Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

iA, a strategic design agency based in Tokyo, released the web trend map for 2008. Around 300 of the most influential and successful web sites and services were pinned down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

This year, the map (which is available as a 3D poster as well) not only uses Snap Shots to display previews of the home pages of the different sites, but it also lists Snap Shots among the successful and influential ones. Next to Snap Shots, on the “Technology Line” (green), you can find MyBlogLog, WordPress, Technorati, Reddit, Blogger, Feedburner, Drupal, Opera, Adobe, Flash, PDF, MySQL, IBM, Linux, Python, Sony and others.

This is a very nice acknowledgement to the Snap Shots service, and a great implementation using Snap Shots.

A few weeks ago I criticized the language inconsistency and other bugs that existed on the Apple Israel web site. It’s time to follow up and see whether things have improved:

• If you just look at the home page, then yes, the site feels more localized to Hebrew speakers. The top navigation bar uses more Hebrew labels than in the past. However, the experience across the site is still inconsistent. The home page (and many other pages on the site) serves as a simple launch pad since many of the links take the user to apple.com.

• The support section has improved and contains plenty of content in Hebrew including quick starts, PDF guides, FAQ and more.

• There are still annoying bugs that I don’t expect to find on an official Apple site, such as linked “Store coming soon” image  that leads nowhere, or problems with Safari for Windows (as I wrote in the previous post).

Last note – In the past few weeks, some of the top search keywords that led traffic to this blog were “apple Israel” and “apple.co.il”. I expect this to increase when iDigital starts selling the iPhone, MacBook Air and other products. I wonder when will Rami Prashove, the owner of apple.co.il, get an offer he won’t be able to refuse.

If you are interested in user interface design and usability, I recommend reading these:

• Five tips for good usability – Usability does not have to be an organization nightmare.
• Ten usability nightmares – Learn from the mistakes of others.

I have always known that cellular carriers will do everything they can to keep a subscriber. But when this business philosophy turns to be the way they run their web properties, things become ridiculous.

To opt out from Cellcom’s newsletter (Israel’s largest wireless carrier) you would have to wait up to 7 business days! Don’t they have something better to do with their call center staff then to manually go over opt out requests? Any email marketing management software, like Constant Contact, will do it automatically and most important, immediately.

A few days ago I responded on the Snap blog to a post on Read/WriteWeb and explained why Snap Shots is the most popular semantic application in the world. One of the applications mentioned in the RWW post is SmartLinks by AdaptiveBlue. As I wrote in my post, it looks very-very-very similar to Snap Shots.

Less than 24 hours after my post hit the wires, I received an email from MyBlogLog notifying me that I was added to a community that I “have shown repeated interest in: adaptiveblue”. Well, it’s always a good practice to follow the competition, but to be added without my permission to a community I have no interest to be part of, and to be notified after the fact – that’s brutal and rude!

Think about it this way. Amazon has one of the best recommendation engines on the web. Can you image that a recommended product automatically gets added to your shopping cart just because you visit the product page once or twice…

MyBlogLog should change this features in two ways:

• Implement some web manners and change this feature to be permission based (opt-in)
• Tune the Recommendation engine so it won’t jump to conclusions and suggest me a community just because I visited the site once or twice. A repeated interest means at least three times. But again, this should just be a suggestion.

A month ago I suggested to MyBlogLog to improve the way they display user’s online identities under the profile page. Today I noticed that they have listen and added favicons, with the matching social service name as Alt text, next to the usernames. This is a small change that makes a big difference.

Kudos for listening and fixing.

During the 4th year of my undergraduate degree studies I took a Human Computer Interaction course. I remember that our professor used the ATM machine’s interface as an example of how to design a good interface to a product that is used by millions of people on a daily basis.

For many years I though that people who design and build ATM machines do not really use them. Otherwise, how would you explain the minimalist graphic design, poor messaging, lack of personalization and the length flow the user is required to go through in many cases.

Yesterday, I stopped at a Bank of America branch today to get some cash. A new machine made by Diebold was recently installed there. This specific machine was out of service, but instead of the typical small dark green screen with an “Out of service” message, a large full color screen with a very helpful message welcomed me. The screen listed all the nearby ATMs (I wonder when will they add a “Map This” feature using one of the popular mapping API services) — killer feature #1.

Since there were two other ATMs at the same location, I went and used a working one. This new model has another killer feature called “Fast Cash” – simply insert your ATM card, type in your PIN code using the touch screen interface, click on the Fast Cash button and you are done – it saves at least 3 key strokes to the average user and especially useful for those who tend to double park their card and block the road just to get some cash…

The machine lets you customize the “Fast Cash” amount, so every time you withdraw money using one of these new ATM machines, you are being presented with the same amount — killer feature #2.

Now this is what I call a user friendly product and a well designed interface.

While doing a search on eBay I noticed an invitation to try their new search at the Playground. I took the plunge and immediately liked the new experience and that fact it became cleaner, more visual and with better search refinement controls – just like how a product search should be (see Like.com, thefind.com, PriceGrabber.com and others).

Here are a few additional observations on the new interface:

• The active search criteria is clearly displayed above the result set. The user does not have to guess which options are on. In the old version it was more difficult and less clear – the user had to look at the drop downs located at the long left column (often this required scrolling). In the new interface, it is also very easy to remove a criteria using the red [x]. One things that would be a nice addition is the ability to add multiple options from the same category where it is applicable (for example – Brand or Technology)

• As can be seen in the image above, a new mode for viewing results was added called “Snapshot”. It displays a tile of product images and when mousing over an image additional information is being displayed — just like Snap’s Snap Shots. This makes me wonder – is “Snap Shot” becoming a generic term (and verb) similar to what happened to Xerox and Google…?

• The “Refine your Search” left column was redesigned and is now cleaner, shorter and displays most of the options above the fold line. This was achieved by moving some of the less frequently used options into a popup window (although some design work is still required to make sure all options are visible and there is not need to scroll), the usage of cleaner controls like the price slider (very popular on travel search sites like Kayak and Farechase) and simple controls instead of check boxes and drop downs.

Bottom line – Kudos to the eBay team for creating an improved search experience. My only suggestion to you – add a “Filter by Color” option where applicable (Clothing, Shoes, Accessories and more).

Update: Renee VonBergen, a sr. manager for buyer experience at eBay, corrected me – a color slider is available in certain categories. The direction is really good but could be improved:

• It would be helpful to see it on more products – some people pick their cell phone or guitar by the color
• If you pick a color that returns no results, you get to something that is similar to a dead-end. In this case it would be helpful (for both eBay and the user) to get recommendations to similar products (“We could not find green shoes but we have blue ones”)

An interesting launch strategy – ask users to leave the page open in browser for hours/days in order to create a large pool of initial users with great hunger to try your new service.

As it currently looks, I think we are a day or two away from the launch of the new Hype Machine. Still, this is a great viral marketing tactic.

I am happy to announce that the experience for my readers who use iPhone or iPod Touch to read this blog has been upgraded.

I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plug-in on my blog. This plug-in automatically reformats the blog content for optimized viewing on an iPhone and iPod Touch.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, iWPhone, iPhone, iPod Touch, Usability, Mobile