causes app: form tips

The Causes application on facebook uses dynamic pop-ups with tips while filling the form to create a new cause. Nice implementation.

facebook: framing external links

Facebook started framing external links (at least the ones from posted items) with a small Facebook iframe. 

tip promo

A little orange box alerting to a feature. 

facebook apps: getting users to bookmark your app

I’ve been noticing this kind of promos on some apps, prompting users to bookmark:

Cool site navigation

I like this tree-like navigation menu.

“concept composition” = multiple attribute selection

This article on Searchnuggets offers a fancily-phrased write-up that (in summary) says that giving users the option to select multiple values in faceted navigation is a good thing if you anticipate having users who are exploring or comparing products. It’s pretty well written though. It seems like we’re doing the right thing over at Oodle.

search vs browse

on Jacob Nielsen:

usability studies show that more than half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behavior

“all experience shows that users cannot use boolean search”

This is an interesting tid-bit from Jacob Nielsen’s site about boolean search. We know this already, but this is interesting additional research:

Boolean search should be avoided since all experience shows that users cannot use it correctly. We have studied many groups of users who have been given tasks like this:

You have the following pets: - cats - dogs Find information about your pets.

Almost all users will enter the query cats AND dogs. In our studies, they typically do not find anything, since the site never mentions both animals on the same page. Upon encountering a “no hits found” message, the vast majority of users concludes that there is no information available about these pets. Experienced programmers normally use the same erroneous query, but when they get the null result, they typically say “oh, yes, I should have used an OR instead of the AND.”

using pop-out tips to draw attention – kayak

The usage of these pop-out tips is increasing lately. This one on KAYAK is just one example.

good search state – forrester

The Forrester research library is not designed in any impressive way, but it’s decent, and the search state signaling pops out pretty well.