The new york times had an interesting article on how yahoo finance visits compare to google. I found a particular snippet very interesting.
James Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo’s audience group, said, “In our research with users, we found that the more information that was displayed on the page, the greater the anxiety.”
He said Yahoo deliberately adopted what he calls “the Apple model — simplicity in design; a clean, simple look, not overburdening our users with too much information on the page.”
This is a brilliant concept that we sometimes overlook as designers. “less is more”. When designing applications, or interactive websites I usually go through an exercise of labeling items on a page with a question mark. The question that needs to be answered is, is this a distraction? Does it really need to be on this page. Sometimes we tend to provide to much information on a page. I never put the term anxiety to what users are actually thinking, but I think it makes perfect sense. Sure, people can be exaustive when navigating a page, but if they are subconciously anxious — then you are not doing your job as a designer.
A great book that articulates this point is “Dont Make Me Think”
http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/dp/0789723107
This fall I will be teaching another class at NYU: Apache Web server. There are not a lot of opportunities to learn Apache in a hands on setting. This course is applicable to all types of web developers. From front end designers, content management system operators, and back end systems admins. I will discuss several real world scenarios with the web server as it pertains to topics such as search engine optimization or security. For more details check out the course listing.
http://www.scps.nyu.edu/course-detail/X52.9805/20093/apache-web-server
So there I was…giving another presentation in our conference room at work. I was using the controlled desktop which uses windows Vista. Every time I opened up a new browser, it defaulted to Bing. Now, this is clearly an obvious form of pitching a product. We see it all the time with google built into firefox and the iphone.
What is interesting to me, is that Microsoft still has complete ownership of the corporate desktop. Sure, I use a mac at work, and I am not a zealot. I use windows when I need to, and there is no ill will.
Over the past few weeks i have seen Bing in a number of places, it just sort of snuck up on me. I personally dont think this will squash google, because it has to absolutely crush google in order to replace it as a search engine. Its just the ubiquitous corporate nature of Microsoft’s products that I find interesting. They have a tremendous advantage here and i suspect they will be cashing in on it.
