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One of ten great presentations on Social Media that can be found here:
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-top-10-social-media-presentations-online/
Posted via web from bzipkin’s posterous
Microsoft Office Labs releases “vision of the future” videos every six months or so. Vision 2019 was launched a few days ago.
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.
I recently caught a short but sensible post from TechRadar.com that makes the case that Apple is great at interface design because they are one of few technology companies who value “pleasure” as a design principle.
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’ve been reading a number of interesting articles about the imminent death of search engine optimization. Frankly, traditional SEO has been languishing on its death bed for the last several years. While this doesn’t bode well for the folks who have built careers out search optimization, we’re going to see a lot of new opportunities for smart marketers able to marry traditional research with search engine savvy.
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 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 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.
Remember the futuristic user interfaces used by Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report? He was able to interact with the system and manipulate data through hand motions. This user interface technique is known as gesture recognition and is one of a number of emerging new computer-human interaction models.
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:
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.