Products I like and wish I actually used
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 Posted in Design, Gadgets, Usability, Web products | No Comments »Sometimes you see something that looks so cool that you want to use it, but quickly realise you don't have any actual compelling need or interest. I've raved a few times about products I'm using at the moment and really ...
Sprixi – useful image search?
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 Posted in Design, Web products | No Comments »It's trite, but it's true - the best products to build are those that people want. Sage words from Paul Graham, yet I'm always surprised at how many products out there are solutions looking for problems. That's why I was ...
Google continues to disappoint in search quality
Monday, September 21st, 2009 Posted in Web products | 2 Comments »At first I thought it was just me who noticed how poor Google has been lately, but happily some folks from Hacker News confirmed I wasn't going crazy. Today I had an odd query which got me suitably terrible results. I ...
Will Craigslist’s dominance continue?
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 Posted in Usability, Web products | No Comments »One thing has always puzzled me -- is Craigslist successful because of its simplicity? Or is it because it was first? I've heard the "you can't be successful unless you're first" line bandied about a few times, but have never truly ...
Information overload
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 Posted in Usability, Web products | No Comments »One important usability principle is to manage complexity for the user. This means both the UI itself, and contraining the data to prevent overload. Brandon Walkin wrote a nice article about managing complex UIs, but didn't talk about managing complex ...
Google doesn’t stop iterating
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 Posted in Usability, Web products | No Comments »One thing you can say about Google is its search results page has been known for its consistency and simplicity. The most radical addition was the poorly-received (by bloggers anyway) search wiki. Most changes have been behind the scenes -- ...
Microsoft Live Search – trying to increase their referrer percentage artificially?
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 Posted in Web products | No Comments »I've noticed a lot of my traffic supposedly is coming from Microsoft Live. However, looking at the referring URLs, something fishy is obviously going on: 01 May, Fri, 09:10:38 http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=authentication 01 May, Fri, 09:19:00 http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=virgin 01 May, ...
Google doesn’t trust us with our search queries anymore
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 Posted in Rants, Web products | 4 Comments »A trend I've noticed lately is that Google selectively ignores and "reimagines" my search terms. (actually, it also habitually drops my search entirely. There are bugs in both the new Google toolbar, and a bug in iGoogle that goes back at ...
PCMag.com top 20 job sites
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 Posted in Web products | No Comments »PC Magazine listed its top 20 job sites today. There were three Monster sites on there: Monster (#11), Trovix (#17) and USAJobs (#19, although they don't appear to be in any particular order). The bit I noticed of course was: Trovix's free ...
The difficulty of simple design – part 2
Sunday, March 8th, 2009 Posted in Design, Usability, Web products | No Comments »In my last post about design simplicity, I touched on the difficulties involved in what does and doesn't make the cut for a design. Recently I noticed a forum post where one of the developers behind Plex (a really amazing media ...
