23 Musings

The BBC have launched their much blogged about, widget based, drag & drop homepage this week.

I gave it a once over while still in beta and my opinion hasn't changed. I love it!

It's a fantastic design job and so easy to use. It's obviously had a usability agency all over it to ensure it meets the needs of as many users as possible too.

Hat tip to Josh at Read Write Web for his write up regarding this link that I'd never come across before. It's a demo of an analytics tool aimed at web 2.0 and AJAX websites.

With the death of the page view as the all important metric of the analyst there has appeared a need to be able to measure users engagement with a website rather than just how many pages they viewed.

The rise of AJAX has been a major player in this with whole websites sometimes being a single screen which makes many calls to databases and servers in order to refresh itself multiple times in a users visit. Thus devaluing the page view completely.

The demo shows a novel way to gauge a users engagement by measuring in time how long segments of the page stay in the browser viewing pane. This isn't perfect by a long way but it's a sign of how analytics tools will have to work in the future as websites get more difficult to measure and marketeers and management get more demanding in their hunt for data to help understand their users.

Also really interesting is the demo of a tool to measure users engagement with a banner advert. I can't wait till metrics like this exist as they may help marketers see that throwing money into display advertising is not the way forward anymore.

What I'd really like to see is mouse interaction data on pages as well. It surely is possible to collect the data on the X and Y coordinates and it's a good hint as to what area of the screen a user is actually focused on (users tend to hover the mouse over what interests them). It's great to know that the item you're interested in is within view but how do you know that users are actually looking at it? Short of installing eyetracking as defacto in PC's we may never answer questions like that!

Great post from Jakob Nielsen on the dangers of going web 2.0 crazy from a usability point of view!

Highly poingant as we're implementing a lot of AJAX at the moment. Overkill is deadly and could trash your conversion rate. Keep it minimal, useful, effective (AJAX is great for some things, pointless for others), simple, usable and give clear instructions where needed.

I agree with his pitch on user generated content as well. Pointless if your audience/customers aren't ready for it or if you have nothing interesting for them to talk about (that said, great in an emotive environment such as online travel if used wisely).

The BBC have released a beta of their homepage featuring Netvibe/Google'esque personal homepage features and loads of AJAX.

I like it. Very clean, well laid out, intuitive to navigate, the AJAX drag and drop is really easy to use. It's very web 2.0 in looks though and they may have taken that style a little too far but it is a vast improvement and looks extremely usable. Good job BBC!

AJAX World Magazine, a decent site that looks into the newer web technology of AJAX has published an interesting list of questions on the subject. The questions come from various pioneers in the technology after they were asked to pose the conundrums that they think we should be answering next to take AJAX forward and 'fix the web'.

Would love to know the answers if anyone has them!

I posted the other day surmising whether Yahoo is catching up in search based on some new metrics from Compete. The general feel from that post was that they weren't really and the numbers were questionable in value.

So, what should I see this morning? New, useful features in Yahoo's main search interface, the kind of features that make search a whole lot less painful for users and add a lot of value, helping users to target searches more effectively.

The first thing I noticed was that they have integrated images from Flickr and also playable videos, kind of like Google's universal search idea and equally as useful to the user. So if you search for a music artist (eg. Unkle) you should get images and video in the results along with useful additions such as links to albums, lyrics, photos and more videos. Next I did a search for a hotel (eg. 'hudson hotel new york') in New York (being the online travel buff that I am) and the top result in this case was a Yahoo Local listing for the hotel complete with map links, again extremely useful (although possibly doing themselves out of a small amount of ad revenue here). Another cool feature is the inclusion of custom results for searches such as health related (eg. 'lyme disease'), quick easy access to relevant info is the killer in search and here Yahoo have it spot on.

And then there's the biggest and most useful addition, and it's an addition that Google haven't yet implemented... It's an AJAX based search assistant panel that appears if it senses you hesitate while typing a search query. It works as an auto-complete assistant and also a guided search tool as it will both try to guess what you were typing and give you suggestions as well. This is extremely powerful and really makes search easier for the user. It also adds a lot of value to advertisers as it should mean more qualified clicks on paid search results as the searches are better informed.

I'm actually really surprised this has come out of Yahoo first, I've been waiting for Google to implement something like this for a while now but for once Yahoo have the upper hand. Now all they need to do is sort out the problems with their paid search results (relevancy, gaming etc), fix their algorithms for natural search and improve the interface and they could become my search engine of choice!

Neilsen/NetRatings has announced it will lower it's weighting given to rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at websites. It has added both 'Total Minutes' and 'Total Sessions' metrics to NetView, its syndicated Internet audience measurement service.

This is to counter the problems their measurements encouter with rich applications using AJAX etc which allow users to interact with websites and services without reloading pages.

This has been coming for a while and I look forward to seeing the shake up in the rankings based on their metrics. I can think of a few sites that should benefit (due to users interacting with single pages for some time) and I can also think of a few sites that should suffer (due to users clicking around blindly and then leaving).

Google news have now launched a visual way to read the news through a new interface which displays images from the news stories of the day along with the headlines and links to the stories.

It's a really nice interface and as you hover over an image the list of headlines on the right scrolls and highlights those that are associated (nice AJAX work).

I like this way of browsing the news, now Google, please could you reverse engineer it so that when I hover over a headline and intro on the text version I get to see an associated image?

As a techy at heart I occasionally come across a resource which inspires me to have a hack around with some code and be creative.

Today I found www.ajaxrain.com. It's simply a resource of some of the nicest AJAX effects and functions available.

Well worth a dig for the nostalgic techies amongst you!

Google has released into beta what web users have been needing for years; web apps that work offline.

Google Gears is a browser plug-in that will let users run web apps whether they're connected to the internet or not. The goal is to enable a single, standardised way to add offline capability to web apps.

Well worth a play I reckon! More details here.

Good article on the BBC website citing Jakob Nielsens comments regarding the state of web design today and it's impact on users. Jakob says that the hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design and said that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Valid points by Mr Nielsen, but I believe this is just indicative of a boom (yes the web is booming). There are so many people trying to jump into the online arena that many are bound to overlook the basics, also with so many design firms out there more of them are going to be of a lower quality (same as happened in the dotcom boom). There will always be badly designed sites, and with the temptation to add endless filters, widgets and features there will be many mistakes made along the way.

Don't fall into the trap of adding features for features sake, make them useful and usable if you want customers to keep coming back!

Netvibes has announced the launch of it's Universe feature this morning. It's a Netvibes page that users can build (adding content that they've chosen), and then make it accessible to anyone online. Great idea! I'm always turning friends onto the power of Netvibes as it's my personal homepage of choice, being able to send them a link to my page so they can see one set up and ready to go would be really useful. It would be even more useful if they could then save your page as a base for their own!

Branded Universes are great for companies who want to create a branded, controlled place for people to access their content from multiple sources. These also could be really useful for companies wanting a quick and easy intranet style homepage for their employees (eg. showing stock, news, blog mentions etc etc).

Netvibes is working again now. Tariq posted on their blog saying that they had to upgrade the servers to cope with demand. Pretty good going and promising for take up I reckon!

Fortify Software, the leading provider of security products that help companies identify, manage and remediate software vulnerabilities, today announced that its Security Research Group has documented the first major vulnerability associated specifically with Web 2.0 and AJAX-style software. Termed JavaScript Hijacking, the vulnerability allows an attacker to steal critical data by emulating unsuspecting users. To combat this issue, Fortify has released an in-depth security advisory that details this vulnerability, how enterprises can determine if they are vulnerable and how they can fix the issue. A copy of this advisory can be downloaded at http://www.fortifysoftware.com/advisory.jsp.

As part of Fortify’s work, the 12 most popular AJAX frameworks were analyzed, including frameworks from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the open source community. Fortify determined that among them, only Direct Web Remoting (DWR) 2.0 implements mechanisms for preventing JavaScript Hijacking. The rest of the frameworks do not explicitly provide any protection and do not mention any security concerns in their documentations. Even if an application does not use any of the frameworks listed above, it may be vulnerable if it contains AJAX components that use JavaScript as a data transfer format for sensitive data.

This could potentially affect apps such as Gmail so is concerning. I've always had my doubts about the security of data transferred in AJAX apps but not having the technical resource to look into it in detail have never investigated fully. My concerns have prevented us using a lot of AJAX features in our site and where we do it is all secure as no sensitive data is involved. Imagine the furore if this proves to be a major problem, just how many Web 2.0 start-ups could fold as they are forced to re-engineer their apps to secure themselves. I'm sure it won't be that bad, but it is something that needs taking seriously!

In a fairly major departure from Google's usual habits of plain, clean, white web pages they are now offering users of their personalised (read Web 2.0/Ajax) homepage an option to have a nice colourful background in the header area. The internet search box at the top of the homepage is placed in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the weather. A nice touch, and with Google homepage gaining penetration it's sure to attract some usage.

The 'skins' will be unveiled today and are sure to go down well with all but the die hard Google users. And the fact that these decorations change with the time and weather is also a new draw to get people to try their homepage for themselves.

Apparently the designs will also contain surprises, such as easter eggs that will pop out at (wait for it) Easter, and one would expect a jolly red man perhaps at Xmas...

Here's an example:

More from the Sydney Morning Herald here.

Very useful little app I came across today that I thought I'd share. It's an Ajax based tool for creating loading indicator GIFs on the fly. There's quite a selection of styles and they come in really handy for most web designers. Example GIF below.


Check out Ajaxload!

Ask.com is the latest search engine to release a testbed interface to trial new technologies, ideas and try to simplify the task of searching the web for users everywhere.

Askx.com is a much more simplified interface making use of Ajax. It features a three-column layout with the left hand column being used for suggestions for broadening or alternate searches, the middle column featuring both the sponsored and organic search results and the right hand column featuring results from shopping, images and video.

It looks much better than the current Ask.com interface, much slicker and easier to use. The left hand column suggestions are really good, the alternatives are highly relevant to the searches I tested which is a really useful feature especially for research.

So, it looks great, loads quickly, is functional and ultimately useful. Wonder how long it will be till some of the features get pulled into the main Ask.com site.

Microsoft have released a redesigned homepage on their main corporate website. It is literally just their homepage that's changed, the rest of the site is as it has ever been.

The redesigned homepage looks much better, the layout is much more up to date and they've obviously taken notice of current design, colour and layout trends.

However, this keeping up with the latest trends looks to have been taken a little too far! They've really tried to emulate the Web2.0 crew by stuffing a clunky AJAX navigation module into the page. It's a nice bit of navigation but is incredibly slow to load, in Firefox 2.0 it is so slow and caused the browser to hang while loading meaning you couldn't switch to another tab or use any other browser features. It's slightly better in IE7 but only marginally, the speed is still slower than I'd expect for any piece of website navigation.

The speed of the nav is verging on being so slow it's unusable, it made me want to find another site to find the info I was looking for straight away. Of course, being Microsoft, chances are the info you want may only be on their website so you may have no choice but to persevere...

My opinion? Top marks for trying to bring their homepage up to date, zero for execution.

Google Finance has had a sneaky upgrade which I only noticed last night when for some unknow reason I decided to have a look at it over my usual destination Yahoo Finance.

I've always liked the charting functionality on Google, so much more usable than Yahoo, but Yahoo has always won me over with the depth of content.

Google have now extended the charting functionality to allow comparisons of stocks over periods up to 40 years (yes that's 40 years of data available to all you stock junkies!). There are also new tools to allow you to sort stocks by different indicators and import tools.

While I love the AJAX used on Google it's still not compelling enough a destination to make me stop visiting Yahoo Finance. Yahoo need to upgrade their charting tools and they'll blow Google out the water again! This is one area that Google may have lost the battle over.....

Good news that ABCE (those people who certificate traffic for advertising purposes) are to move to using unique users as the metric of choice from January 2007. It's about time we moved away from the irrelevant page impressions metric which has been so easily faked for so long.

With the advent of web 2.0 page impressions have become even more irrelevant especially with the Ajax based page refresh approach.

So this is a really good move and will help advertisers work out if a site is worthwhile paying to be displayed on. But (there's always a but), how is a unique user defined??

There's a number of issues around this:

• A unique user could just be hitting a site by mistake and disappear in seconds. Is there a minimum time that they must be active?
• Unique users are usually counted by IP or cookie (is there another way?). So two unique users could actually be the same user.
• Sites can drive huge amounts of unique users to their website through a campaign, but when that finishes the volume may disappear completely. So maybe the metric could be an average over a number of months?

Still, all the above applies to page impressions and a whole lot more so this is a big advancement that will help advertisers gauge a sites worth much more accurately!

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the improvements made in IE7 when it was compared to IE6 by the guys at Zimbra when using a Web2.0 app.

Well, they've now revisited the tests and added Firefox 2 into the mix and directly compared it to IE7. The tests were completed using the same interface as before (an app making a lot of use of Javscript and DOM manipulation).

The results seem to confirm what I would have suspected; whilst IE7 has made significant improvements over IE6 it has still not caught up with Firefox in it's performance with handling complex javascript interfaces.

Full details of Zimbra's testing are available here.