Midway through the talk, Shum mentioned that Google’s stated philosophy is to minimize the time that users interact with search results pages. A search engine should do little more than give you easy access to maximally-relevant external content and then get out of your way. I couldn’t agree with this more, but Bing’s strategy is very different. Shum said that their goal is to get people to interact completely with Bing, instead of solely acting as a helpful navigator. Bing is littered with features intended to keep you on Bing, including quick-info boxes at the top of search results, fancy inline slideshows, and built-in Wolfram|Alpha support.

Bing is designed around “complex task and decision sessions,” instead of simple query-response chatter. I don’t entirely agree with this use case. I understand that some people may like the type of interactivity that Bing provides, but that’s not how people I know search for things on the internet. People don’t go to Google with the goal of getting their information from Google. They search with the intent of gaining access to some relevant piece of information on some other site. It’s like Bing is trying to be the illegitimate child of Google and Wikipedia, but ends up with AOL.

As a side note, Shum’s talk gave me an interesting view into the workflow of a Microsoft head-honcho. During the live demo portion of his talk, I was startled by his Internet Explorer setup. His four toolbars (including separate ones for Live Search and Bing), in addition to the IE browser chrome, left about 65% of the browser window actually occupied by webpages. I wish I had a screenshot. Take into account the giant blocks of ads centerstage and to the right of results in Bing, and you’re left with precious little room for useful content.

The talk as a whole was somewhat frustrating because I want Bing to succeed. I like Google as a whole (so much so that I’m interning there this summer), but their dominance of the search market is pretty ridiculous. As consumers, we all benefit from competition between services in the same space. As such, it’d be nice to see Google get some solid competition to keep everyone on their toes. I hope that the Bing team continues to iterate on their aspirations for usability and develops a kickass service to shake things up.

With regard to typography, Josef Albers writes:

“The concept that ‘the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading’ was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by ‘modernistic’ typographers…. Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading. Without going into comparisons and details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading — because of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.”

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963, revised edition 1975), p. 4.

The message should speak for itself, but I found it striking in particular given the now-cliché trend of lowercase sans-serif company and website names. This was printed over 25 years before the era of flickr, digg, facebook, and mint.

Mind you, this trend in part tends to only apply to logos and images, leaving websites’ copy properly capitalized. However, it takes actual effort to find a modern web service brandishing serifs in body content. If your product’s brand is trying to convey a sense of easy-going, friendly, hipness, then you’re more likely to eschew statistical readability for the cool finnesse of helvetica, lucida grande, and tahoma.

One of the most powerful things about digg is that you come and you hit a button and the number goes up by one. It’s not a question of you like it or you don’t like it, it’s just kind of if you like it, hit it. That’s really important, I think. And it also makes things more positive because it’s not about disliking things.
Daniel Burka

The idea here is that if you center a user’s interaction with an interface around a positive action, then that user is more likely to come away with a positive experience with that interface. In this way, digg focuses on the act of showing interest in a certain story or object. In this sense, there really is no negative aspect to digging. The bury feature isn’t meant to be an outlet for personal disapproval of a story. It’s meant for stories that aren’t appropriate for the site. If you don’t like a story, just don’t digg it. It’s that simple.

This simplicity has directly led to digg’s popularity. The ease with which users interact with the site opens it up to a wide audience. People may only read 20% of the words on a page on average, but plenty are willing to make a single click to show support for a story on digg.

As a side note, apparently if you bury with a purpose (i.e. specifying a story as innacurate or OK, This is Lame), your bury counts for more. Keep this in mind the next time you see a story that shouldn’t be on the homepage.

Normally, what you want your home page to do is give is [sic] a balance between showing the user what they expect to see and attracting them to areas of your site they might not have known about but that you want them to be tempted by.
fadtastic: The New Shop Window / Home Page’s That Sell

The metaphor of a website’s home page as a storefront is a great one. Just as a shopper’s split-second glance in a store window helps determine whether they’ll soon part with their money, a user’s initial experience with a page determines its effectiveness, be it in terms of sales, influence, or branding.

The article mentions the importance of keeping the message simple, which I couldn’t agree with more. Present the necessary information in an obvious and intuitive fashion and then get out of the user’s way. The examples of Apple and Skype are very good. Both companies have always excelled at pragmatically delivering marketing dialogue.

Remember The Milk does it pretty well, too. It’s all about clearly presenting your message (what your product does, what your service can offer, what you want people to know) and leaving the fluff out.

I don’t totally agree with the inclusion of eBay as an example, though. It’s much better than it has been in the past, but still much more nervous and unintuitive than Apple or Skype. I’d be interested to see how the site would fair if they went for the Google search-box-and-button approach. That can be saved for another day and post, though.

The fadtastic article’s definitely worth checking out. There’s a bunch of other useful articles at the end of it too, for even further reading.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles. In a sense, constraints amount to the solution half-built. It is merely up to us to then realize the other half according to what these signposts indicate is appropriate. Nowhere in this concept does self-expression find any valid foothold.
A List Apart: Articles: On Creativity

While getting caught up on A List Apart, this paragraph by Andy Rutledge stuck out. I’ve always thought this without realizing it.

To many people the word “constraint” carries a negative connotation. Constraints are things like a curfew or a short budget.

But to a designer, or anyone working on a project, constraints can be godsends. They act as limitations innate to the task that narrow your focus and thus decrease the amount of overall work you have to do.

It’s like having to mow a manageable, fenced-in lawn as opposed to a sprawling field.

The colors and layout are all but identical. The only difference is the orientation of the black and blue portions. I can’t decide whether or not it’s possible that it’s a coincidence.

A part of me wonders if it’s even post-worthy. Favicons serve a distinct purpose in making sites more recognizable and it seems someone designing a tech-oriented site (with a digg widget on the front page) would know about del.icio.us.

Is it reasonable to speculate on favicon plagiarism?

One interesting point that Victor presents is the notion that interaction (i.e. navigation through a website or software) is in essence detrimental.

“Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. Many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic.”

This idea that navigation is inherently bad reminded me of a design trend among large-scale news websites that I find extremely irritating. You know how a lot of big old-media sites tend to break up articles into way more pages than are necessary? For example, sites that break up semi-long articles into half a dozen pages in order to display one viewport’s worth of text at a time and “Top n ” pages like this one.

I HATE that.

Pages like these are so tedious to navigate through that I usually don’t bother reading them. The amount of time and effort wasted by having to click and load separate pages containing little blurbs of information is much greater than the effort taken to scroll down. It’s time old-media websites realize this and stop frustratingly hand-feeding us content.