Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Wow! I’m really looking forward to seeing this go from strength to strength. My growth in usage (and appreciation) of the spotlight feature on the Mac OS makes me realise Ubiquity it’s the way of the future. The natural language aspects of the way it works is key and I’m seeing this more and more in sophisticated interfaces.
A video of the Vice President of Operations at Google, Nikesh Arora, was posted on our internal UX Blog at Sensis the other day. The video was of Nikesh talking generally about Google – about how they got where they are and what he/they see for the future. I found the video incredibly interesting but the parts that really resonated with me though were when he talked about why he thinks Google has been so successful.
For the first 3 years Google didn’t make any money, in the last 7 years they have gone from making nothing to making $5 Billion in a quarter. This has been by focussing on building products that are “cool for consumers” (his words). Monetising followed/follows naturally.
This is the most important aspect from my point of view (sure I’m a user-centred designer I’m biased) but the web is still in it’s infancy. This period of the web, for my mind, is about creating new markets and/or dominating existing ones. Becoming the most used and well known for whatever your focus is. Getting an audience and user base for your website should be the focus and monetising it will naturally follow. If you focus on making money too early, a competitor with a longer term vision will easily steal your space. Build traffic, keep them happy and the rest will happen naturally.
By providing products for free you have the opportunity to really surprise and impress consumers. You lower their expectation and then they can be pleasantly surprised – this builds equity in your brand.
They get their staff to work on their own projects, I think 20% of their time. They encourage innovation and are rewarded for it.
Anyway I’ve editing the hour long video to highlight these key points:
If you want to create a successful website, you need to think in these ways. Businesses sometimes need to think more long term like this and stop focussing on the short. It’s just plain, well, short sighted.
And if you want to see the full video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR_yGjqzk
Street view on Google Maps Australia has arrived and I’m impressed! I remember fumbling about stitching together panoramas some 9 years ago for the real estate industry and thinking that the technology had a lot of potential. I didn’t think it had that much potential!
I just saw the renovations my Mum has done to her front yard in Perth and here is a snap of my current digs:
Google street view of my house
Now if only they can keep lawyers and litigious types at bay.
In one of our Concept & Design team meetings we were discussing User Generated Content. One of the designers mentioned the idea of making user participation a side effect which I think is both a really nice idea and a nice way of describing it. Now the idea of making user generated content a side effect is nothing new, Amazon, Apple and others have been doing it for years but the idea and description really resonated with me. I also think it’s something that is often overlooked by a lot of designers and websites. Look at ways in which users behave on a website and think about how you can use this behavior to actually feed back into the interface.
Examples of making user participation a side effect include:
I just downloaded and installed a new application called Jing. It’s made by TechSmith who are also the makers of one of my most missed PC applications SnagIt. I tested it by creating this screencast of my send to mobile interaction on Yellow Pages and from first use I’m pretty happy with it:
It would be great to be able to edit the video, for example to snip out a few seconds where the server was struggling, but hopefully that’s coming. :)
I enjoyed this presentation from Margaret Gould Stewart, User Experience Manager at Google:
MX 2008 | Margaret Gould Stewart from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
A great video for all managers and want-to-be managers out there. Building effective teams and managing people, especially in a creative environment, is a daunting task and I like how she approaches and advocates it.
