Today Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that they will be releasing the much speculated powerpoint version of their free online apps for small businesses. This is very exciting news for those of us who have been fully enjoying Gmail, Docs, and Spreadsheets…and more importantly those of us who use Visio.

It has been said in the past that Power Point can be a great tool for creating wireframes and other types of bare-bones visualization methods. Though I’ve always used Visio in the past, I could see this new online tool being extremely useful for throwing together some quick diagrams.

Over the past year I’ve dived head first into starting my own business, doing my own accounting, and the most recently frustrating, doing my own taxes.

The IRS has done a great job of making it as complicated as possible to figure out taxes on your own so that tax professionals can exist and in turn generate more tax money for the government. (That’s my interpretation anyways

I am lucky enough to have a close relative who is a CPA and has helped me though this painful process, but without them I would be forced to hire one…and that is lame.

Taxes are not as complicated as the IRS makes them and it doesn’t have to feel like your going to the dentist to get teeth pulled!

There is a better way.

It is clear to me that if the IRS hired a rock-star team of information architects and designers to come in and organize the tax worksheets, publications, and god forbid make them smart working online applications, there would be no need for anyone to hire a tax professional.

Imagine that after receiving a reminder email, you log-in to your user-kind IRS website, it tells you which documents need to be filed (and when), you input some numbers into some form fields, which instantly does some math and auto-populates other related fields for you, then…woops, theres an error with some data you entered, not to worry, the application is smart enough to diagnose the problem and help you fix it with ease. You type in your name at the bottom, enter your CC# or bank routing info, and hit submit.

Ahhh, now wasn’t that easy?

Maybe next year ae? (in government time that is 10 years BTW)

Altia has released a photoshop plugin called PhotoProto that allows you to turn your photoshop documents into working prototypes. It is a script that you run that takes advantage of layers and layer comps, turning them on and off as you click around your mockup. The demo makes it look like it’s very easy to use. You can even make changes to your photoshop document without affecting the prototype.

Check out the demo video for more info.

Today I was working in Dreamweaver and got this delightful error message:

Thanks for the insightful error message, Dreamweaver.

Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Here are the results of the survey…

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Demographics of Taggers
28% of online Americans say they have tagged content like a photo, a news story
or a blog post

Proportion of all Americans in the group who are taggers

• Men 29%
• Women 27%

Race/ethnicity

• White, non-Hispanic 26%
• Black, non-Hispanic 36%

English-speaking
Hispanic* 33%

Age

• 18-29 32%
• 30-49 31%
• 50-64 23%
• 65+ 18%

Educational attainment

• High school diploma 24%
• Some college 28%
• College degree + 31%

Household income

• <$30K 28%
• $30K-$49,999 28%
• $50K-$74,999 27%
• $75,000+ 36%

Internet connection at home

• Dial up 23%
• Broadband 38%

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project December 2006 tracking survey. (N for internet users=1,623. Margin of error is ±3%).

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Tagging is done somewhat differently at different websites. Here are some links that illustrate more fully how the tagging process is done:

• At Flickr – a photo sharing site
• At Del.icio.us – a browser bookmarking site
• At Technorati – a blog search engine
• At Furl – a browser tool that allows content to be archived and labeled
• At Yahoo – how tags work in Yahoo’s MyWeb browser feature
• At YouTube – a video-sharing site
• A Wikipedia entry on tagging

I just saw a video that blew my mind. At NYU they’ve developed a touch screen similar to the one featured on the iPhone…only much larger. Jeff Han demonstrates it’s possibilities in this video.

Interfaces like this will be a huge leap forward in how we interact with computers.

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

Luke from Functioning Form recently posted notes from a discussion with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO on the topic of innovation through design thinking:

So what is Design Thinking?

• It’s a human-centered approach to innovation.
• Being human-centered is unique to design, Designers think about people first, then the business second. The opposite is true for most companies.
• In the traditional Venn diagram of People (desirable), Business (viable) & Technical (feasible), design thinking solves the problem from the People perspective
• Design thinking is supported by a rich set of tools, processes, roles, and environments. Designers work like craftsmen. They know when to use the right tool at the right time.
• There are 3 important phases for design thinking: Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation

Inspiration

• Everything hinges on inspiration. We need new insights to drive innovation.
• The right way to get inspired is to get out into the real world: use the world as a source of inspiration not just validation.
• Great designers are great observers of life. They get out there to look, listen, and try.
• What’s the difference between design research and market research? Predictive market research is used by marketing to gauge the size of an opportunity. It is primarily a validation tool. Design research is an inspiration tool.
• Designers gain empathy by looking at the world through other people’s eyes in order to understand things at social, cultural, cognitive, emotional, and physical levels.
• Designers often look at analogous situations for inspiration. For example, when doing research for surgery procedures an IDEO spent a day with a Nascar pit crew.
• Insights come from extreme users and not from center of the bell curve. There’s little inspiration in average usage.
• Kids are extreme users. They magnify issues that we have as adults.

Ideation

• Building to think is essence of the prototyping process.
• Prototypes can be very rough but they should always enable engagement & discussion. Prototypes don’t have to be physical but do need to be tangible.
• Designers might go though hundreds of iterations of prototypes so they need to be quick and easy to build.
• McDonald’s prototypes service models and scenarios in a giant reconfigurable lab in Chicago.
• Prototyping makes a difference. Mcdonald’s saw kiosk usage rise from 7% to 90% after IDEO ideation process.

If you’re ever struggling to find the right way to display and visualize data, have a glance at this page for some ideas:

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

They’ve broken it out in a periodic table fashion with slick rollovers that reveal a screenshot of the visualization.

Consumers are becoming aware that the more features a product has, the less easy it is to use. They have demanded feature ridden products without understanding the impact on usability. Technology companies in competition have been compelled to meet these demands…cramming as many features and functionality as possible so that their products can be everything to everyone. These products do a thousand things poorly, and nothing great.

The success of the iPod is a perfect example of a product that does one thing extremely well…and is a good indicator of things to come. I believe that we’ll start to see more products like the iPod…instead of 1 product that does a thousand things, we’ll see 5 or 10 products that meet specific needs.

The CEO of Phillips, Paul Zeven, recently made some enlightening comments on this topic and shared some results from a study they performed:

“Clearly, the American consumer believes that we are still cramming features and functions into our products simply because we think they will sell or in response to fierce industry competition.

We need to change that. As makers of tomorrow’s gadgets and gizmos, we need to take a lesson from the success of Google. It rescued users from complexity by presenting the simplest Internet search interface possible. Another Web site, Craigslist, has done the same to maintain simplicity and to-the-point information at users’ fingertips.

The fact that some products have been able to deliver this should have raised the bar for all technology products. My industry needs to better understand the impact technology is having on our lives and find ways to simplify the overall consumer experience. And consumers should demand that we deliver this, always. After all, what is the purpose of designing a product for consumers if they are not able to use it?”

Study Results:

• more than half of Americans believe manufacturers are trying to satisfy perceived consumer needs that may not be real.
• two out of three Americans have lost interest in a technology product because it seemed too complex to set up or operate
• Only 13 percent of Americans believe technology products in general are easy to use.
• only one in four consumers reports using the full range of features on most new technology products.

Clicktale recently published some findings from their analytics data that reveal some interesting things about user behaver when it comes to scrolling. They used a subset of 120,000 page views from 11/06-12/06. Their service records the height of the web pages, the height of the window and the bottom-most location the user scrolled to.

Global Statistics

• 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
• 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.

Findings

• Visitors are likely to scan the entire page no matter the page size.

Recommendations

• Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
• Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
• Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text – they scan web pages.
• Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout.