Anyone who has been using Facebook for a few years knows that even minor changes to an interface design can cause a wide variety of reactions from a loyal user base. When the popular social network has made design tweaks in the past, there is always some portion of their users that are upset, if not enraged, by the changes made. A couple of weeks ago, we told you how your registration process could be driving potential users away, and a large part of that has to do with the design.

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These days, the look and feel of a website or product is just as important as the features that it provides. One product with one of the hottest new interfaces available is the new Boxee Beta software which allows for streamlined local and Web media viewing. Whitney Hess is the user experience (UX) designer behind the framework of the Boxee interface, and recently on her blog Pleasure and Pain she described the systematic process she went through to design it.

When Boxee hired Hess to overhaul their UX, she began by interviewing eleven people, some of which were current users of the software, and others who weren't. She asked them a variety of questions about their use of multimedia, including "Have you ever played music at a party you were hosting?" and "Have you ever displayed your photos on your TV?" among several others. Hess then held usability tests with five participants and gauged how they navigated around the software when asked to complete a series of tasks.

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Thu Jan 28, 2010 16:55 pm

As a parent (now there's a phrase you don't see here that often), I'm dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids' apps on my iPhone to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze.

But there's this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and - loath though our children's parents are to admit it - sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue... and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play.

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Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for - like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we're groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us.

At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We're reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story.

With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again.

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Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:40 pm

In several key respects, the Android platform has almost caught up to the iPhone, according to new statistics from comScore.  There are still a lot more iPhones floating around in the great, wide world, of course, but otherwise, Android's doing extremely well.

Let's start with the table below.  It illustrates that, more than the average smartphone user, Android users do a lot of things other than talk.  This is important since it could mean that Android devices aren't becoming buy-and-forget paperweights; owners actually enjoy using them.

And indeed, Android's numbers are almost neck-and-neck with Apple's.

Then there's the simple matter of what people have said they intend to buy.  A comScore statement reported, "[O]f those American consumers in the market for a smartphone, 17 percent are considering the purchase of an android-supported device in next three months, compared to 20 percent indicating they plan to purchase an iPhone."

So again, Android's almost caught up with the iPhone.

Given a few more months and the release of another Android device or two, it's not hard to imagine that we'll see a tie or new leader.

Related Articles:

> New Google Phone Has Tech Community Licking Chops

> [...]

Mon Dec 21, 2009 13:45 pm

Posted by wrttnwrd

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say 'invisible', I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results.

If you can find those pages, you can decide:

• To keep them, but work to raise their organic search profile;
• To keep them, but use more of their link juice to help other, higher-profile pages on your site; 
• Get rid of them, and 301 redirect them to higher-profile, higher-value pages on your site.

Soooooo, how do you find 'em?

Turns out, a new Google Analytics feature can make it happen: Pivot table reports

Here's how you do it:

1. In Google Analytics, click 'Content'.
   
   
2. Click the 'Top Content' report:You'll see a list of the most-viewed pages on your site. Not much help just yet.
   
   
3. Now for the good stuff. At the top-right corner of the 'Content Performance' tab, click the 'Pivot' button:
   
   
   
4. Change 'Pivot by' to medium. Leave 'Showing' set as 'Pageviews'. You'll get a new table showing pages as the rows, and the mediums (media? mediumses?) as the columns, like this:
   [...]
   
   Thu Jan 14, 2010 14:40 pm

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