I’ve been using Google Docs lately to write papers because it is so much easier to move from computer to computer than with traditional word docs. Once you get used to the interface, it really is just as effective… save for one major problem — there is no way to determine how much you have written!

Paul Stamantiou says it much better than I, so I suggest reading his post here.

“The problem comes with the fact that it is damn hard to get a real sense of how much you have written in Google Docs due to the lack of a proper, ruled page layout view. I have gotten to the point of frustration; continually copying and pasting my documents into a real word processor…”

The most popular group of posts in the history of my blog center around problems with and alternatives to Evite, the mostly famous online party planning an invitation service. Recently I stumbled across a new service, MyPunchBowl, which is a Web 2.0 take on this service. I’ve only started to play around with MyPunchBowl, so it’s very hard to say that it’s better or worse than Evite at this point, and as with any web 2.0 application, MyPunchBowl is surely ripe for the typical AJAX user experience issues.

However, after a cursory look at this new application, it does seem to solve two of the major problems that I pointed out in my initial review of Evite. My biggest problem is the way the Evite interface puts undue pressure on the user to come up with something interesting to say in the message field when responding. Although it does offer an alternative where the messaging area is not visible at all to guests, this takes away the ability to see who’s going to the party, which is at least part of the point of it in the first place. MyPunchBowl handles this issue in two ways: first, it separates the messaging from the response. Users who respond “Yes” can then view the message board and post comments if they choose. The beauty of this is that the person is not asked to make comments while they respond to the invitation; as such they are probably more likely to quickly answer without worrying about saying something witty or funny or deciding to come back later when they think of a good comment. Users who respond “No” to the invite never even see the message board; instead, they are prompted to pass along a private message to the party host. I love this because it prevents those incredibly awkward and mostly annoying decline messages such as “Hey Mike, thanks for the invite your party, it sounds really fun, but unfortunately, I have to take my cat to the dentist next Saturday so I’m not going to make it!”

The other huge problem with Evite is that the invite e-mails are terrible. They provide no information about the party, and generally just waste a lot of space. MyPunchBowl, on the other hand, still has a somewhat cheesy graphical display, but at least offers the ability to show the description of the event in the e-mail itself (so the user doesn’t need to click to find out what the event is). I especially find this helpful with people who are at work, who might not want to click. The best possible scenario, and something that Evite alternative DarkGuest offers, is the ability to respond directly from the e-mail, giving people yes / no / maybe choices directly in the e-mail body. Despite not having this feature, however, the e-mail from MyPunchBowl is definitely a step in the right direction over the useless e-mail from Evite.

I should also point out that Evite has recently been giving me a ton of technical issues. Last time I tried to organize something, I had to set up the invitation three or four times because for some reason, every time I tried to set it up, it ended up erasing all the data I had previously entered. Perhaps I did something wrong, but a user like me should be able to figure these things out relatively quickly; to have this happen several times shows some definite usability issues.

So, in summary, combining these issues with the intriguing features of MyPunchBowl, I’ll definitely be trying this new service the next time I organize a gathering of friends.

This post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.

Yahoo! news has just (I think) added a new feature on some of their news articles that allows for an AJAX search lookup of some terms within the article.

It is a neat idea, although often much of the results overlay “window” appears below the fold of the page, especially if the link is towards the bottom. If they could somehow sense that and move the window accordingly, that would be nice.

It also makes more sense in some situations than others. In the great article I was reading, for example, it made sense for the linked text “Britney Spears” to bring up pages related to her. On the other hand, when I saw the text “The Smoking Gun” linked, I expected to be taken to that site.

Interestingly, when I saw this a few days ago, the icon next to the name was a downward arrow. Since then, they have replaced that with a magnifying glass icon, which conveys the “search” theme a bit better.

[Yahoo! News]: Britney and the Saga of the Bald Billboard

I received an email the other day announcing the redesign of bloomingdales.com, so I figured I would give the new site a little review.

In Jakob Nielsen’s recent Alertbox, he talks about how annoying it can be to have to select something (in this case, state) from a dropdown menu while moving through a form. I agree — it forces the user to stop what they are doing and focus on the finicky dropdown menu. Personally, I like to tab through the fields, and, although it is possible to get through the dropdown without picking up the mouse, I often find myself having to do so to correct an error.

I do, however, think that Jake is being short-sighted with his recommendation to offer a text box that asks users to enter the two-digit state code instead. With all the advances we’ve made in AJAXy auto-fill form technology, why not use something similar to the USAIR airport code field generator that I mentioned back in August? There are only so 50 states, so a simple table of all the possible entries would be somewhat easy to build, and this way the user has instant confirmation that they are typing the correct state.

The auto-fill would be even more effective if it provided the entire state name; the one thing Jake fails to mention is the fact that users probably don’t know every state code (if, say, they are mailing something to a friend or family member elsewhere). It would be rather easy for someone to think MA was the state abbreviation for Maine, for example, if they were from New Mexico and didn’t think of Massachusetts (especially with the pathetic state of geography knowledge in this country).

Building a wine cellar is a difficult proposition; you need space, money and time. These are obvious points, but there is one other thing that is less obvious and perhaps the most difficult — knowing which wines to cellar and for how long.

Did you ever see a wine label say “Drink now through 2010″, or “Best cellared for five to fifteen years”? Of course not. I’ve even visited many vineyard websites and have never once seen this mentioned by the producer. For those who aren’t extremely knowledgeable in this area (most of us), the only way to find out whether a wine should be cellared or not is to get lucky with an online review or know somebody who knows.

Why is this? From a marketing / sales standpoint, the percentage of people who purchase wines to cellar must be extremely low, so I can understand why a winery wouldn’t be promoting the fact that a particular wine should be stored, but on the other hand if they are making wine that will be even better in five years, wouldn’t they want people to know this?

One good thing is the emergence of wine sharing sites on the web, such as cellartracker, cork’d and winelog. These sites allow the experts to provide some extra information about wine and help n00bs try to learn more about how to build up a nice collection.

I’ve been using Cellar Tracker because it has a large community of serious oenophiles. Cork’d is a bit more light and fun; I haven’t really played with Wine Log yet.

It should be a neat tool, but for now there is a few issues. Here’s just one, for today: It told me I needed to install Flash 8 to continue, so I did. One problem — no way to continue!

(click image to enlarge)

Talk to any die-hard college basketball fan about CBS’ coverage of the NCAA Tournament and you’ll hear mostly grumbling about their lack of understanding of what the viewers want. I wonder if they actually do any user research?

- Their choice of which game to show and when to switch between games is generally horrible. Instead of trying to figure out what the people want, why not take NBC’s lead (with the Olympics) and ESPN’s lead with pretty much everything and show all the games on different channels? Viacom owns Spike, BET, and CSTV, all of which would be reasonable options.

I’ve noticed some interesting zoom interfaces on product-driven eCommerce sites recently — the web 2.0 of zoom, if you will. Three in particular stand out as being progressive: Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Endless (Amazon’s new handbag/shoe shop).

Endless and Dick’s both use a dual panel design where the user controls the location of zoom (on the item) with a small box on one panel and views the zoomed in part of the product on an adjacent panel. Both cover part of the page with the “zoomed” panel, and Dick’s zoom panel actually slides out from “underneath” the product image (though you won’t be able to see that from my static image below).

(endless left, dick’s right)

In both of these examples, some page content is covered by the zoom portion of the image — not a big problem but not ideal either. On Dick’s site, the animation of the zoom panel sliding out takes a few seconds, again not a major issue (and it does look quite “slick”), but still a waste of a few seconds. (On endless the zoom panel simply appears.)

Although the image quality is stunning in these zoom functions, it seems more difficult to me when a user has to control the image in one panel and look at it in another. The traditional zoom model allows users to simply click and zoom or scroll exactly on the image where they want to view.

Nike seems to have come up with an even better solution, allowing the user to click and zoom where they mean to view, not covering up content, and serving up a large, high-quality image.

This isn’t perfect either — in my review of Nike’s site I wrote: “The zoom feature can be a bit strange at first, as the product description and selection fields appear over top of the enlarged product. I think that this will become less befuddling after repeated use, but I was thrown the first time I saw it.” That said, I still think that Nike has come up with the best solution because it shows a stunningly high-quality image without forcing users to learn new behaviors or focus on more than one point on the page at the same time. Nike also offers multiple levels of zoom, allowing the user to view a broader or more focused image, another nice option.

Gucci takes a bold step at capturing the emotion and feeling of the in-store experience on their website. Instead of providing search and navigation like most eCom sites, Gucci instead uses flash to display handbags on shelves as one might see in the store; the user can scroll horizontally (but not vertically) to browse through the entire selection.

Pros:

Gucci is a high-end luxury brand and this site establishes them as such. By displaying the product in this light, the designers are able to bring some of the emotion that one might get from shopping the store online.

Product details appear within the interface, sliding out and making it very easy for customers to view the details of several products without a pogosticking effect.

Cons:
The horizontal scroll is not typical of websites, and as such may not be clear to some users. (although the arrows and the overall design do afford that there is something more to the left of the viewable area).

This design idea clearly will only work for some companies and products; those with a deeper product line or less high-end product would never be able to pull this off.

Nike recently launched a new, revolutionary commerce site that is built entirely in Macromedia Flash.

I’ve always been critical of Flash sites — although it is a powerful tool, it is typically used poorly and in a way that compromises the usability of the site. Nike, however, in partnership with design firm R/GA, has achieved a level of usability never reached previously using flash. Briefly put, the site is phenomenal.

Pros:

Guided navigation and refinement tools that are both slick and well thought out — Flash allows for an incredibly smooth, easy user interface, but the design also relies on web navigation standards to make it incredibly easy to learn.

Very cool “lightbox” animation to load product detail, almost like Gap’s “QuickLook” but with the entire product detail.

The browser BACK button works with both product detail and navigation! One of my biggest complaints with Flash has always been that it deactivates the inherent browser tools (and such the tools that users are familiar with) — R/GA has coded the pages so this is not an issue.

Shopping cart works similar to Gap’s, making itself known enough to give good feedback, but not taking the user away from the path they are currently on.

“Single-page checkout” allows users to get through the entire checkout interface without reloading the page; repeat users can checkout with lightning speed. Nike has already seen an increase in checkout conversion from their previous incarnation.

Although one might think that designing a site entirely in Flash would greatly compromise natural search optimization, Nike has built a skeleton site specifially for spiders to crawl and as such is better poised for natural search than they were before. (I’d hope they can leverage this for reader accessibility as well — espeically in light of the Target lawsuit — but I can’t say for sure that this is the case.)

Cons:

Can be slow to load, even on a fast connection. (It should be noted that users without Flash can still browse the old site; Nike reports that around 7% of all traffic still uses the non-Flash site.)

The zoom feature can be a bit strange at first, as the product description and selection fields appear over top of the enlarged product. I think that this will become less befuddling after repeated use, but I was thrown the first time I saw it.

The dropdown menus can be a bit skittish; moving my cursor around the page (especially in the masthead) seemed to send menus flying in every direction. Perhaps putting a split-second delay on the menu would help prevent it loading when the cursor simply passes over it.

It took about 4 weeks for sales to return to the level they were before the launch. Although this implementation was clearly ripe for an “all at once” launch, with all we have learned it is a shame that a company still needs to take that big of a hit when launching new functionality.

There was a lot of talk at the recent shop.org Annual Summit about how broadband has finally achieved critical mass and how this supposed web 2.0 revolution is poised to take advantage of this trend. 50% of internet homes are now broadband, and on average more than 80% of online purchases are made via broadband connections.

One of the conference’s keynote speakers suggested that the broadband penetration would increase to at least 80% of all internet homes by 2010 (perhaps a conservative estimate as moderate-speed DSL can already be had in many markets for around the same price as dialup). This statistic was used to suggest that the time has finally come to get agressive about targeting broadband customers.

I, however, see a different situation on the horizon; in 2010 when those dialup holdovers are finally embracing what we currently consider to be broadband, the speeds us early adopters will be using will be far, far faster than what we considering today.

Already, Verizon offers a 768k DSL product and a 15MB FIOS product, and Comcast just announced a 16MB product called Blast!; if trend continues this gap will continue to grow. Applications, graphics and videos that we currently consider for the top of the line “broadband” users will become the lowest common denomenator, and perhaps HD imagery and video will be the expectation of “high” broadband users (the early adopters).

Surely we should embrace the broadband of now and continue to monitor its progress, however as the details change, we also must keep in mind that although the details may change, the challenges may remain the same.

As suspected, a lot of discussion at the recent shop.org Annual Summit was devoted to social networking and how it can be leveraged by e-retailers. Although much of the conversation revolved around adding SN tools to commerce sites (Customer Reviews being the most popular), many suggested leveraging external tools such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. to drive both brand messaging and site traffic.

What worries me about this is not unlike the concerns I expressed recently about blogs — will the commercialization of these sites render them obsolete? The great thing about MySpace is that individuals are able to publish their thoughts and opinions, hook up with other like-minded people and have a place on the web to call their own. Sites like YouTube and Flickr flourish because the content is generated by average people, not companies, and as such it is fresh, interesting and exciting. If, on the other hand, every other MySpace page becomes a company promoting some product or agenda, or it becomes harder to find videos on YouTube that were uploaded purely for entertainment and for no other reason, these sites will lose thier cool, and thus their audience.

On a related note, I remember when I first started using eBay back in 1998 — there were phenomenal deals *everywhere*. It quickly became a daily stop on my surfing adventures. Sure, the overall assortment of product was not what it is today, but it didn’t matter. The site succeeded because it was something special in a world of sameness. Nowadays, I hardly ever use eBay because it is so cluttered with people who are more interested in profit margin than getting rid of their stuff. When I do look for something there, I regularly find items that are going for more than I could buy them new at Amazon or another web vendor. Great deals reminiscent of the past can be found occasionally, but they have become the exception rather than the rule.

Are MySpace, YouTube and Flickr next to suffer from oversaturation? If retailers continue to look for ways to profit from these wonderfully organic mediums, I fear that this will be the case.

Typically if I’m talking about US Airways, I’m complaining. This airline, at least in Philadelphia, normally seems unconcerned with providing any kind of passable customer service. However, today I discovered a feature in their new reservation system that made me positively happy. As you can see over to the right (yellow highlight mine), when the city name is typed into the text field, the form uses some kind of AJAXy, Google Suggest-style functionality to autofill based on what the user has begun to type.

Personally, I use these online travel engines a lot to scope out possible trips, and I get very frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the “airport finder”. (Often times, if the airport code is not specified and only a city name is provided, the page refreshes and forces the user to make another choice before continuing.) This particular feature, however — although somewhat minor in the grand scheme of this page — makes finding the airport code for the city in question much, much easier to do.

Bravo USAir! It’s about time!