We found 262,353 photos matching [keyword]. Click “search” above to see!

Also the search box is prefiled with the query.

All in one, a simple strategy that could boost the pageviews by a few percents.

Try it for yourself

Here are my main reasons:

1. Is 2008. No browser is an island anymore. I expect from my browser to be connected to web services and my browsers from different locations. Scared by bad PR Google has done no integration with its services (that’s if you don’t count Gears) and that’s a big down for me. Here is what Google could have done or at least offer the options for the users to enable/disable:

a) Browsing history. In IE / FF, if you have installed Google toolbar, Google keeps a record of your history online and makes that searchable from any point. Some might complain about privacy issues but considering my daily activities the gains are bigger then the looses

b) Bookmarks. Google has a pretty decent bookmarking service. Of course you can use the bookmarklet option but there’s no integration with the browser default bookmarking system. Kudos for Foxmarks on that.

2. Again is 2008. Every user has a wide range of browsing habits and patterns. You cannot make everybody happy and because of that you make your software extensible. FAIL. Maybe in time extensibility will be added and extensions will be created. But I think that’s a distant future we are talking about. Core extensions I missed during this period

a) Google Toolbar

b) Foxmarks

c) Stumbleupon

d) GTDInbox and Xoopit

e) Yahoo’s new Inquisitor (I wished for that from the moment I saw it available for Safari)

f) SEO for Firefox (DUHHHHH)

g) Twitterfox – this is the only app I use for Twitter. Usage pattern has decreased since using Chrome but that will be fixed from now

3. Plugins integration. That was one of the main causes of frustration and cursing. C’monnnnn is 2008 again. Make the god damn flash work. I’m depending on YouTube for my business and I’m a big fan of South Park, John Stewart and Colbert. Constant crashes (can’t remember if I ever played a clip without crashes), slow streaming and so on. Google Analytics is becoming unusable. And let’s not get to Silverlight that I need it for Live Mesh

4. Resources. Chrome is fast. Fast to lunch more precisely but that’s all. I was using DivxLand Media Subtitler that’s using my processor up to 99%. I cannot do anything on my PC and Chrome was dead. Not loading any page. Today I tried Firefox and works like a charm.

Conclusions

I won’t uninstall Chrome. But is not my default browser anymore. I’ll use it mainly for it’s incognito mode to login to multiple accounts without using all my available browsers (7 or 8 i think ). Perhaps in about 1 year Chrome will get better but so far Firefox fits all my working/entertainment/communication habits.

The challenge appears when you have too many static pages and you want to group them and show them to the visitors on certain conditions. In my projects so far, I have used GD Pages Navigator. This is a widget based plugin that does it job pretty fine. 

Today I’ve stumbled across Wordpress Menu Creator that resembles features of other CMS systems like Joomla or Mambo. The resemblance might help more some users and developers to transition to Wordpress as a CMS platform. Haven’t used it yet, but I’ll sure give it a try on the next challenge.

Mistakes:

1. They require as mandatory both last and first name? Ha? Why? How does this help the service? What problem does it solve and I can’t figure out?
2. No real time validation. C’monnn is 2008. Through in some AJAX and validate the fields BEFORE I hit submit
3. Step by step validation. By this I mean that when you have a form with multiple fields, after submit, you get only the error for the first field. You correct that, hit submit, you get the next error (and of course each time you to fill in the captcha and the password)
4. Not marking the mandatory fields. Tie that to all of the above and you’ll get the image

• Due to the nature of content, the law requires is
• Marketing / demographic purposes
• both

This tip doesn’t refer to porn sites. Over there is a simple 2 buttons solution: Are you 18+? YES / NO

This tip is useful for sites  that fall under the 3rd category, sites that require age verification for both legal and marketing purposes (ex: game websites)

There are 2 ways you can do this:

1. Dropdown boxes
2. Text boxes

The correct answer in this case is to use text boxes. This is so because by using dropdowns your demographic data will be false. This happens because in general users are too lazy to go through a scrolling list and identify the correct values. They will just scroll enough to be the legal age and that’s it. If you use dropdowns, don’t be surprised if the web marketing department will say that your latest gory shooter is played by persons aged 50+.

By using text boxes, users are forced to input some data and in this case they just too lazy to lie about it and they’ll input the correct values.

If you describe to a technical person those features, or even if you only name them, instantly they’ll understand what are they about and they’ll see great use in them. Unfortunately we, technical people, tend to forget that our frame of mind has nothing to do with the regular user. The regular user that comes in huge numbers and it’s our main revenue source. And by forgetting that, we overdevelop things that we like and by doing that we overdelay the launch of the product or we ignore the common features considering them insignificant.

The YouTube features I mentioned above work like total crap. The playlists never display the correct number of videos and the custom players never display all the videos and more than that, this morning were displaying other people playlists. Who the hell cares beside me and maybe a dozen other people. Youtube works well on what is suppsoed to do. Upload and play videos.

If you are in a control position, try explaining to the top management or your client that the fancy crap he needs are not worth any delay. Time is money and the markets are crowded. Release in small chunks and release often. Keep in mind that your products has a final target in the masses not in the elites. Screw the early adopters. Let them complain. If your unique, fancy (and useless most of the cases)  features are so important, the early adopters will wait for them.

First of all you need to validate any email address that your users use for registering an account. This is important for 2 reasons:

1. Helps those users that misspell their address
2. Prevents bot attacks (on one of my sites I had a bot that created 10k accounts in 2h)

Emailing your users, gives them a reminder of your service. I consider myself an early adopter and I create accounts on various services and than I tend to forget them. If I don’t have an email from you in the first 5min, your chances to be forgotten are very high.

Also, periodically email your users, especially those with none to less activity to remind them how useful your service is and if you had added new features. There is no golden rule on how often you have to email them but from a few tests you will be able to figure it out.

Here is an example on how some small changes can lead to feature awarness.

A few nights ago, my girlfriend called me that she saw that Google added, to the compose screen, the option to create invites for Gcal. While I knew that this was an pretty old feature, I knew that something has changed but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Happily, you can switch between the old and new interface and than I saw it:

Gmail old interface:

Gmail new interface:

(click on thumbnails for the bigger pictures)

What really changed  so that feature become more vizible to the “regular” user:

• In the old version,  the link to create new event was placed on the far right of the screen. Most people don’t move their eyes so far so is practically invisible even though it’s in front of your eyes.
• Labeling. In the original version, the feature was labeled “” Add event info”. That basically doesn’t say anything to “regular” users. What event? It’s an freakin email. What info should I add?(those questions appeared in the rare case they spotted it). In the new version, the label says “Add event invitation”. This label is more clear and in plain view.

Those 2 small changes might appear as insignificant to most of the people. But I am willing to bet a lot that the spike in usage after the roll out was pretty huge.

So, summing it up. Just because you use the internet on a daily basis and develop web apps that doesn’t mean that those are going to be user friendly. Not even if you are a huge, popular company. Hiring  a team or an usability company, might not also guarantee your success but at least you have more chances than your competitors

Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.” “What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.

…

Fastness of recognition: The faster we recognise something (heuristically) the more attractive we judge it to be and if the image match prototypes the faster the processing.

How this translates to user interface design? Simple. When you design a UI pay close attention to your maket segment and demographics. Try to find out what your users are using on a daily basis and have a close look to your most successful competitors. Try to mimic them without being a clone and you’ll have instant satisfaction.