Great dataviz from GE and Ben Fry: http://www.ge.com/visualization/health_costs/index.html
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Conditions and symptoms dominate online health searches… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/ylc29cv
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Dead on
]]>Some interesting highlights:
- Consumers who visit product sites are nearly three times more likely than the average US adult to request prescriptions by name from their doctors.
- When consumers use search engines for pharmaceutical or health information online, they are most likely to search by the name of a specific condition/disease or the name of a specific product.
- The most common situation for which they use a search engine for this purpose is when they have symptoms for a condition.
One of ten great presentations on Social Media that can be found here:
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-top-10-social-media-presentations-online/
While much of the technology is Microsoft-centric (someday everyone will have a Surface table), the concepts are insightful and cool. Enjoy.
Also check out their Healthcare Vision demo.
]]>Great concept and very true – when was the last time you used a device or application (from a company other than Apple) and found the experience actually…ummm…enjoyable?
So what is this user experience pleasure principle? Why do Apple products continue to inspire and dazzle users while products from companies like Microsoft and HP just tend to bore us?
UX designers are conditioned to think that user workflow, task completion and logic are the essentials of a quality experience. Elements like design craftsmanship and detail are often considered extraneous and wasteful—or are simply seen as just “adding color”. Many leading design firms and pundits have trumpeted this concept of simplicity over embellishment—function always trumps form.
It’s becoming clear, however, that interfaces don’t need to be stark and bland to be good. Some of the most interesting and powerful digital experiences can be seen in game UI. And companies like Apple continue to show that creating a sense of wonder in your product experience just may please customers as much as simplified design workflows.
]]>I’ll explain.
Google has been moving towards more personalized search services for the last couple of years. Much of this is driven by new principles of the semantic web and the advent of web services and media types that compete with traditional web content for relevancy. Who’s to say, for example, that someone searching for Angelina Jolie will be interested in viewing news more so than her videos or photos?
Google’s New Personalization Tools
Google no longer wants to prioritize content for you—they want their users to do it themselves. This approach is now clearly apparent with the promote and remove functionality now showing up on a lot of search results.
Expect to see more of this technology in the coming months. I strongly believe that search personalization will only become more pronounced in future—both user-managed personalization and machine-generated based on your “personalization profile”: personalization based on both your prior activity and the behaviors of users similar to you.
So what does personalized search mean for the traditional SEO? If you deconstruct the process of SEO it breaks down into three parts:
- The ability to forecast and predict how search engines will assign relevancy
- The understanding of the terminology used by target users (and their search heuristics)
- Modification of web pages and content to optimize for the top two parts
The combination of these elements fundamentally drives search optimization. With personalized search, however, #1 and #3 lose their importance, while #2 because vital. The future of SEO hinges on user research.
User research and profiling has gained importance in user experience design, interactive strategy, and digital marketing. SEOs will also need to become user researchers if they hope to excel. Not only will they need to gain insights into how people search, they need to be able to understand who their users are, how they behave, and what their needs are. This goes way beyond traditional keyword and terminology research—SEOs will need to “get inside the heads” of their users—gaining understanding into demographics, psychographics, and technographics.
The future of SEO may hinge on the ability of marketers to truly understand the makeup of their target customers. This may kill off a good number of the traditional number-crunching SEOs, but the savvy and innovative players will find lucrative opportunities to optimize for the next generation of search experiences.
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Gestural recognition allows users to interact with a system without providing a direct input like a tap or click. The system recognizes hand movements and other signals and responds accordingly. Combinations of gestures (or a gestural system not unlike sign language) could be used to interact at much higher speeds than current interface techniques. It’s not a stretch to imagine gestural UI systems that adapt and personalize to a user’s specific gestural mannerisms. When combined with voice recognition, gestural UI will create new paradigms for computer/human interactions that could revolutionize how we interface with machines.
And we’re not that far away…
Gestural UIs are already out there in rudimentary form and are evolving at frighteningly fast rate:
- One of the best examples of gestural UI is the Nintendo Wii. The Wii’s success is based on its revolutionary new gaming interface—gestural game interactions.
- Healthcare is another industry that is beginning to experiment with gestural interfaces. A group of Israeli researchers has developed an application that allows doctors to manipulate medical images using gestures. This replaces the need to use a mouse or touch-screen device—eliminating possible contaminants that accumulate on physical hardware.
- Another cool application is in the kitchen. Bang & Olufsen is developing a hands-free remote control prototype. This control could have a number of interesting applications, although Bang & Olufsen is targeting it at kitchen devices (you won’t need to wash your hands before using the remote).
- In addition to Apple, several mobile phone and PDA manufacturers have recently filed patents for gestural control applications. The iPhone’s touch UI is likely a glimpse of what future handsets will support.
I expect we’ll see more and more applications and prototypes emerge in the next few years.
When Minority Report came out in 2002 the technologies it envisioned seemed far off. Gestural UIs were only one example—the film showed paper-thin LCDs, personalized ad displays, and 3-D imaging. With advances in materials and processors we may see these technologies a lot sooner than we think.
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