2 posts tagged “search”

    There is an age-old saying that everything that can be thought of has already been created in some form or another. The problem that differs from every single scenario is not necessarily the practice that implements the solution but the entire product that shows itself through its main and completed interface. While the importance of lean and efficient code is and always will be there, there is of much greater importance to a product that can market itself. But let's take a step back at what great products entail in their user interfaces.

    There are a load of toolkits available to create graphical user interfaces today for the web, desktop and mobile but what most of these toolkits tend to do is supplement a key component in creating a product - showcasing originality. In fact, the greatest part about creating a new product is that you have full control over how your users are going to interact with it - you can choose to make task completion inherently difficult or inexplicably easy. In all of interaction design this is quite possibly the most important - work hardest on it over any other.

    Google wasn't the first search engine, or the last for that matter, but what made its success what its ability to create relevant searching without disrupting the user's train of thought. The same logic can be applied to just about every industry in existence. Take a look at the number of different learning management systems available - (there are over a dozen different open-source "enterprise systems").

    The only successful product out of that market will be one that can differ itself in great interaction experience. Of course, creating that will not be easy and should not be taken lightly. Efficient code takes much thought into building algorithms that you can depend on. The same goes for interfaces in that successful products take much more thought, time and emotional presence into designing interfaces that you can depend on.

    Recently, I picked up an incredibly awesome tool called Enso from Humanized. Enso is all about bringing the ease of creating, navigating and manipulating content through commands. In the old days we used commands to get tasks done. As the GUI undoubtedly made things much easier to work with, it has also made things undoubtedly difficult to work with as everyone has their own opinions and natural bias towards one method of interaction over another - as well as color schemes..etc. But the one aspect that has us seemingly removed in this cumbersome Web 2.0  world is distraction. Some call it multi-tasking, I would disagree and say that we have created a monster for distraction.

    Not to say that some distractions aren't bad, but the thought is on how applications are increasing the gaps between the tasks we want to accomplish and the content that we are dealing with. Take for instance the fact that the market is now flooded with a dozen different social networks; there are hundreds of paint tools, editors and more. The market has a way with filtering these products out with emergence - or the difference in what is the best possible yet practical solution for the major audience.

    Nevertheless, it brings an motivating perspective towards the very definition of what operating systems are supposed to do for us. When I/O operations became a habitual necessity for computing technology it was added as a standard protocol to which all operating environments follow. However, today we are at a point where the desktop's monolithic structure has created an environment where dozens of applications are added due to what the user has asked for.

    The idea of adding feature after feature is fairly common among applications as well. In addition to this, there is integration - where one product's feature must integrate or serve another product in some form. For instance, Vox uses the Flickr API to allow users to add pictures to to posts. But what happens if you don't have a Flickr account, you just want to put pictures you got from your camera. Well, not only does Vox have to integrate with Flickr, they need to handle their own picture uploading service as well. When in reality, the only service that Vox is interested in it giving users the ability to write content to their blogs.

    In search technology, we have the ability to look up any website, blog, video and picture that exists on the web. We type a query and off it goes. The web provides a very nice tool for search. But how much have we provided in the web for commands? Telling the web to do something for you isn't as easy, but it definitely could be thought along the same lines. We have had the ability to aggregate content to serve information to users; what we need now is a way to aggregate services to serve tools to users. In that manner, we can begin to bring the level in which developers are typically mounted on up to the user's perspective.