Stanley Yao's Blog

The new beta site http://www.askx.com/ is pretty impressive overall.  Fast results, AJAX'y UI, thumbnail preview, facade search, vertical search, etc.  Just the "Save to MyStuff" is a bit confusing at the beginning.  After adding a few items to mystuff, I'm expecting to be able to see all my stuff by clicking some tab.  But it turns out I have to click one of the item that I added into MyStuff.  Not very intuitive.  The space utilization is not very efficient.  The main search result column in the middle is narrow and often times the 2 side columns are half empty.

Yahoo Pipes is a recently released new innovative product. The name explained itself. It's the web counterpart of UNIX Pipes. UNIX pipes help connecting multiple command line tools to produce a new customized tool, while Yahoo Pipes help connecting the countless web services and boost the power of those web services exponentially. By wiring up the web services on the web, you can create amazing new products of your own.

The pipe network consists of modules (doing processing like filtering, sorting, etc.) and pipes (directing the data flow). RSS and text flow through the pipes and produce the final result in the RSS format. Here is an easy example to show how it works. Let's build a video search that covers YouTube and Soapbox and sort the results based on the rating and play count.

We need 2 user input, keyword and minimum rating required. The Soapbox search is easier. Do a search on Soapbox and copy the RSS URL (notice the parameters on the URL). Create a URLBuilder in the Pipes, paste the URL in the Base, and it will automatically parse the parameters and fill them in below the Base. Then extract the result by a Fetch module and direct them into a filter on the ratings. Finally sort on the rating column and dump the result into Pipe Output module. YouTube is a little bit trickier, because they don't support parameters on the RSS URL. But have a tag based URL explained here. Fortunately Yahoo Pipes has a String Concatenate module, which could be used to connect the 3 pieces "feed://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/", user search keyword, and ".rss". Connect the resulting URL to the Fetcher too and we are done. One small problem though. Because YouTube feed doesn't supply the rating information, so the sorting is only effect on the result item from Soapbox. Now try this new video search here.

I suggest Yahoo Pipes to also include the following features:

1. When several sources are Union'ed their items are listed in the order of the sources.  So if the sources in the front has pages of items, it's very difficult to surface the items from the source at the end.  It'd be helpful if a Shuffle module is provided so that when doing the Union, it can shuffle the items from multiple sources.  Ideally some sort of weighting function can be specifid to differentiate the relative importance of each source.
2. When clicking on an pipe, it highlight the 2 modules it connects.
3. When clicking on an module, it's directly connected modules are hightlighted.

Just begin with some of the many good and bad examples of usability cases.  In google search, when you click the "search" button after typing in the keywords, at the top of the search result a tip will appear saying "Tip: Save time by hitting the return key instead of clicking on 'search' ".  This approach is light footprint yet effective.  The users see the tip right after they did a "stupid" thing.  They have the motivation to try the tip right on the spot and found it really helped.  This whole process of stupidity->gotcha->cool happens in a streamline and I believe the user will remember the tip in the bone.

In live search, when users type in a non-English keyword, there are very small amount of snippets/summary for the non-English sites in its own language, which is not very international user friendly.  Those who typed in a non-English language keyword most likely know that language well enough to read the results in that language.  Having summary in the website's native language is a very natural thing to do and an expected result for the users.  Even if the search engine is facing NA market, since there are a large number of foreign people in NA, having some degree of International language support makes sense.

The importance of usability is elevated to a even higher level in the web 2.0 era.  The center of computing is shifting from computers to human users.  After many years' of advancement, computers begin to fade into the background as commodity.  The real power is organizing and combining exploding information generated by people and eventually used by people.  However, people are "lazy", "impatient", and "greedy".  Making the human users satisfied becomes more and more critical to the success of software and services providers.  The business model and vehicle to deliver the software and services in Web 2.0 era is so unique that contributes in "spoiling" the users too.  The barrier of entering and Web 2.0 industry is so low that a few good programmers with a good idea could make a very successful website.  The services of huge number of those websites are very innovative, powerful, and, more importantly, free most of the time thanks to the online ads business model.  The release and delivery of newer and nicer online services has so low impact to the users, with no hassle of installation, upgrading, or troubleshooting on the client side.  With all these things together, the users end up being the spoiled king!  They have so many choices and they are free.  So they can switch to any better product without much difficulty.  Now it's time for the software and service providers to worry about the user experience their products bring to the customers.

One big resistance to achieving good usability is from the software developers.  Most of them are passionate about technology and tackling challenging problems, while feeling bored about non-technical stuff.  Being customer obsessed and having a mind set of building software for human instead for machines would be a very appreciated capability of an excellent software developer.  The new ways of organizing emails in gmail, the search engine keyword spelling correction feature, and so on are all from developers who made this step ahead.