David Herrold

Mobile search

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Hardware, Mobile, Software, Usability

We’ve gotten very good at finding what we’re looking for online. Ever since the early days of AltaVista, Lycos and DogPile we’ve become experts at finding Thai restaurants in Hoboken, NJ and singing telegrams in Anchorage, AK. Just type a few keywords into the search box and click the go button. Your best result will be on the first page, right? Pretty easy.

Fast forward to 2008 - and the proliferation of mobile phones, PDAs and palmtop computers that can access the web. Things become much more interesting.

There is an increased sense of immediacy based upon our physical location and actions. In the old world, we designed sites for users who were typically sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse. Today we design sites for people who are surfing the internet while walking the dog, boarding a plane, driving to work and cheering for the home team during the playoffs.  Mobile devices are with us all the time.

Good-bye keyboard.  Good-bye mouse.  We’ll miss you.

We are using our thumbs to type now. We are scrolling down our tiny screens with trackballs, slide-wheels and pencil-thin styli. We are clicking with phone keys, tiny buttons, pens and our fingers. We need results need to be simple, easy to read, accurate and light weight. And we need it now.

Mobile platforms need to distill web content down to the bare essentials, trimming away unnecessary page clutter while pushing relevant content to the top of the page.

John Markoff’s New York Times article sums this up more eloquently than I.

“The small screen forces you to be even more ruthless and focus on usability almost like a haiku,” said Barney Pell, Powerset’s founder and chief executive. “That’s what happens with design for the small screen. You have to think about what the most important thing the user is doing is.”

There are currently only a few methods of searching the web on a mobile device (although, there SHOULD be more, in my opinion*.)

The first method is the one we’re most familiar with.  We type search terms into a little box and hit submit for results. As long as the web server produces valid XHTML and mobile friendly CSS, most phones will display results without too much trouble. Many mobile sites that offer search, offer this method.

Another method uses SMS and allows users to search via text message instead of using web forms. This can be a faster way of getting results in some cases if you have little or no access to a strong mobile signal for WAP searches. Depending upon your carrier’s packages, SMS can also be used without a data plan (which is usually much cheaper than a full data plan).

A good example of this is Google’s SMS service. If you happen to have a text message plan for your mobile device, try this. Send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) with the message of “pizza and [your zipcode]“. You should get a text message back from Google with 3-4 of the highest ranking listings along with click-to-call links to contact the restaurant.

You can also send links to your users within the text message. A good example of this is our own classified ad platform on the Houston Chronicle’s mobile site. For another interesting test, try sending a text message to 24766 (CHRON) with a message of “ford mustang”. You will get a text message back informing you how many results this search produced and a link to the mobile search results (if you have a WAP access).

This is pretty useful, but still not perfect.

Within the last year location-based services have grown quickly in popularity. Mobile platforms like Brightkite, Google Maps and Fire Eagle are gaining ground with many mobile users. Using a mobile device’s internal GPS (or triangulation from cell towers if your device doesn’t have a GPS), the device determines your location and allows you to simply search for the word “pizza” to produce local results for you (since it already knows your location).

We will begin to see more of these services over the next few years. However, I think we can do even better than that.

As I’ve said in the past, our mobile phones are audio devices first and foremost. Let’s put that audio technology to good use.

* Allow me to speak “Find Starbucks” into my phone to trigger a Google Maps search or speak “Browse CNN” to auto-dial a browser bookmark. Surfing the internet hands-free might be extremely useful if I were driving a car, walking the dog or even peddling a bicycle.

With devices like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s upcoming Android platform the possibilities are nearly endless.

Let’s push the limits.

————————

Some resources that can help you get started with mobile web development:

Dev.Mobi - A website dedicated to mobile web development
Blue Flavor’s web development guide is a good start - and they’re nice folks too.
Mobile Web Development - by Nirav Mehta a more in-depth look at mobile development
Mobile Web Design - by Cameron Moll - a great introduction to the mobile web

Tags: Google, iPhone, Mobile, search, sms

Gmail labs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Google, Software

I’m checking out Gmail labs. Has anyone started to play around with the new features?

- Dave

Tags: gmail, gmail labs, Google

Google opens Website Optimizer

Posted by Dave | Filed under Business, Design, Development, Google, Marketing, Usability, Web design

Google released their Website Optimizer platform last week for general use. It has only been available to sites using Google AdWords in the past, but now can be used by anyone to enhance site performance. This is great news for web analytic junkies, usability testers, developers and designers alike.

In a nutshell, Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to test multiple versions of content (ie. marketing messages, logos, icons, copy, etc) in a live environment to determine which combination of content yields the best results.

Based upon what you are testing, this “result” could mean higher click-throughs, increased product sales, increased product downloads, increased ad revenue, higher traffic to internal pages, etc.

This eliminates the guesswork of testing ad placement, site designs, product purchase flows, etc. You can simply release multiple versions of your content and look at the analytics to determine which one is yielding the best results.

There are certainly other tools to do the same job; but not many are free or this simple. We could certainly do the same thing at the Chronicle, however we would have to use several systems to make it happen. This simplicity of using one system appeals to me.

Here are some links to get you started with Google’s Website Optimizer:

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer blog
Website Optimizer press release

(via Web Worker Daily)

Tags: analytics, Google, Marketing, Usability, website optimizer

Google Apps Engine vs Amazon S3

Posted by Dave | Filed under Development, Google, Technology

According to a recent TechCrunch post, Google will be venturing into the application cloud business to compete directly with Amazon’s S3 service.

From TechCrunch:

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

Are there enough differences for both services to exist or will there be a knock-down, drag-out fight in the near future. It’s hard to beat Google’s “hey, kids, our dope is free…for now” model.

It should be interesting to watch this unfold.

- Dave

Tags: amazon, application, Google, hosting, s3

What is your time worth?

Posted by Dave | Filed under Productivity

Merlin Mann, from 43Folders, presented a thought-provoking talk at the Google campus about time management. The video above is around 36 minutes, but worth watching if you have the time.

I thought his concept of laying departmental ground rules for communication was an excellent one. Does a particular message warrant a phone call, email, AIM, in-person visit, group meeting, etc? This is something I’d like to try at work.

I try to be conscious of my co-workers’ time when I schedule meetings, only inviting someone if it is absolutely necessary for them to be invited. I know how busy our schedules can become, and don’t like sitting in meetings where it’s difficult to determine why I was invited in the first place.

Merlin addresses some of these issues more eloquently than I ever could.

Link to the video if the embedded video doesn’t work for you.

- Dave

Tags: Google, merlin mann, Productivity, techtalk, time management

Google goes goth

Posted by Dave | Filed under Google

Is Google going goth or perhaps making an homage to heavy metal concert t-shirts (ROCK-N-ROLL…where’s the stage)?

No, my fellow creatures of the night, they are not. According to Google:

Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

I thought I hit an odd key combination this morning that inversed my screen colors (command+option+control+8 on a Mac). I stopped for a minute, cocked my head in a a befuddled way and clicked on the Earth Hour link.

Ah, it all makes sense now. It was simply Google giving us a dose of environmental awareness at 72 DPI.

Thanks Google…I need more coffee.

Tags: earth hour, energy, environment, Google

David Allen: Getting Things Done

Posted by Dave | Filed under Productivity

This is a great presentation by David Allen at the Google campus. He is speaking about his productivity method called “Getting Things Done.” It runs about 45 minutes, but it’s worth watching if you could use a productivity boost.

Tags: getting things done, Google, GTD, Productivity

Google Knol - Wikipedia killer?

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Google

From the official Google blog:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

Sounds like Google’s Knol is a direct competitor to Wikipedia if I’ve ever seen one.

Tags: distribution, Google, information, Wikipedia

Open social

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Productivity, Software, Web design

Here’s a great post on SixApart’s website on the subject of Open Social:

Take a spreadsheet, for example: Imagine if a simple spreadsheet could be shared on one of the services you use, but limited so only your friends could see it, for a fantasy sports league; or only your family could see it, for a Christmas wishlist; or only your coworkers could see it, for sensitive business information. You’ve probably already set up groups or buddy lists for those people on the various social networking sites that you use, but there hasn’t been an easy way yet for a developer to let you access those networks right from within an application. Now, there will be. And if your work network is on LinkedIn, but your friends are on MySpace, and your family’s on Vox, it can all Just Work.

You can read the whole article here.

Tags: Google, linkedin, myspace, open social, Social Networking

Google Reader goodies

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Software

Google added a nifty new feature to their reader recently that allows people to share the feeds they read via a little badge on their blog or website. Here’s how you can do it too…

• Open Google Reader
• Go to your shared items
• Click on the “Put a clip on your site or blog” link at the top of the page.
• Configure the color and number of items you’d like
• Copy and paste the code into your blog
• Now go share those cool posts about LOLcats with all your freinds.

P.S. - I opted for a simple link at the bottom of the site for my Google Reader shared items.

Tags: Blogging, Google, RSS