2. Resize any window from anywhere

Surprisingly, nothing happened. I applied more power using my thumb but the lid refused to open. I looked closely at the lid’s opening mechanism to make sure I got it right. I tried to push it in a different angel but it remained locked. As a desperate move, I tried to push and squeeze the black rubber that covers the top of the lid, just because it looks “press-able”. Nothing happened. I spent a good 30-45 seconds trying to open the lid in all sorts of ways, applying more and less power, trying to pull the cover away from the lock yet it did not open.

I almost gave up and was about to unscrew the lid and drink the water directly from the bottle. But then, as I was holding the lid using two fingers and gently squeezing it between my fingers, it poped and opened (picture 2 below).

That was a eureka moment for me and from that point I “adjusted” the way I open the bottle. I am not sure exactly why it did not work originally. I can only assume that for a brand new water bottle the lid had to be opened 20-30 times to make the mechanism loose enough to work as intended but what is clear is that the product does not “Allows for easy one handed operation” out of the box like its web page says.

I wanted to test if it was only me who could not open the bottle so I asked two colleges to try opening it (of course without telling them what is the right way to do it) and they both followed the same steps I did and quickly got pretty frustrated that the lid did not open. They also applied more and more power and nothing happened until they concluded that “something is wrong with this bottle”.

Why am I telling this story? Simple. To remind product managers and designers to always evaluate the intuitiveness of their designs and whether it actually works in the real world.

I am sure that if the Nalgene designers were sitting next to me while I was struggling with their water bottle, they would go back to the drawing board and work on a new design that actually works.

For anyone who is in the business of designing and building web products and services things are a lot easier than to those creating physical products. There are many great tools that let you see exactly how users use and interact with your website. All you need is to install and use them. Beyond the obvious Google Analytics, I also recommend ClickTale, a great service that records user behavior and lets you watch complete user sessions as videos. And finally, let friends and family try the product and watch, like a fly on the wall, how they interact with it. When they are done completing the tasks you gave them interview them and see how well they can describe what they were doing and how they were using your website. You will learn a ton from it and probably have to change a few things to make your product more intuitive.

There are many goodies in the new version of TweetDeck (0.33). The one that I like most is the Column Navigator, a usability improvement that makes navigation between columns a snap and will make you say goodbye to horizontal scrolling.  

Another worth mentioning feature is the additional media types you can view inside the client, like Flickr images and YouTube videos.

Posted via email from jaymeydad’s posterous

Today I discovered another hidden feature that I was not aware of – suggestion of the right spelling for a query that contains a misspelling. For example, start typing the the query “waist of t” and Google will suggest terms such as “waste of time” or “waste of space”. Pretty cool as it saves you the extra “Did you mean?” search.

By the way, when comparing this feature of Google Suggest to the other search engines, I would rank them in the following order:

1. Google – variety of offers and misspelling correction
2. Ask – misspelling correction but small variety of suggestions
3. Yahoo – strong bias towards suggesting misspelling
4. Bing – No variety, no misspelling correction. Still needs to do major improvements in that area.

But as a long time user of TweetDeck’s desktop client, when I read that an iPhone version was just released, I thought to give it a try.

Well, I must say that TweetDeck for iPhone still has a long way to go before it becomes my preferred twitter client on the iPhone. Here are a few reasons why based on a 5 minutes usages:

• The app is not stable at all. In 5 minutes it crashed 5 times on me. In one of the cases, after a crash I had to try 3 times before the apps actually worked
• Strange error message indicating that I am not connected to the internet appeared while I was on Wifi kept appearing (see gallery below)
• The app does not seem to have a local cache of draft messages. If the app crash while you type a tweet, after restart you will have to start all over again!
• If you type in a tweet and then attach to it a photo, your tweet message will disappear and gets replaced by the link to the photo. Ugh!
• Search is not easily accessible. A few steps are required before you can do that which makes search a feature for power users only. First you need to add a new column called “Twitter Search” and set its initial search tern. Then whenever you want to actually edit the search term you have to: (a) navigate to the search column (b) click on the column settings wheel (c) change the search term. However, on TwitterFon search is a main function that is always visible at the bottom bar which makes it very easy to modify a search term
• Too many times and extra click is required:
  • TweetDeck opens by default in the column preview mode and it forces you to hit another time a column in order to make it use all screen area. IMHO, this should not be the default logic as for most user the Friends column is what they want to read most of the times when the app loads. Better usage of the 80%-20% rule would help here
  • When viewing a streem of tweets, you can not just click on a link that was tweeted to open it. You first need to open a specific tweet in a large preview mode and only then the link becomes live
• Last personal preference is the UI color. I prefer a light and bright app

On the positive site, TweetDeck has some features that I wish could be added to TwitterFon like:

• Growl integration – those little notification icons that float at the upper left corner whenever there is a new update
• QuickFollow button which lets you quickly type in a user name and follow

It is interesting to see how the battle to be the most popular twitter client is accelerating. But for now, I stick with TwitterFon Pro as my preferred Twitter client for the iPhone.

For a detailed comparison check out this great post.

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Couple of observations:

• The header height was shaved by a few pixels, the Yahoo logo was moved right next to the search box instead of above it, and almost all of the essential information is viewable above the fold! pretty impressive that Yahoo was able to achieve that without getting eliminating links and content that is on the current homepage

• The expandable tabs that are used in the left side bar (called Favorites) make the home page extremely extensible with all sorts of information and applications, from Yahoo properties (Finance, Messenger, Flickr, movies) and partners (eBay, NPR, BBC, and more). It is also great for advertising since there is a medium rectangle ad (most desirable ad size on the market) on every tab. This should increase the number of home page ad impressions sagnificantly. Anyone wanys to model what it will do to the stock price?

• Yahoo clearly wants you to do more searches and that’s why they moved the “popular searches” box to the top and made it so prominent

• Yahoo also wants to regain their position as a portal to the Yahoo network. That’s why they:

(a) placed the link “View Yahoo! Sites” which expands to a directory of all the Yahoo sites at the top of the Favorites left bar

(b) moved the articles section to the top and increased its size from 5 to 10 links

• One very interesting application that was pre-installed for me on the favorites bar was MySpace. I wonder if that is a first sign for a deal that might happen between MySpace/FIM and Yahoo (the Google deal is supposed to end in mid 2010) or is that just a traffic aquisition campaign mySpace is running on Yahoo

Overall, I like the new design. It is lighter, cleaner and the information is organized in a more logical and accessible way compared to the existing homepage. Who knows, if this version will eventually become the live one, I might switch my homepage back to Yahoo like in the good old days.

Update: According to Sillicon Alley Insider, this new homepage is not a test but a phased rollout.

Here are some photos of the new design

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You might ask yourself how come I kept doing this. Very simple, I just could not find the right setting under the Preferences pane that would change the behavior. There is also no setting related to the positioning of the signature under the “Signatures”window to address this.

I finally found the time and did some online research and was able find the answer. I figured others could benefit from this tip as well. So, here it is. To get Entourage automatically add the signature at the top of the reply/forward, make sure you have the setting as in the screenshot below.

Alternatively, you could upgrade to Outlook which is a much better email client for Mac and is part of the new Office 2011, or use a webmail like Gmail.

Related to that, I was thinking how come Twitter has not released this feature and kept their new follower email so basic. After all, you would expect that with all the hype and buzz around Twitter and the almost-endless resources they have ($55M in funding to date), the Twitter team would be releasing new features constantly. So, I put this short list of pros and cons and this is what I came up with:

A: Why twitter should have implemented improved email notifications long ago:

1. Twitter’s basic new follower email has been a major user pain and many users have requested this feature. Listening to your users & enhancing your product to address their needs is important and it creates an engaged user base.
2. The current email notification is actually hurting Twitter since it is not optimized to help users grow their network. Users don’t check their email constantly. Even when they do that, they don’t immediately take the necessary action. Many of them are limited in time, attention or don’t have the right device (ie a smartphone) that makes it easy to visit their new follower’s twitter page, read the bio located on the right side bar, and then, log into your Twitter account and follow back. This is a very long and cumbersome process which leads to poor conversion.

B: Why twitter has not implemented improved email notifications:

1. Keeping the product feature-lite encourages more & more 3rd party developers to use the Twitter API and it cements Twitter in the center of the eco-system.
2. The current basic email alert forces users to visit the twitter website in order to get information about the new follower. This helps increase the number of page views & unique users Twitter.com gets. After all, if the entire Twitter usage comes from 3rd party apps & clients, how can user-rating services like Compete & Quancast measure Twitter’s growth?
3. Investing resources in email related features is a low priority to Twitter (same as SMS these days) since they see their future in its robust API.

My wild guess is that the folks at Twitter deliberately chose (B) despite the fact it makes their product inferior, and that they will continue to do that until they establish their web property as a top destination site and get bought by Google.  Once this happens they won’t have to worry about how to position the company for an exit and then they will start releasing new features like crazy, including one similar to Topify. They might even acquire Topfiy like they did in the past with other missing features (Summize the Twitter Search company).

What do you think?

Those materials include photos, posters, books, videos, sound recording, newspapers articles, paintings and drawing and more. All have commentary and are categorized under 7 different themes that demonstrate how well the Nazis understood topics such as mass communication, marketing & branding, and how well they used them in order to promote alluring ideas that appeal to the masses such as freedom, unity and prosperity, rather than pure hate.

The Themes and Gallery Search sections gives access to these materials from the years 1919-1948. In addition, there is an interactive timeline section which goes all the way from 1919 until 2008 and it lists major events around the world that are related to anti-semitism as well as genocide.

I find the timing of releasing this exhibit & website extremely important, especially in light of the recent anti-semic voices the are spiking as a result of the current economic crises, the recent holocaust denial statement made by British Bishop Richard Williamson (“There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies”) , and of course, the constant anti-Jews and anti-Israel speeches and announcements made by the leader of Iran, as well as other terror organizations such as Hamas & Al Qaeda.

This is by far of the most impressive website I have seen lately. Add to that the fact it is about such an important topic, that I have already selected it as my top website for 2009.

I highly recommend spending some time on the site, navigating through the different sections and reading the materials. It is important to remember what the Nazi’s did in Europe 60+ years ago and remind others, so it never happens again.

So, Share it, Bookmark, Digg, Twitt, StumbleUpon it, and use every other social media method you know to spread the word about this site.

Here is the link: http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda

ushmm.org - nazi propoganda exhibit - homepage

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