I have been using Netflix for several years now, and while I believe it to be one of the most usable and cleanly designed websites on the interent, its algorithm to recommend movies to me has fallen way short of my expectations. I have rated roughly 600 movies on Netflix, which is more than enough to give them a good idea of what I’m in to…yet nearly all the movies that they recommend to me I dislike.

The ratings they display to you are based on how you rate other movies…which means that “The Divinci Code” could be rated as 5 stars to me, yet 3 stars to you based on how you (and others with similar ratings as you) rate other movies. This seems like a really smart way to build a rating system, but it sure doesn’t work for me. Personally I would rather view overall ratings of movies rather than an algorithmic one…that way I know I’m looking at real ratings vs. ratings a computer generated for me.

Netflix must be aware of this flaw, because, according to the New York Times, they’ve started a contest offering a million dollar prize to anyone who can improve their rating system by at least 10% (hopefully they’ll use a better system to measure improvement than they use for ratings).

The winning solution (if there is one) will not only be useful to Netflix, but useful for all recommendation algorithms out there…and just may result in pushing the internet to the next level.

Research and Markets will be releasing a new book in November 2006 on usability success stories. There seems to be some enlightening information based on the overview, table of contents, and experienced writers involved…

“Poor usability also imposes significant costs on product producers. Companies that make hard-to-use products incur higher support costs, spend more on rework, and have less satisfied customers. “

People spend increasing amounts of time and effort interacting with complex hardware and software products. Some of the products we interact with are easy to learn and easy to remember. Some are even a pleasure to use. Others are hard to learn, hard to use, and frustrate us at every turn. But it is not just the user that pays the cost in such cases.

These outcomes can be avoided by applying the techniques of usability engineering and user-centred design (UCD) during product development. This book shows how usability and UCD practitioners do this by studying users needs and abilities, designing the product accordingly, and verifying the design through additional testing with users.

Despite the positive return on investment for usability engineering activities, many organizations view usability engineering as a non-critical part of the product development process. This book seeks to change this by relating a number of cases where usability engineering contributed significantly to the solution of a business problem. Evidence is drawn from experiences within a range of private and public sector organizations showing how usability work can best be organized and executed within a business environment. The organizational factors that facilitate or impede the application of usability engineering are also discussed. The book clearly explains the barriers to be overcome as well as highlighting the factors promoting success.

A wide range of applications are covered, including web-based e-commerce, medical devices and software, process control management systems, financial services applications, consumer desktop applications and interactive voice response systems.
Usability Success Stories provides a valuable guide for business managers and technical staff as well as for practitioners within the field itself.

Table of Contents:

An introduction to usability and user-centered design, Paul Sherman

Tracking ease of use metrics: A tried and true method for driving adoption of UCD in different corporate cultures, Wendy Castleman and Kaaren Hanson

Tales from the trenches: Getting usability through corporate, Hank Henry

Redesigning the United States Department of Health and Human Services web site, Mary France Theofanos and Conrad Mulligan

Creating better working relationships in a user-focused organization, Elizabeth Rosenzweig and Joel Zif

Using innovation to promote a user-centered design process while addressing practical constraints, Leslie Tudor and Julie Radford-Davenport

Changing perceptions: Getting the business to value user-centered design processes, Adam Polansky

UI Design at Siemens Medical Solutions, Dirk Zimmermann and Jean Anderson

Collaborating with change agents to make a better user interface, Paul Sherman and Susan Hura

Learning from success stories, Paul Sherman

Neighboroo created a mashup between google maps and a bunch of public data to create heatmaps of the data.

You can view heatmaps for several different data types, such as Politics, Crime Rates, Tax Rates, Household Income, etc…

Its a very interesting little tool to play with.

Screenshot:

The Ambient clock combines a typical clock interface with the event data from your google calendar so you can see a simple view of your scheduled time vs. free time at a glance. The background color changes if you have up-coming events as a additional identifier.

With a quick glance you can determine:

• How long until my next event?
• What time is my first event?
• What time does my last event end?
• What is my ratio of free time vs. scheduled time?

Additionally, if your google event has location information added to it, the Ambient clock will estimate your commute time to that event and display it as dots preceding the event.

None of these physical clocks are in production yet, but you can get a google homepage version. They claim that the physical version would only need AAA batterys and connect via Ambiant’s nationwide wireless network.

Apple’s Marketing and PR departments have gotten quite clever in their old age. They know that for someone’s company to fork over $2000 for a 30-inch Cinima HD monitor, they better have some damn good ammunition and reasoning behind something like that.

Well, just recently, Apple has provided you with the ammunition.

They hired a consulting company to do a benchmark analysis on using a 30-inch vs. a 17-inch monitor for certain tasks…and I’ll have to say, the results are convincing…

Major Findings

• High-resolution displays such as the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display can result in measurable productivity and efficiency gains.
• Productivity gains were present in not only professional design and publishing, digital imaging, and digital video, but also in general productivity and office applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.
• Cumulated productivity gains linked to a large, high-resolution display can lead to a return on investment (ROI) of several thousand dollars per year.

They also proceeded to break down the ROI based on productivity gains, concluding that buying this monitor can save you up to $23,000 per year! Ha!

Resources:

• Download the entire study (PDF) …and forward it to your boss

Google is about to release yet another analytics tool for all Adwords advertisers…Website Optimizer. This new tool allows you to dive deep into a/b testing of specific elements on a given landing page in order to discover what combination of elements performs best.

With the optimizer tool, you can test multiple versions of images, call to action, marketing text, buttons, ect… on a given landing page. The Website Optimizer tool will then show you which combination of elements performed the best in order to retain customers, increase conversion, and increase your ROI.

Resources:

• Demo
• Documentation

The other day I was watching a Texas governor debate (there was nothing else on ok?!)…and one of the guys in his closing speech said “I think the Internet is the devil”. At first I thought, “this guy just sealed his own coffin!”…but after further thinking… “humm, perhaps many of the people of Texas haven’t caught on to the Internet revolution yet and what he said just might have won him some votes”.

I believe the Internet is going to change everything…not in a satanic sort of way, but in a rate of human evolution sort of way. Looking historically at our evolution for just the past 100 years, we have accomplished amazing things. Even the rate at which we evolved during that time significantly increased.

I believe that the rate at which we evolve is determined by 2 major factors:

1) Population Increase
2) Knowledge and Information Accessibility

In the past knowledge and information has been accessible by libraries, teachers, professors, and your peers. Most of which you pay for, either with tax money or collage loans. This has been a somewhat fixed level of knowledge and information available to us.

The internet enables us to learn anything we want instantly, accurately, and free. Best of all, it is evolving at the rate that we contribute to it! The Internet removes the barriers of knowledge between countries, religions, languages, and cultures.

What this means to me is that we will see an exponential evolution rate in the years to come, much more than we’ve seen in the past 100 years. We can now learn from the mistakes of others around the world…pushing us forward faster.

I see a future where structured learning is no more and that we will only be taught how to teach ourselves…leaving the rest up to our own personal pursuit. We will spend more time specializing and less time generalizing. You wont hear…”All that useless stuff I learned in school”…useless knowledge will be your own fault.

I am very excited to be a part of the internet revolution, and something tells me I wont be going straight to hell for it.

I’ve been using Bloglines to aggregate my 100+ rss feeds from around the Internet since I discovered the wonderful world of rss about 2 years ago. When Google Reader v1 came out, I was at first impressed with the slick ajax UI they came up with…it was very smooth, had lots of bells n whistles, etc. However, unlike most google products I use, Google reader v1 fell way short of satisfying my rss thirst for knowledge. I could not categorize feeds and it was difficult to quickly browse articles. It was a classic example of where “cool” did not sync with “functional”.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Reader v1 beta:

Recently, Google launched version 2 beta of their Google Reader…and after trying it out for a couple weeks, I’ve officially made the switch from Bloglines. Why? Because it finally lives up to the wonderful user experience that I’ve come to find in many of Google’s other products such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Analytics.The

Pros:
My favorite feature of the new reader is the ability to toggle the way you view the feeds from a list view (very similar to gmail) to an expanded view (similar to bloglines). I use both views frequently because some feeds (like craigslist feeds for example) are much quicker and easier to view as a list while other feeds that have long articles I tend to read regularly make the expanded view the most practical.

List View Screenshot:

Expanded view screenshot:

You can now categorize your feeds and organize them how you wish (similar to bloglines…only without the frames).

Another great differentiator from Bloglines is that google can display only feeds/folders that have new posts…which makes my list of 100+ feeds not so long and above the fold since i read them regularly.

Google reader is also smart enough to know the difference between a new post and an updated or modified post…therefore google will only show you new posts (if you tell it to)…where bloglines always just re-displays the same post every time its updated.

The Con (yea just one):

UPDATE: Just a couple of days after posting this review, google added the auto refresh in there…so this con is gone

My only gripe is that Google doesn’t automatically update your feeds like bloglines does…instead, you have to refresh the reader to get your updates…not a show-stopper for me though

Competitious recently launched a service that helps you easily keep track of your competitors.

I can see this coming in very handy for those of us who do competitive analysis on a reguar basis.
In their own words:

“Having accurate information about competitors is vital to your company’s ability to maintain its competitive advantage. With a structured way to gather competitive intelligence, your company can maximize opportunity in your market while minimizing the threat of current and potential competitors. Competitious is an easy, confidential way to discover and share competitive information globally across your organization, and stay up-to-date on the competition.”

You start by creating a project like “Ajax startpages” or whatever field you are interested in. You then add competitors by home page URL. Competitio.us hits the web and brings back each company’s blog, recent blog posts, related blog posts from off site and detailed traffic data from Alexa.

Each competitor page has an Ajax drop down to build a feature list. When one competitor on a project has a feature added, a check box for that feature is added to all the other competitors’ pages. You can then view all of the competitors and features in a full page matrix.

Blog posts are displayed (via the Google Ajax Search API) on the same page as each company’s information and can be sent to the clippings section with one click. When you add something to clippings you’re asked for comments and whether you want to email the clipping to the rest of your team.

There’s also a browser bookmarklet for adding news to clippings from off site. That bookmarklet brings up fields for related project, competitors and comments.

All of these clippings from a team of users can be subscribed to through a secure RSS feed. Any number of enterprise social bookmarking services are slowly emerging but this single feature in a relatively lightweight service makes it really valuable.

A team can work on any number of projects, each with different permission levels for individual users. Recent activity is listed on the sidebar so you can quickly check in on the newest discussion about your competitors in one place.

Get the full article at TechCrunch