Users were eager to see Delicious improve under new management. Unfortunately the direction and actions taken by Delicious over the last 8 months make me pine for the days when it was the toy thrown in the corner by Yahoo!

Where Did Delicious Go Wrong?

I know new management means well and have likely poured a lot of time and effort into this enterprise. But I see problems in strategy, tactics and execution that have completely undermined user trust and loyalty.

Bookmarklets

The one mission critical feature which fuels the entire enterprise falls into disrepair. Seriously? This is unacceptable. The bookmarklets that allow users to bookmark and tag links were broken for long stretches of time and continue to be rickety and unreliable. This lack of support is akin to disrespect of Delicious users.

Stacks

Here’s how they work. Select some related links, plug them into a stack and watch the magic happen. You can customize your stack by choosing images to feature, and by adding a title, description and comment for each link. Then publish the stack to share it with the world. If you come across another stack you like, follow it to easily find it again and catch any updates.

Instead of the nearly frictionless interaction we’ve grown accustomed to, we’re now asked to perform additional and duplicative work. I’ve already created ‘stacks’ by bookmarking links with appropriate tags. Want to see a stack of links about SEO, look at my bookmarks that are tagged SEO. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.

Not only have they introduced complexity into a simple process, they’ve perverted the reason for bookmarking links. The beauty of Delicious was that you were ‘curating’ without trying. You simply saved links by tags and then one day you figured out that you had a deep reservoir of knowledge on a number of topics.

Stacks does the opposite and invites you to think about curation. I’d argue this creates substantial bias, invites spam and is more aligned with the dreck produced by Squidoo.

Here’s another sign that you’ve introduced unneeded complexity into a product.

In just one sentence they reference stacks, links, playlists and topics. They haven’t even mentioned tags! Am I creating stacks or playlists? If I’m a complete novice do I understand what ‘stack links’ even means?

Even if I do understand this, why do I want to do extra work that Delicious should be doing for me?

Design

The visual makeover doesn’t add anything to the platform. Do pretty pictures and flashy interactions really help me discover content? Were Delicious users saying they would use the service more if only it looked prettier? I can’t believe that’s true. Delicious had the same UI for years and yet continued to be a popular service.

Delicious is a utilitarian product. It’s about saving, retrieving and finding information.

Sure, Flipboard is really cool but just because a current design pattern is in vogue doesn’t mean it should be applied to every site.

UX

There are a number of UX issues that bother me but I’ll highlight the three that have produced the most ire. The drop down is poorly aligned causing unnecessary frustration.

More than a few times I’ve gone across to to click on one of the drop down links only to have it disappear before I could finish the interaction.

The iconography is non-intuitive and doesn’t even have appropriate hover text to describe the action.

Does the + sign mean bookmark that link? What’s the arrow? Is that a pencil?

Now, I actually get the iconography. But that’s the problem! I’m an Internet savvy user, yet the new design seems targeted at a more mainstream user. Imagine if Pinterest didn’t have the word ‘repin’ next to their double thumbtack icon?

Finally, the current bookmarklet supports the tag complete function. You begin typing in a tag and you can simply select from a list of prior tags. This is a great timesaver. It even creates a handy space at the end so you can start your next tag. Or does it?

WTF!? Why is my tag all muddled together?

Delicious improved tagging by allowing spaces in tags. That means that all tags have to be separated by commas. I get that. It’s not the worst idea either. But the tag complete feature should support this new structure. Because it looks like it functions correctly by inserting a space after the tag. I mean, am I supposed to use the tag complete feature and then actually backspace and add a comma?

It’s not the best idea to make your users feel stupid.

Uptime

The service has been unstable, lately as poor as it was at the height of Twitter’s fail whale problem. I’ve seen that empty loft way too much.

What Should Delicious Do Instead?

It’s easy to bitch but what could Delicious have done instead? Here’s what I think they should have (and still could) do.

Filtering

An easy first step to improve Delicious would be to provide a better way to filter bookmarks. The only real way to do so right now is by adding additional tags. It would have been easy to introduce time (date) and popularity (number of times bookmarked) facets.

They could have gone an extra step and offered the ability to group bookmarks by source. This would let me see the number of bookmarks I have by site by tag. How many times have I bookmarked a Search Engine Land article about SEO? Not only would this be interesting, it maps to how we think and remember. You’ll hear people say something like: “It was that piece on management I read on Harvard Business Review.”

There are a tremendous number of ways that the new team could have simply enhanced the current functionality to deliver added value to users.

Recommendations

Delicious could create recommendations based on current bookmark behavior and tag interest. The data is there. It just needs to be unlocked.

It would be relatively straightforward to create a ‘people who bookmarked this also bookmarked’ feature. Even better if it only displayed those I haven’t already bookmarked. That’s content discovery.

This could be extended to natural browse by tag behavior. A list of popular bookmarks with that tag but not in my bookmarks would be pretty handy.

Delicious could also alert you when it saw a new bookmark from a popular tag within your bookmarks. This would give me a quick way to see what was ‘hot’ for topics I cared about.

Recommendations would put Delicious in competition with services like Summify, KnowAboutIt, XYDO and Percolate. It’s a crowded space but Delicious is sitting on a huge advantage with the massive amount of data at their disposal.

Automated Stacks

Instead of introducing unnecessary friction Delicious could create stacks algorthmically using tags. This could be personal (your own curated topics) or across the entire platform. Again, why Delicious is asking me to do something that they can and should do is a mystery to me.

Also, the argument that people could select from multiple tags to create more robust stacks doesn’t hold much water. Delicious knows which tags appear together most often and on what bookmarks. Automated stacks could pull from multiple tags.

The algorithm that creates these stacks would also constantly evolve. They would be dynamic and not prone to decay. New bookmarks would be added and bookmarks that weren’t useful (based on age, lack of clicks or additional bookmarks) would be dropped.

Delicious already solved the difficult human element of curation. It just never applied appropriate algorithms to harness that incredible asset.

Social Graph Data

Delicious could help order bookmarks and augment recommendations by adding social graph data. The easiest thing to do would be to determine the number of Likes, Tweets and +1s each bookmark received. This might simply mirror bookmark popularity though. So you would next look at who saved the bookmarks and map their social profiles to determine authority and influence. Now you could order bookmarks that were saved by thought leaders in any vertical.

A step further, Delicious could look at the comments on a bookmarked piece of content. This could be used as a signal in itself based on the number of comments, could be mined to determine sentiment or could provide another vector for social data.

Trunk.ly was closing in on this since they already aggregated links via social profiles. Give them your Twitter account and they collect and save what you Tweet. This frictionless mechanism had some drawbacks but it showed a lot of promise. Unfortunately Trunk.ly was recently purchased by Delicious. Maybe some of the promise will show up on Delicious but the philosophy behind stacks seems to be in direct conflict with how Trunk.ly functioned.

Analytics

Delicious could have provided analytics to individuals as to the number of times their bookmarks were viewed, clicked or re-bookmarked. The latter two metrics could also be used to construct an internal influence metric. If I bookmark something because I saw your bookmark, that’s essentially on par with a retweet.

For businesses, Delicious could aggregate all the bookmarks for that domain (or domains), providing statistics on the most bookmarked pieces as well as when they are viewed and clicked. A notification service when your content is bookmarked would also be low-hanging fruit.

Search

Delicious already has search and many use it extensively to find hidden gems from both the past and present. But search could be made far better. In the end Delicious could have made a play for being the largest and best curated search engine. I might be biased because of my interest in search but this just seems like a no-brainer.

Revenue

Building a PPC platform seems like a good fit if you decide to make search a primary feature of the site. It could even work (to a lesser extent) if you don’t feature search. Advertisers could pay per keyword search or tag search. I doubt this would disrupt user behavior since users are used to this design pattern thanks to Google.

Delicious could even implement something similar to StumbleUpon, allowing advertisers to buy ‘bookmark recommendations’. This type of targeted exposure would be highly valuable (to users and advertisers) and the number of bookmarks could provide long-term traffic and benefits. Success might be measured in a new bookmarks per impression metric.

TL;DR

The new Delicious is a step backward, abandoning simplicity and neglecting mechanisms that build replenishing value. Instead management has introduced complexity and friction while concentrating on cosmetics. The end result is far worse than the neglect Delicious suffered at the hands of Yahoo.

Delicious Turns Sour is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Image from The Complete Pitcher

The Knuckleball Problem

I define the knuckleball problem as something that can be highly effective but is also extremely difficult. The problem arises when people forget about the latter (difficulty) and focus solely on the former (potential positive outcome).

Individuals, teams and organizations embark on a knuckleball project with naive enthusiasm. They’re then baffled when it isn’t a rousing success. In baseball terms that means instead of freezing the hitter, chalking up strikeouts and producing wins you’re tossing the ball in the dirt, issuing walks and running up your ERA.

If a pitcher can’t throw the knuckleball effectively, they don’t throw the knuckleball. But in business, the refrain I hear is ’X isn’t the problem, it’s how X was implemented‘.

This might be true, but the hidden meaning behind this turn of phrase is the idea that you should always attempt to throw a knuckleball. In reality you should probably figure out what two or three pitches you can throw to achieve success.

Difficulty and Success

The vast majority of pitchers do not throw the knuckleball because it’s tough to throw and produces a very low success rate. Most people ‘implement’ or ‘execute’ the pitch incorrectly. Instead pitchers find a mix of pitches that are less difficult and work to perfect them.

Yet online, a tremendous number of people try to throw knuckleballs. They’re trying something with a high level of difficulty instead of finding less difficult (perhaps less sexy or trendy) solutions. And there is a phalanx of consultants and bloggers who seem to encourage and cheer this self-destructive behavior.

Knuckleballs

In general I think mega menus suck. Of course there are exceptions but they are few and far between. The mega menu is a knuckleball. Sure you can attempt it, but the odds are you’re going to screw it up. And there are plenty of other ways you can implement navigation that will be as or even more successful.

When something has such a high level of difficulty you can’t just point to implementation and execution as the problem. When a UX pattern is widely misapplied is it really that good of a UX pattern?

Personas also seem to be all the rage right now. Done the right way personas can sometimes deliver insight and guidance to a marketing team. But all too often the personas are not rooted in real customer experiences and devolve into stereotypes that are then used as weapons in cross-functional arguments meetings. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think this feature speaks to Concerned Carl.”

Of course implementation and execution matter. But when you consistently see people implementing and executing something incorrectly you have to wonder whether you should be recommending it in the first place.

Pitching coaches aren’t pushing the knuckleball on their pitching staffs.

Can You Throw a Knuckleball?

The problem is most people think they can throw the online equivalent of the knuckleball. And unlike the baseball diamond the feedback mechanism online is far from direct.

Personas are created and used to inform your marketing strategy and there is some initial enthusiasm and some minor changes but over time people get tired of hearing about these people and the whole thing peters out along with the high consulting fees which are also conveniently forgotten.

The hard truth is most people can’t throw the knuckleball. And that’s okay. You can still be a Cy Young Award winner. Tim Lincecum does not throw a knuckleball.

How (and When) To Throw The Knuckleball

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking risks or attempt to throw a knuckleball once in a while. Not at all.

However, you shouldn’t attempt the knuckler simply because it is difficult or ‘more elegant’ or the hottest new fad. You can take plenty of risks throwing the slider or curve or change up, all pitches which have a higher chance of success. In business terms the risk to reward ratio is far more attractive.

If you’re going to start a knuckleball project you need to be clear about whether you have a team that can pull it off. Do you really have a team of A players or do you have a few utility guys on the team?

Once you clear that bit of soul searching you need to be honest about measuring success. A certain amount of intellectual honesty is necessary so that you can turn to the team and say, you tossed that one in the dirt. Finally, you need a manager who’s willing to walk to the mound and tell the pitcher to stop futzing with the knuckleball and start throwing some heat.

TL;DR

The Internet has a knuckleball problem. Too many are attempting the difficult without understanding the high probability of failure while ignoring the less difficult that could lead to success.

The Knuckleball Problem is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Here are five different perspectives that illustrate why I dislike mega menus.

As a User

Many mega menus are often hard to use. Some are like a game of whac-a-mole, trying to get a cascading menu to expand and stay open so you can click on the right link.

Other times they’re too sensitive, opening when you nick them with your mouse and interrupting normal browse activity. Not to mention some simply don’t behave the same in different browsers.

Sure, some mega menus don’t create this type of technical frustration. Yet even when they don’t there is no standard mega menu interaction. Click to open or hover to open? Click to destination or click to reveal sub-menu? Users have to learn what actions produce what results.

Is this how you want your user spending their time?

As a Scientist

The theory behind mega menus is that they’re supposed to get us to the ‘right’ information faster. Clicks are seen as pesky obstacles to be avoided at best and inherently bad at worst.

In the quest for fewer clicks, more choices are offered. But more choices often lead to fewer productive outcomes and less satisfaction. This is The Paradox of Choice, something I’ve blogged about numerous times. Studies have shown, again and again, that more is less.

Mega menus usually present an overwhelming number of choices to the user. As the adage goes ‘a confused mind always says no.’

You’re also trusting that the user knows exactly what they want and forcing them to find it. Mega menus are the Where’s Waldo of navigation. You’re making the user do all the work. Frankly, I don’t need to be a scientist to know this is not a good thing.

As an Editor

An editor is supposed to bring focus to an endeavor, whether it be a book, magazine, website or film. Their job is to trim what is unnecessary and highlight what is important. Instead, mega menus make everything important. We know that’s just not true.

Mega menus are often born out of the ‘but what about’ problem. It’s the idea that if you don’t show the user everything you offer (all at once), then they’ll never find it.

Imagine if this same philosophy was applied to a magazine cover? Every section and article would have teaser text on the cover shattering any type of editorial tone or direction.

Mega menus are an abdication of the editorial process and thereby fail to provide guidance and expertise to your users. Even from a profit perspective, do you want to feature your low margin categories as prominently as your high margin categories? Seriously, think about it.

You might as well fire your editor if you’re just going to pack every sub-category under the sun into your mega menu.

As a Marketer

Marketing is about telling a story and providing context to help users make a decision. If a user jumps to the end without any of the background, you’ve lost the ability to tell that story and provide vital guideposts along the way.

An article in UX Movement does a great job of describing this journey.

As users view page content, they can click on any link they find interesting. This takes them to another page of content with links they can click that leads to another page of content with more links and so forth. Before users know it, they will have consumed multiple pages of content through the clicking of content navigation links. That’s true engagement.

Clicks and additional page views are not evil. Users feel good about a click when it leads to appropriate information and content. I made a decision and I got what I was looking for. Even if that leads to yet another decision tree, that’s okay!

Create easy and rewarding decisions that allow you to lead your users through an experience. I’m reminded of the Choose Your Own Adventure books where certain decisions throughout the story lead to certain outcomes. It wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying if the first choice you made was between all the different outcomes.

The story matters.

As an SEO

Mega menus often result in an astounding number of internal links that ruin any sort of contextual relevance between categories or content. Take L.L. Bean for instance.

Their mega menu is displayed on each and every page. Here I’ve triggered the mega menu for Hunting & Fishing from the Luggage category. Even on a product page there are over 400 internal links.

Now, I’m not saying that PageRank is the end all to be all, but you’re doing yourself no favors by splitting trust and authority into 400+ pieces.

Not only that but the links wind up being completely illogical. A page about sleeping bags also links to one about lunch boxes. A page about carry-on luggage also links to one about blouses. And that page about blouses links to one about gun accessories. Huh?

Mega menus can wreak havoc on internal link structures. You can minimize the problem by only showing portions of that mega menu based on context, but all too often that isn’t how they are implemented.

But Jakob Nielsen Says …

Yes, in March 2009 Jakob Nielsen endorsed mega menus. I have a great deal of respect for Nielsen and have found most of his research to be enlightening and extremely useful. Yet, I find it tough to determine what exactly was measured in that study. Was it the ability to navigate? Task completion? Satisfaction?

Nielsen himself backed away a bit from the ubiquity of mega menus in November 2010, though he maintains it’s about how mega menus are constructed and designed.

My own research and experience (not just personal anecdotes but in working with clients) leads me to different conclusions. I’ve never been one to blindly follow experts and instead bring my own critical thinking to the task and look to test assumptions. I encourage you to do the same.

TL;DR

Mega menus are often difficult to use, shift the burden of navigation to the user, reduce or eliminate editorial expertise, hamstring marketers and create SEO headaches. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Mega menus mean well but usually wind up doing more harm than good.

Mega Menus are Mega Awful is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

The Pen Salesman

There once was a pen salesman who had two types of pens. One was a very nice but basic model and the other was a fancier, more expensive, high-end model.

The pen salesman was doing a pretty brisk business but he had a problem. He wasn’t selling enough of the high-end model. This was troubling because the margin on his high-end pen was … higher. People seemed to like the high-end model but, on par, most wound up buying the basic model instead.

So what did the pen salesman do?

He decided to create a new premium pen. It would be even fancier and more expensive then his high-end pen. Now the pen salesman had a selection of three pens from which to choose. The secret was that the pen salesman didn’t really want to sell the premium pen! In fact, he wasn’t even really stocking them. But a funny thing happened, customers began to select the high-end (now the middle) model in droves.

When presented with three choices (good, better and best), the middle pen suddenly became far more attractive and looked like a better value. Had the pen changed? No. But the context in which it was presented did, and that made the difference.

That doesn’t mean you can go on forever adding more and more models to your product line and expect similar results. No, I can also talk your ear off about The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz some of which is based on work by Sheena S. Iyengar, author of When Choice is Demotivating (PDF).

In short, consumer behavior is fascinating and powerful.

Internet Marketing Maxima

I sometimes wonder if we as Internet marketers are using these old school techniques and stories when implementing our campaigns. The ability to conduct A/B and multi-variate tests has soared but the root of most successful campaigns is in understanding context and consumer behavior. Don’t get me wrong, I love numbers and am all about data-driven decision making. But not in isolation.

I worry that the technology we rely upon creates local maxima issues, which is a highfalutin way of saying that we constrain ourselves to the best of a limited set of outcomes instead of seeking a new (and better) solution altogether. Harry Brignull of 90% of Everything and Joshua Porter or 52 Weeks of UX explain this far better than I could, so go off and do some reading and then come back to finish.

The pen salesman could have tried different colors (of pen or ink), or a different pitch, or added features or cut prices or offered a gift box with purchase or any number of other typical marketing techniques to help increase sales of his high-end pen. But it’s unlikely any of them would have achieved the monumental shift in sales he saw by introducing that premium pen.

So I hold on to the story of the pen salesman as a way to remind me to think (really think) about context and consumer behavior.

The Pen Salesman is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Here’s why SEO and UX are like chocolate and peanut butter.

Intent

SEO is, when you get down to it, about meeting query intent. This goes well beyond the traditional breakdown between informational, transactional and navigational search.

Keyword research is performed not to just identify the keywords and modifiers with the largest search volume, but to understand the syntax and intent of users in that vertical. We’re looking for patterns and want to understand how and why people are searching on specific terms. Maybe you’d prefer to call them user stories?

For instance, why might someone search for a product manual? Is it to get specifications for that product or because they’re having a problem with the product? SEO seeks to understand intent to best satisfy that query.

Satisfaction

Google is intensely interested in measuring user satisfaction. They measure pogosticking behavior, track long clicks versus short clicks and in some instances can analyze click-stream behavior. No, Google is not peeking at your Google Analytics data. They have other ways of obtaining this information.

The result is that an SEO will not want pages with an unnaturally high bounce rate or sessions with a very low time on site. We might not talk about delighting the user (I’ve heard just about enough of that) but we care about user satisfaction.

Really, it goes way beyond the metrics above. A savvy SEO knows that user satisfaction leads to more word-of-mouth, more social mentions and more links.

Readability

I’ve been very critical about how people write and format content for the web. It’s not just about having the right content, it’s about making it accessible and easy to read.

We’ll want to see proper font hierarchy, though many might talk about it as header optimization. Our obsession about keyword frequency is rooted in the knowledge that people crave consistency and repetition as a way to understand content.

SEO wants a person visiting a page to instantly understand what it is about. Take my five foot web design philosophy as an example, or try the five second test and similar tools. We know that what is retained by a user is likely what will be retained by a search engine.

Conversion

Traffic does nothing in and of itself. Don’t hire an SEO is they’re simply concerned about driving traffic. There’s no need to get saucer eyes about that big pool of traffic you could optimize for but would actually do nothing for your business. (If that were the case we’d simply use ‘boobs’ as a modifier for all terms.)

I suppose if you’re running an ad supported model it matters, but at the end of the day the best traffic is traffic that converts. You register a new user or you make a sale. When you do this it means you likely have a better way to connect with these people in the future.

SEO is, largely, an acquisition channel. A rising rate of repeat visits through natural search should make an SEO uneasy. Poor conversion might point to low satisfaction, to not matching query intent or to not being relevant.

Relevance

Google wants to return pages that are most relevant to a query.

Yet, too often sites want to throw the kitchen sink at someone when they land on a page. If I search and find your site about programmable coffee makers you should put associated links and content about coffee makers, coffee and maybe coffee cups. Don’t put content and links to lawn mowers, refrigerators, and sofas on the same page.

SEO wants focus! We want to create topic neighborhoods. It may come out as discussions about anchor text, the number of links on a page, cross linking strategies and references to page rank, but we’re really talking about relevance.

Everything they want, nothing they don’t.

Navigation

We care about how users get from one point to another. We’re mapping the information architecture (IA) of a site. We think about how many links are really necessary on the page. We’re thinking about breadcrumbs. We’ll have an opinion on drop down and mega menus. (I generally don’t like them.)

We’re analyzing how easy it is to get from the home page to any other page on the site. That’s important for users as well as search engines.

We want navigation to enforce and enhance relevance.

Social

Today, SEO is also about being social. The deteriorating link graph is augmented by social authority. Whether this is straight up brand mentions or links, both primary (acknowledged by Google and Bing to be a ranking factor) and secondary (the links generated as a result of social chatter), an SEO is going to ask how the content or product is going to be shared and distributed.

Trust and authority is earned through social evangelism.

SEO and UX

Is what I describe that different than UX? Do any of these things sound like they’d be bad for your business?

Instead, I challenge organizations to think of SEO not as a necessary evil, not as something you trade-off against better user experience, but instead look at SEO as an ally to creating better user experience.

SEO and UX is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Facebook becomes a search engine

The Open Graph is just another type of index. Instead of crawling the web like Google, Facebook lets users do it for them. Facebook is creating a massive graph of data and at some point they’ll go all Klingon on Google and uncloak with several bird of prey surrounding search. Game on.

Google buys Foursquare

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last 6 months it’s clear that Google wants to own local. They’re dedicating a ton of resources to Places and decided that getting citations from others was nice but generating your own reviews would be better. With location based services just catching on with the mainstream, Google will overpay for Foursquare and bring check-ins to the masses.

UX becomes more experiential

Technology (CSS3, Compass, HTML5, jQuery, Flash, AJAX and various noSQL databases to name a few) transforms how users experience the web. Sites that allow users to seamlessly understand applications through interactions will be enormously successful.

Google introduces more SEO tools

Google Webmaster Tools continues to launch tools that will help people understand their search engine optimization efforts. Just like they did with Analytics, Google will work hard in 2011 to commoditize SEO tools.

Identity becomes important

As the traditional link graph becomes increasingly obsolete, Google seeks to leverage social mentions and links. But to do so (in any major way) without opening a whole new front of spam, they’ll work on defining reputation. This will inevitably lead them to identity and the possible acquisition of Rapleaf.

Internet congestion increases

Internet congestion will increase as more and more data is pushed through the pipe. Apps and browser add-ons that attempt to determine the current congestion will become popular and the Internati will embrace this as their version of Greening the web. (Look for a Robert Scoble PSA soon.)

Micropayments battle paywalls

As the appetite for news and digital content continues to swell, a start-up will pitch publications on a micropayment solution (pay per pageview perhaps) as an alternative to subscription paywalls. The start-up may be new or may be one with a large installed user base that hasn’t solved revenue. Or maybe someone like Tynt? I’m crossing my fingers that it’s whoever winds up with Delicious.

Gaming jumps the shark

This is probably more of a hope than a real prediction. I’d love to see people dedicate more time to something (anything!) other than the ‘push-button-receive-pellet’ games. I’m hopeful that people do finally burn out, that the part of the cortex that responds to this type of gratification finally becomes inured to this activity.

Curation is king

The old saw is content is king. But in 2011 curation will be king. Whether it’s something like Fever, my6sense or Blekko, the idea of transforming noise into signal (via algorithm and/or human editing) will be in high demand, as will different ways to present that signal such as Flipboard and Paper.li.

Retargeting wins

What people do will outweigh what people say as retargeting is both more effective for advertisers and more relevant for consumers. Privacy advocates will howl and ally themselves with the government. This action will backfire as the idea of government oversight is more distasteful than that of corporations.

Github becomes self aware

Seriously, have you looked at what is going on at Github? There’s a lot of amazing work being done. So much so that Github will assemble itself Voltron style and become a benevolently self-aware organism that will be our digital sentry protecting us from Skynet.

2011 Predictions is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Quora Button

Feel free to use it or make a better one. (Just let me know when you do.) In the interim, you should follow me on Quora and explore the growing knowledge community.

Quora Button is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

There’s a new unlinking meme going around that contextual links are a bad thing for web content. That they’re a distraction and take away from the prose of the journalist or blogger. It’s amazing that so many smart people actually believe the myth that people are reading their content word for word.

They’re not.

People Scan Text

Jakob Nielsen found that 79% of users scanned content and further research has supported this finding. But there are ways to increase the readability of web content.

highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)

That’s right. Links actually help the usability and readability of your content.

Writing for the Web

Putting all the links at the end may encourage users to skip your content. People aren’t patient and while it would be nice if they were, I don’t think that’s going to change. Fighting against this instinct doesn’t seem to be a winning strategy, nor is it entirely bad.

Different mediums dictate different writing styles. A novel versus haiku versus grant writing. They’re all very different in style, syntax and structure. Contextual links are simply a part of the style, syntax and structure of web content.

Links and SEO

Don’t forget that links are still an important part of SEO and recent research indicates that links within the text likely carry more trust and authority. And while backlinks are far more important, establishing a hub of authority and your presence within a ‘neighborhood’ is going to help your content get read by the right people.

So, get over the anecdotal stories and past the vanity. Links within text are valuable in web communication. Period.

Unlink at your own risk is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Solving Google’s Jazz Problem

Recent attempts to solve the jazz problem have revolved – primarily – around a left contextual navigation pane. Whether it is always exposed or only introduced when clicked, Google seems sure that this is the way to solve search overload.

But is it really?

Google and Web 2.0

Google is rooted firmly in Web 1.0. There’s (clearly) nothing wrong about that. Yet, the interface hasn’t changed all that much as the web has evolved. While Mayer acknowledges the bimodal world of screen sizes (larger desktop screens but smaller mobile interfaces), does the interface fully acknowledge and take advantage of these advancements?

The Splinternet is real and seems only to be expanding with the launch of the iPad.

New User Interfaces

Some of the most interesting new interfaces are far more visual and horizontal in nature, allowing the user to digest more information at a glance. Think about what Google search results could look like if they used an interface like Lazyfeed or the Times Skimmer.

Google 2.0

Here’s a quick Frankenstein of what Google 2.0 could look like using a bit of Google’s Jazz UI and the Times Skimmer.

One or all of these results or panes could update in real-time. Another could present a fully embedded video. Yet another could present thumbnails for image matches. The possibilities, while not endless, are numerous.

I’ve kept the left hand navigation, but you could just as easily do without it. In fact, that would better adhere to Google’s search motto: don’t make the user do something we can do for them.

Google Takes The Safe Route?

Of course, Google would need to determine how to present AdWords effectively in this environment. Perhaps the fear of disrupting AdWords revenue is why a major UI change isn’t in the cards. But this seems like a contradiction in how Google sets goals and measures success.

Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary – Setting impossible goals and achieving part of them sets you on a completely different path than the safe route. Sometimes you can achieve the impossible in a quarter, but even when you don’t, you are on a fast track to achieving it soon. Measuring success every quarter allows for mid course corrections and setting higher goals for the next quarter.

Maybe Google has already tested radical new UI with unsatisfactory results. Or maybe Google is taking the safe route, thinking that the search interface can remain relatively static as the web transforms.

Is Google really doing enough to solve user interface jazz?

Google 2.0 is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.

Comcast was last on the list since I review my bills in reverse chronological order and the Comcast bill notification arrived in my inbox on Friday.

Comcast Fail

I clicked through on the bill and entered my user name.

I tried three times, paying special attention to ensure I didn’t fat finger something. Each time, same thing.

So I contacted customer support using their Live Chat feature. I was quickly connected with Vanessa who after a brief back and forth provided this explanation.

Vanessa > I wish to inform you that we did an upgrade with our system and we merged the 2 accounts which is the comcast.net and .com

Vanessa > And due to this upgrade since you do not have internet service I am afraid that you need to register it again online, AJ.

That makes as much sense as a fish riding a bicycle! To Vanessa’s credit she was apologetic (even though it wasn’t her fault) and very helpful. Thank you Vanessa.

Comcast System Upgrade?

I’m not an engineer or a coder, but I know enough to know that a database merge can be done far more elegantly. Boiled down, isn’t this a simple left outer join?

Even if there is more complexity (and there usually is) wouldn’t it be wise to deal with those issues instead of inconveniencing your customers?

Comcast Error Messaging

Even if Comcast chose to go ahead as planned, they could have avoided in-bound customer service issues by applying proper error messaging.

A simple statement about a system upgrade requiring users to re-register would have made the situation clear. Inconvenient but at least Comcast would have provided an immediate answer to the problem they created.

But here’s the rub. You need your account number to register!

That account number is not on the billing email and since I use paperless billing I have no material with my Comcast account number. No matter what, I’d still have to contact customer support to retrieve my account number.

Comcast Customer Service

Despite the buzz Comcast has generated around their use of Twitter they still don’t seem to understand customer service.

If they did, they’d have created use cases from a customer perspective and realized that this upgrade would be detrimental for users and would cause added customer support costs.

AT&T U-verse is looking better all the time.

Comcast Upgrade Disrespects Customers is by AJ Kohn, originally posted on Blind Five Year Old.