Posts tagged Find
User-Centric Design is Great, Just as Long as You Find the Right User
Feb 8th
My friend and colleague Esther Schindler has written a wonderful post over on SoftwareQuality Connection about encouraging user-centric design. The only trouble is figuring out the right set of users that your software is designed for. Put another way, this is the classic programming problem: the person who hires you (or who sets up the job) isn’t the ultimate end-user audience for the actual program.
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Schindler mentions the Abomination That Is Taleo as Exhibit A. For those of you that haven’t been in the job market lately, this is one of the go-to apps that employers use to collect resumes and screen applicants. The only trouble is that its UI is bad, really bad. As she says, “Features and functionality that would give joy to the most common hands-on-the-keyboard user (the hundreds of job applicants applying for a given position) may not even appear on the list of application requirements.”
And having agile programming practices can actually remove programmers from the ultimate consumers of the app, because you write so quickly and get close enough in your first build that you stop doing anything further. Or don’t get to have any further discussions beyond the initial meetings, if you even meet with your programming team at all, because the budget for the project gets cut.
Some of the problem is the Dilbert-ization of corporate life, where a boss gets the overview and the devil is in the details. Part of it is the level of communication in modern companies can be frighteningly bad, as work teams are more distributed and we all have more work to do as layoffs have decimated most IT departments.
It is a great article, and one that you should email to your boss when it comes time to put together your next project. Along with the appropriate Dilbert cartoon, of course.
N.B.: The agile turtle is from Sarah Maddox’ FFeathers blog.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online
Jan 26th
Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized.
We’ve got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It’s almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I’ve found two I love, and I’ll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you’ve got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.
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Greplin: For Finding Your Stuff
Greplin is the way I find that one online thing I’m looking for. It’s a fast search engine that can index a whole bunch of common cloud services many of us use. Once it’s done crawling for the first time, you don’t have to wait for a second. You type in your search query, and Greplin brings back an organized list of everything in your cloud-life that matches.
It can search Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Contacts (as well as the professional Google Apps versions). It searches Dropbox, of course. It searches Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn. It’s got Delicious and Pinboard. It has Yahoo Mail. It even searches Reddit. And these are all free. Premium users can search Evernote, Yammer, Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire. All of these services in one search.
Some of them you have to unlock by inviting friends. That’s okay. Invite your friends. They’ll thank you for it.
Here’s Greplin in action:
Yes, you’re reading that right. My Greplin has (at press time) 1,106,324 documents in it. Every search is instantaneous, though. I can filter the results by service (Twitter, Google Reader, whatever) as well as by type of content: events, files, links, messages, notes, people and streams. Clicking on each service on the left sidebar tells you its status and how many items are indexed.
Greplin’s premium service is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. But basically every consumer service, and even the Google Apps service, is available for free. Evernote is in premium, and that’s a very tempting hook for power users. But it’s amazing what the free version of Greplin can do. In addition to the Web version (which works on mobile), there’s a free iPhone app, and it’s killer.
What About Sensitive Stuff Like Logins & Passwords?
User names, passwords, ID and credit card numbers are hard to remember, too, and we need to use them often online. But it’s not a good idea to keep those in a cloud-hosted service like the ones Greplin searches. It’s best to keep those in a secure service if you’re going to store them on your computer at all.
Today I found out about Dashlane, which will do just that. It’s a desktop application for Mac and Windows that will remember all your sensitive info so you don’t have to. It’s also just a convenience; it plugs into your browsers and lets you fill in Web forms with your saved information automatically. It’s like 1Password, which is available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, but the features are a little simpler.
I’ve taken it for a spin. It’s easy to set up, and it’s very secure. It lets you store your contact info, various forms of ID, credit cards and Web accounts. It’s also good for shopping online and lets you speed through the checkout process. When you’re filling out a form on any Web page, boxes that Dashlane can fill in have a little gazelle (or whatever its mascot is) icon. You click it and drop the info in. No need to remember it or even type it out.
Dashlane is not quite open to the public, but here’s a link for RWW fans to get it now! I’ve been using it all day, and it makes everything faster.
What other services do you use to keep yourself sane online? Share them in the comments.
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CES 2012: Find All The Gadgets With Google Maps for Android
Jan 10th
If you’re attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you’ll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport.
Google has also partnered with some Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores, so it can guide gadget-addled convention-goers straight to the cash register. Today’s update also releases the floor plans of some of the first locations submitted to Google.
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The update to Google Maps for Android that launched in November contains indoor maps of participating locations. Google is extending its mobile reach until it can be the end-to-end provider of finding what its users are looking for, period.
There’s a mobile arms race heating up here. Apple’s Siri intelligent search assistant on the iPhone 4S skips Google and goes to Yelp when you search for a local place or business. Apple has also been snapping up 3D mapping technology. Meanwhile, Bing Maps has provided inside mapping since August of last year.
Mobile mapping inside buildings is an important trend, but Google has an advantage of scale. As the map provider for the biggest smartphone platform and the iPhone (for now), the majority of smartphone users are comfortable with Google Maps.
To understand the value of this strategy, look no further than Google’s partnerships with Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores during CES. Google has a piece of every step of the sales process except the cash itself, and it wants in on that, too.
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How to Find Streaming Movies
Jan 4th
Back in October, I compared the various online streaming services here and Netflix looked like it had the most offerings. But what if you want to search across multiple providers for your streaming content, and find out which one offers you the best deal? Enter CanIStream.It, a free iPhone app from Urban Pixels that allows users to search for movies. It is a great idea whose time has come.
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We’ve written before about how poor Netflix’ own iOS app is here, particularly when you compare it to the full Web version run on the desktop.
You can see an example of its search results screen here. The streaming search app has been recently improved and now can search across Youtube Movies, Blockbuster, Vudu, and Crackle as well as Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. The new version adds the price of each movie rental or purchase, and you will be amazed (or maybe not) at how these differ depending on the particular movie and service involved. Urban Pixels has added the ability to embed a search result widget on third party websites so blogs and other movie review sites can put a widget on their site that shows where the movie is available. And they are working on an API so developers can use their results in their own apps.
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How to Find Low Cost Legal Help – If You Live in Tennessee
Jan 4th
If you need a lawyer and you can’t afford one and live in Tennessee, you might want to take a gander over at this website started by the state’s Supreme Court called JusticeForAllTN.org. “The court realizes that sometimes people cannot get help from a lawyer because they cannot afford one or they decide they want to represent themselves.” That and some plain-English initiatives started by the court can go a long way towards reducing legal costs for many common activities such as divorce, mediation and parental rights.
Wait a minute. Plain English legal language? Started by a court? For free? Yes, this is for real. And the site is nicely designed and easy to use too. It is about time, and shall we say sets a new high bar for similar kinds of public information sites from their government.
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The website, which was created by the court’s Access to Justice Commission, also has tips on self-representation, instructions on who qualifies for legal aid, and a way to locate the nearest such office. The court claims that more than a million residents of the state can’t afford a lawyer, about 20% of total cases brought before the various courts. “To our knowledge, this is the most extensive statewide site,” says Anne-Louise Wirthlin, the coordinator of the project for the court. The project prepared this short promo video:
According to this column by Gail Kerr in The Tennessean, in addition to the site, six of Nashville’s larger law firms have split up the various legal specialties and agreed to offer pro-bono legal services. Both are worthwhile efforts and I hope more states follow with similar acts in the future.
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Most People Rely on Search Engines to Find Local Businesses [Study]
Dec 19th
PEW Internet recently conducted a survey in which 1087 adults (age 18 and older) were interviewed in both English and Spanish about their habits when searching for local businesses and restaurants. They were asked about both their online and offli…
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Find Out What Videos Your Friends Are Watching, Anytime
Dec 14th
Wajam, a social search extension for browsers, has just added social search for video and product recommendations. It also added social search to the Web’s most powerful video site, YouTube. Now if you’re searching for a keyword like “Christmas” on Google, Yahoo or Bing, you’ll also be able to see what your friends have recommended. Wajam has also added social search to YouTube, enabling users to see what videos their friends are sharing.
This new product does not mention any Facebook-related video searches, however. In fact, Facebook doesn’t actually allow you to search by video, though a search for “Christmas” on Facebook did bring up some videos that friends have shared. Wajam and browser extensions raise the question: Will search and social ever truly become intertwined?
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Here’s what Wajam’s video search looks like:
Now try searching on Facebook and filtering the results to “posts by friends.” That’s about as close as you’ll get to finding videos about a specific topic.
Is Wajam more accurate for social search, even though it doesn’t include results from Facebook? Probably not.
Speaking of social search, Bing’s didn’t quite work out even though it included Facebook social integration. Apparently people are less interested in searching specifically for what their friends are doing, watching or buying.
On Facebook, content surfaces through the news feed. In its current iteration, users can sort by highlighted stories first or recent stories first. The news ticker steadily scrolls, bringing up new stories every few seconds.
Facebook is organized not around social search, but around popular content and real-time updates. Facebook Lists also gives users the opportunity to search by group.
While there is a way to search for a keywords specifically in posts by friends, it’s not an oft-used technique.
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The Sucky Video Awards: Help Us Find The Worst Web Videos of 2011 & WIN – ReelSEO Online Video News
Dec 12th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
The Sucky Video Awards: Help Us Find The Worst Web Videos of 2011 & WIN
ReelSEO Online Video News It's been said that Great Content is the best SEO. When it comes to business videos there's… Video-sharing website Vimeo has recently launched something called Vimeo Video School, a sort of… One of the top viewed pages on ReelSEO is that of a post … |
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Why Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics & How It’s Not An Apple Conspiracy
Dec 1st
“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an…
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