Posts tagged problems
Solve for X: Google’s Answer to All World Problems
Feb 7th
Google believes that we can solve some of the world’s greatest problems by working together. We Solve for X appears to be more focused on global problems, using them as opportunities to encourage “moonshot” thinking.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot & Fix Them
Feb 3rd
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the </script> tag!” I thought it would…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
5 Common Tracking Problems: How Troubleshoot & To Fix Them
Feb 3rd
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the </script> tag!” I thought it would…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Panda problems continue to blight travel sites – Travolution
Jan 13th
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Panda problems continue to blight travel sites
Travolution Greer said conducting a content audit can “transform the functioning of a website” and while traditional SEO remains valid, the focus is switching on to the front-end experience. He said: “In the light of Panda, the advent of content marketing and … SEO Speak: Content Strategy |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Weekly Wrap-up: Problems with Google+ and More
Jan 6th
Jon explains what he hates about Google+. NASA creates an FAQ for the debunked 2012 apocalypse. No SOPA is a Chrome extension that helps you spot SOPA supporters in your travels around the web. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet
Jon Mitchell hates Google+, and he’s not shy about sharing why. In the most popular ReadWriteWeb story of the week, Jon details the issues he has with Google+, from the minor annoyances to more serious ones, like prioritizing Google+ posts about an article over the article itself, Jon is concerned about how Google+ is already affecting Google Search. Check out why Jon thinks Google+ is going to mess up the internet.
NASA Debunks 2012 Apocalypse With New FAQ
Don’t start preparing for Armageddon just yet. NASA has created an FAQ to ease fears that world will end this year. Those of you sitting on a few cases of tactical sammiches should probably check out this FAQ pronto. For the rest of us, the FAQ is an entertaining and educational trip through some of the more interesting doomsday predictions for 2012.
Chrome Extension Warns You When You Browse A SOPA-Supporter’s Website
SOPA isn’t being covered by news outlets that are supportive of the measure, so how are you to know when your favorite website’s parent company is a SOPA supporter? This Chrome extension warns you when you browse a SOPA-supporter’s website. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.
Bonus: Find out where your legislators stand on SOPA/PIPA with this handy geo-enabled mobile HTML application.
More Top Posts:
32 More of the Best (And Worst) Tech Tattoos
At this point there’s probably nothing in geekdom, no matter how arcane, that hasn’t ended up on someone’s skin. “In” someone’s skin, to be precise. From ASCII art, to xkcd comics, to video games, to binary, to parts of your childhood you just can’t leave behind, there are entire sites like Geeky Tattoos now devoted to nerd ink. More
Android Ice Cream Sandwich Running On Less Than 1% of Total Devices
Android Ice Cream Sandwich has made its first appearance in Google’s fragmentation numbers for the platform. Android 4.0.x is now running on less than 1% of all devices that have accessed the Android Market in the last two weeks, coming in at 0.6% overall. More
Turn Your Android Into a Hotspot Without Your Carrier Knowing
There is little in the world that provokes the fury of smartphone consumers more than when one of the major carriers institutes a data cap, eliminates tethering or makes customers pay an exorbitant rate to use their smartphones as hotspots. Users want to be able to use their mobile bandwidth unhindered by any restrictions. More
First Signs of an Intel Windows 8 Ultrabook: Here We Go Again
For at least seven years running, Intel has been working to specify a form factor for lightweight, mobile computing devices. No, not tablets. As early as 2005, the first whispers of a joint Intel/Microsoft specification were bandied about, where Intel specifies the internals, and they supply the plastic. More
Analyst: Apple Will Lose Its Cool Factor In 2012
The last week of December and first couple of weeks of January is when analysts and pundits climb out of the woodwork to make bold predictions for the new year. Some are data driven, some are just based on hunches from following the trends. Investors Business Daily is no exception and has one bold prognostication for 2012: Apple will “lose its cool.” More
![The Verified Twitter Account for Rupert Murdoch's Wife Was Fake [Updated]](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/images/lead-images/wendi150.jpg)
The Verified Twitter Account for Rupert Murdoch’s Wife Was Fake [Updated]
Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter last week. So did his wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch. “Joining my husband @rupertmurdoch in our new digital adventure on Twitter,” reads her bio. Cute, right? Rupert was verified, Wendi was verified, and so began another cute chapter of celebrities figuring out how to use Twitter. More
A Guy’s Guide To Pinterest
One of the first things I noticed when I signed up for Pinterest earlier this week is that several of my female friends and acquaintances were already on the site. It was as if they had been holding out on what many are promising will be 2012′s hot ticket in the social networking space. More
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- Android Holo Themes An Important Requirement to Ease Fragmentation
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- First Signs of an Intel Windows 8 Ultrabook: Here We Go Again
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- PhoneGap Releases Version 1.3 With Full Windows Phone Support
- Study: Apps Are For Android, Games For the iPhone
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Netflix’s New Tablet UI Does Not Solve Its Search Problems
Nov 15th
Netflix today announced a new user interface for all Android tablets, including both the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook. The interface displays twice as many movies to place in the user queue and is generally a better looking app than it was before. Yet, does the new UI solve some of Netflix’s problems with search and discovery on tablet devices?
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One of the biggest problems with Netflix on tablets (the new UI will be coming to the iPad soon) and third-party devices like the Roku is that the search function is not as intuitive as it is on PCs and laptops. For instance, we were watching The Change Up with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds the other night on the Roku. We then wanted to find more Bateman movies or shows but the search function for the Roku (and Android tablets and the iPad) does not allow users to search by actors, directors or studios. As of this point, only the way to find those movies is to search through the browser.
Hulu Plus is the same way. The only search results that come up are TV show and movie titles. Ultimately, this may be the biggest problem with discovery on either premium streaming content service. Netflix can add as many bells and whistles to the Android tablet UI as it likes, but ultimately it is just a beefier version of the same thing.
How can Netflix solve this problem? One of the best avenues may be a partnership or acquisition. Does Netflix have the liquid capital to make an outright acquisition of the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb)? That would solve many of Netflix’s discovery problems in a snap. Currently, what a lot of users do is check IMDb independent of Netflix and then go and search for those particular titles. The great thing about IMDb is that it breaks down content by actor, studio, director etc. It is precisely the type of search that Netflix should have on tablets and third-party streaming devices.
Netflix may have had an opportunity earlier this year with the movie app and critic base Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes. Warner Bros. snapped up Flixster as part of its content collection, discovery and social network and hence turned it into an exceptionally horrid desktop app (see our review here). With Netflix’s often tenuous relationship with the major movie studios, Flixster has been closed off to them forever.
The bottom line: It is nice to see a new tablet UI for Netflix, but it does not solve the real problems that users have on devices. What kind of feature do you want to see from Netflix on tablets? Let us know in the comments.
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5 Problems with Gmail’s New Design
Nov 11th
Gmail’s redesign may come with a bunch of spiffy new themes that look great in screenshots, but the actual usability of Gmail is in steep decline. For business users, Gmail is going downhill fast. It looks like Gmail is trying too hard to be a “social” application, and not hard enough to be an application for reading and responding to email quickly and effectively.
I’ve been using Gmail now almost since its release to the public. Its clean interface, keyboard shortcuts and relatively responsive Web interface have made Gmail my go-to mail client for years. While I’ve had some gripes with Gmail for years (not being able to sort by subject or sender in my inbox, for instance) the latest redesign has me considering going back to Thunderbird. Considering Thunderbird has improved very little in the last five years, that’s a sad reflection on the state of Gmail.
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Cleaner, More Modern
Google’s “cleaner, more modern” look is neither of those things. First of all, Google? Piet Mondrian called and has two things to say: He’d like his designs back, and he’s thrilled to be alive again. (OK, maybe not.) If you happen to be an art buff or took a few art history classes in college, you might realize that the “new” Gmail/Google interface seems to be taking a strong cue from Mondrian’s paintings and the De Stijl movement.
OK, technically I guess you could call this “modern” if you’re referring to “modern art.” But modern art and modern are two very different things these days.
The boxy designs with thin black lines and assorted white, yellow, blue, and red boxes may work for you as art (or it may not). It’s certainly not working for me as a way to view my inbox, though. To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Mondrian or the De Stijl movement. I can’t say for sure whether Google’s UI team is full of closet Mondrian fanatics, but there’s a strong resemblance.
Wherever the UI team got its cue, the interface may look nice – but it isn’t actually that useful.
Generally Confusing
Some of the gripes I (and others) have with the new interface may well fall under the “people don’t like change” category. But a number of the changes just seem like clear steps backwards. Part of the problem with the new layout/interface is that it’s difficult to tell where the interface ends and the email itself begins.
There’s no divider between the mail contents and the navigation on either side. Too much white space in many areas. If you use a Gmail edition that’s unpaid (read: has ads) the problem is even worse due to the visual clutter of the ads on the right-hand side.
A lot of the UI elements have been minimized or iconified, making them harder to see and less intuitive. The button to toggle mails as importan/unimportant has been moved from the toolbar to the top of the mail, next to the tags. The calendar and quicklinks have been shuffled off to a separate “tab” at the bottom that swaps with the chat list.
Icons Only
A major problem that I have with the new interface is that Gmail has gone from text-based buttons to an icon-only design. Lots of desktop applications offer the choice between text, icons or text and icons. Gmail, however, seems to have decided that we’re all better off with just icons. But we’re not.
Not only does this make the interface less usable, but it also takes up more vertical space than the original design. The icons really don’t do the job anyway. Does an octagon with an exclamation point really say “spam” to you? Some folks may prefer icons to text, but Gmail doesn’t seem to provide an option to switch between the two. (Even the Gmail folks rely on text for the “More” button, which should be an indication that concepts are better conveyed with text than icons alone.)
Information Density
The good with the redesign is that Gmail has an option to choose between “compact” and “comfortable” views. There’s also a “cozy” which seems to be exactly the same as “comfortable” on my display.
The bad is that the compact is hard to read, and comfortable displays less information than the classic Gmail design.
As mentioned already, the whitespace issue is a problem. There’s also the sudden intrusion of user icons in my mail interface. Some folks may find this enticing, somehow, but I find a slew of user icons on the left-hand side of my mail to be distracting. It takes up unnecessary space, and it’s duplicating the contact information displayed on the right-hand side of Gmail.
I brought up the GMail topic on Google+ this morning and one of the folks who commented said the redesign seems to be for tablets and “makes the buttons easy to stab with a fat finger.” As an owner of fat fingers, I can appreciate this – in a tablet design. For a desktop design, not so much. I still use my mouse and not my fingers for most of my Gmail work.
More Work
Reasonable people can disagree on what makes for an improvement in a user interface, but adding more steps to typical user actions is rarely seen as an improvement.
But that’s exactly what the new theme for Gmail does. In the standard design, you have a list for Mail, Contacts and Tasks. In the new design, you have a Mail “menu” in the same place with a drop-down. This poses two problems. First, it’s non-obvious that it’s a menu. It looks like it’s just text sitting there. Secondly, it requires an additional click to get to contacts. Yes, that’s just one extra click, but that’s a lot of clicks over a long period.
Google has also removed the bottom toolbar from the interface. So if you’re at the bottom of your inbox, you have to move the mouse back up to the top of the screen to archive, spam, mark messages read, and so forth.
All these little tweaks add up to more work on the user’s part.
It’s Not All Bad
This isn’t to say that Google hasn’t gotten anything right. I do like the new conversation view. I like the idea of the “comfortable,” “cozy” and “compact” views users can toggle easily. Not crazy about the actual styles that exist now, but the ability to toggle between them is a good idea. The fact that you can resize the widgets on the left-hand side is nice as well.
The new HD themes are much more attractive, but I’m not sure they’re actually any more usable than the prior set of themes. The term “visual clutter” pops into mind. The themes suggest to me that the Gmail team are really thinking more about users who send a handful of emails a day, and not the business users that live in the inbox. But props to Gmail on the actual designs.
The “Mail from this month” information you get under “more information” on the right-hand side for a contact is useful.
But, overall, I think the new design is a step back. I’d like to see Gmail provide a theme for users who are processing large quantities of email, without the distractions. Until then, I think I’m going to be looking into standard desktop mailers again to try to find something more efficient. Any suggestions, or do you think that the Gmail redesign is the best ever?
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems by @audette
Oct 10th
Pagination has always been a sticky problem for search engines. While not nearly as complex as faceted navigations for SEO, they can certainly cause crawling inefficiencies and excessive duplicate content. They can also create problems with undesirable pages ranking for important terms, in cases…
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems – Search Engine Land
Oct 10th
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems
Search Engine Land While not nearly as complex as faceted navigations for SEO, they can certainly cause crawling inefficiencies and excessive duplicate content. They can also create problems with undesirable pages ranking for important terms, in cases where the search … 10 Steps to a Successful SEO Migration Strategy |
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