Google CEO Describes Web in 5 Years

ReadWriteWeb posted an article (Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years) highlighting some bits from Eric Schmidt's (Google CEO) talk at the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo Orlando 2009. ReadWriteWeb was even kind enough to post a 6 minute excerpt that they believe would be of interest to those of us on the web:

He has some specific ideas that stand out:

• Citing Moore's Law and claiming that 5 years is a factor of ten increase in computing power, he sees far more powerful computers and broadband in excess of 100MB. This feeds his idea that TV, radio, the web (YouTube, etc.) will all become merged in some way.
• The internet will be dominated by content in Chinese (although he's silent on the future of Great Firewall of China).
• Real-time content and real-time search may further push traditional news sources to a tier below user-generated content.
• Watch today's teenagers to see how they use the web today as they will drive how employees consume content in 5 years.

Catch the full 45 minute interview on YouTube: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, interviewed by Gartner analysts Whit Andrews and Hung LeHong in front of 5,000 CIOs and IT Directors at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

New Google Analytics Features

In the article "Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent" from last Tuesday (yes, I know I'm behind on this) on the Google Analytics Blog, the Analytics team has introduced some interesting new features. Some of the updates:

• Two new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. You can also define up to 20 goals per profile.
  
• A server-side chunk of code is coming to allow tracking on moble sites (since mobile browsers may not be able to run the JavaScript Analytics code on a page).
• Advanced table filtering allows you to filter rows based on assorted conditions. In their sample video they show ho to filter keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30% that referred at least 25 visits (it's much easier to understand with this video).
  
• You can now select unique visitors as a metric for custom reports.
• You can now have multiple custom variables so you can track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes and page attributes.
• You can now share custom reports and segments with other Analytics users.

There are two items over which the blog post is most excited:

Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur. [....]

R.I.P. Geocities

In my post "Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?" I mentioned that on October 26 Geocities was going away. Well, that sad day is upon us. And if you didn't follow those Geocities links I posted, you are SOL now. However, more tributes have popped up on the web in honor of this historic (hysterical?) day.

• XKCD themed their site today.
• The irascible Bruce Lawson has created aGeocities template for CSS Zen Garden.
• GeoCities tribute with lots of helpful comments at Reddit
• Mashable links to group trying to download and archive all of Geocities.

Usability Testing vs. Expert Reviews

An article at UX Matters titled "Usability Testing Versus Expert Reviews" takes a reader question and tosses it to a series of experts to answer:

Under what circumstances is it more appropriate to do usability testing versus an expert review? What are the benefits and weaknesses of each method that make one or the other more appropriate in different situations?

The experts ultimately all came up with similar answers — do both. Start with the expert review to take care of low-hanging fruit and then bring users in for the testing phase to catch the issues that trip them up. Some quotes:

Expert reviews are especially useful for finding violations of usability standards and best practices. These are often obvious problems that may or may not cause problems during usability testing.

Before doing usability testing, it is helpful to do at least an informal expert review to determine what to focus on during testing.

I recommend always doing both. Expert reviews that are performed by specialists, using standards and heuristics, reveal easy-to-catch usability problems in a very cost-efficient way.

While usability testing is more powerful than expert review, both methods in combination are great, because you first want to discover the low-hanging fruit and get them out of the way.

We need to remember that expert review is a user-free method. Regardless of the evaluators' skill and experience, they remain surrogate users—expert evaluators who emulate users—and not typical users. The results of expert review are not actual, primary user data and should lead to—not replace—user research.

There aren't any real surprises here, but it's interesting to see the different approaches suggested by each expert.

Bing and Google Add Social Search

Google and Bing have been locked in a struggle recently for search engine dominance. Bing came out of the gates fast and gained a lot of market share, but has appeared to level off recently (another link, and another link). Neither of them wants to lose any ground. Factor in the recent explosion of Twitter and other near-real-time social media outlets on the web and people's desire to search them all, and you have two search giants salivating over new opportunity.

Both Microsoft and Google announced partnerships with Twitter yesterday. There had been fears of one making an investment in Twitter and locking the other out from search results, but those fears appear to have been assuaged. At least for now. Consider that Microsoft already has a sizable cash investment in Facebook ($240 million, or 1.6% of Facebook's valuation at the time) giving them a leg up over Google on searching within Facebook. It seemed that the same thing might happen with Twitter (a company that just closed a deal for another $100 million in funding, pushing its value to ~$1 billion).

Google made its announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo, showing off its Social Search feature from Google Labs. The same presenter, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience, then posted this to the Google blog:

...[W]e are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

Mashable has some more detail on what was discussed at the in-person announcement, including some information on linking your social media profiles in to Google to allow searching across them as well

Microsoft signed two deals on this same day, one with Twitter to bring its tweets to Bing, and one with Facebook to bring status updates to the search engine (another link). The Bing blog reports its Twitter search:

...[T]oday at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).

Essentially the Twitter search has been rebuilt within Bing, including the real-time updates. Bing also includes relevancy, based on things like number of retweets, keywords and the quality of the tweets (who decides this?). Bing also shows the trending topics as a tag cloud. In case you haven't tried it yet, head on over to Bing.com/twitter

The next few months should be interesting as both Bing and Google tweak and enhance they new offerings. Given their same-day announcements, we can expect both teams to be watching the other closely and responding to changes quickly.

In the meantime I'll be scratching me head on why Twitter, a place solely for me and millions of others to spout our own brand of crazy in real-time, is valued at $1 billion.

UPDATE: Read this swell article, just posted: Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands.

Firefox 3.6 to Support Web Open Font Format

Mozilla's developer blog today posted that they have added support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.5 gave us support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts, but this takes it a step further to support a format that is more robust for two key reasons:

1. WOFF is a compressed format, resulting in files smaller than an equivalent TrueType or OpenType font.
2. It avoids DRM and domain labels by containing meta data about its source, garnering support from typeface designers and foundries.

If you want to see this in action, you'll need to grab a Firefox 3.6 nightly build until the full release is out the door. If you should feel compelled to do that, the nice folks at Mozilla have provided a sample block of CSS that uses the @font-face rule to link to a WOFF font:

@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.woff) format("woff"),
       url(fonts/GenR102.ttf) format("truetype");
}

body {
  font-family: GentiumTest, Times, Times New Roman, serif;
}

Structured this way, browsers that support the WOFF format will download the WOFF file. Other browsers that support @font-face but don’t yet support the WOFF format will use the TrueType version. (Note: IE support is a bit trickier, as discussed below). As WOFF is adopted more widely the need to include links to multiple font formats will diminish.

If you are fortunate enough to have a build of Firefox 3.6 already up and running on your machine, go to a test page using ff Meta set up by the nice folks at edenspiekermann (if part of the name is familiar, Erik Spiekerman is the designer of the Meta family, and if the typeface is familiar, it's what we use at Algonquin Studios). The image below shows how that page looks in Firefox 3.6 using ff Meta (left side) and how it looks rendered in Internet Explorer 8 (right side).

Because IE8 only supports the EOT format, the blog offers some code to account for IE8 in the CSS. Because IE8 doesn't understand the format hints, it will parse the hints as part of the URL, resulting in requests to the server for files that don't exist. The end user will see things just fine because of the EOT reference, but your logs will show some odd 404s as a result of this technique. The Mozilla post has more details on this and some other issues. The code to do this:

@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.eot);  /* for IE */
}
 
@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  /* Works only in WOFF-enabled browsers */
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.woff) format("woff"); 
}

The main Mozilla blog has a post today listing the supporting organizations with the following endorsement:

We endorse the WOFF specification, with default same-origin loading restrictions, as a Web font format, and expect to license fonts for Web use in this format.

Updates

• font_dragr: a drag and drop preview tool for fonts
• after Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers

"Myth of Usability Testing" at ALA

There is a very good article over at A List Apart today titled "The Myth of Usability Testing." The article starts off with an example of how multiple usability evaluation teams, given the same task and allowed to run at it as they saw fit, had far less overlap in found issues than one would hope.

The author goes on to explain why usability evaluation is unreliable with a series of examples (which seem painfully obvious, and yet these mistakes keep happening) broken into two main categories:

• "Right questions, wrong people, and vice versa."
  Using existing users to evaluate a site is a loaded approach, they already have expectations set by the current site that taint their ability to see other options. Conversely, asking new users to complete tasks driven by an existing design is not a good way to evaluate new approaches.
• "Testing and evaluation is useless without context."
  It is common for me to hear the statement that "nothing can be more than two clicks from the home page," but this ignores the real context of the site and its users. These blanket statements or goals can harm an evaluation when instead a test should start with an understanding of user goals, success metrics, and real site goals.

From here the article outlines what usability testing is actually good for, and then helps focus the reader on the reality of the testing process and its results. I'm glossing over the other 2/3 of the article partly because I wanted to draw attention to the bits above and partly because you should just go read it already. There are some good links in the article for tools that can help identify trouble spots and support an evaluation.