and a place where more people will enjoy going for all of their searching needs.

Pukinski

Predisposition:  Users want to receive relevant information efficiently.

Research:  People interviewed believe that relevant information is more important than visual stimulating information.

Research:  People interviewed also wanted more efficient information as opposed to the slow load time of searchme.com

Insight:  SearchMe.com needs have both text search results as well as visual search results to fit both users wants and needs.

2 Concepts

1.  SearchMe.com needs to focus on how they can use stimulating visual objects, while still retrieving relevant information for the user.  SearchMe.com should either give the choice between using just visual or just text search results or give both search results on the same page.  Using both types of search results would allow the user to use whatever they feel more comfortable with or whatever fits their need at the time.

2.  After many interviews, I realized that users were also confused about other features on the page.  Everyone understood the main focus of the page, which was to use it as a search engine, but when asked about the other features, no one knew what i was talking about.  SearchMe.com needs to emphasize some of their other features.  A way they can focus on other parts of the page is by creating big easily recognizable buttons on the homepage.  These buttons will catch the eye of the viewer and possibly have the site utilized more than is now.

Pukinski’s Set of a Poorly Chosen Acronym That Assembles Into a Word That I Never Would Have Guessed

Well, here you go.

Predispositions

End-user desires fast and accurate search results.

Research

Interviewing “random” users with closed/open questions in order to gain enough data about the typical user of such a site.

Insight

Regardless of how “good” we make Searchme.com, Google will remain the powerhouse of search engines, OR if Searchme.com actually becomes something of the worthy… it will just be bought by Google.

Two generated concepts arising from the relationships between these components

Concept 1

Redesign the search algorithm for Searchme.com, thus generating more accurate results.

Concept 2

Use the following interactive model to base Searchme.com off of: http://gtse.freehostia.com. I think that this is better than the current site setup in most ways, and this is in the pre-pre-alpha stage. Also probably because I wrote it.

Just a thought, but I think it addresses the page preview issue… and it doesn’t use flash, so it must be better.

Pukinski

PRIs

1) Predisposition: The more information accessible to the user, the easier it will be to find the result that they want.

2) Research: Many interviewees found the images helpful in finding the results they wanted

3) Research: The organization of the information on searchme.com was confusing to the users without much experience in using the site.

4.) Insight: The information provided by Searchme is very helpful, but improvements can be made to the layout of the site to allow it to be more intuitive and usable.

Concepts:

1) There is some very good information available to the user from Searchme, but it needs to be organized better. The layout of the information needs to provide for people who prefer images, but also those who prefer text-based descriptions of the website.

2) Many of the features people asked for in the interviews, actually do exist, but were not known about at the time. In redesigning the layout as set out in concept 1, this has to be corrected to help provide the user with all of the information they want, without the information they don’t want.