inter:digital strategies

Once again I’ve crossed the boundaries between my two blogs – Bill Slawski and Gray Wolf have recently published articles discussing "inline linking". Gray Wolf’s original article spawning Bill’s response (not exactly a response, but an article prompted by Gray Wolf’s comments).

I felt the need to respond, but rather than addressing this from an SEO perspective, I thought of it as an accessibility issue, so I’ve posted on this at my Accessible Web Design blog. Since the subject definitely pokes around in the area of search engine optimization, I thought it worth mentioning here, as well.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on the question "Does Accoona Suck". My criticisms were two-fold: first, whether Accoona provided a unique value as a search engine, and second, whether they utilized underhanded marketing techniques to build their reputation.

On the basis of those two points, I was very unimpressed. Recently, Accoona released an interesting new toolbar, as pointed out by Loren Baker. As Loren says, the toolbar, functionally speaking, is fantastic. It’s not perfect; but I was quite impressed with the way it managed to handle numbers.

I tested it with a year incorporated into text, and it successfully expressed that year correctly. It even distinguished between the speaking pattern for a year like 1985 (nineteen-eighty-five) and 2005 (two thousand five). I checked a zip code – also correct. I tried a phone number expressed with dot separators – no problem. It didn’t manage a PO Box number quite right, and had a little trouble with the fraction 1/2 – pronouncing it "one-second". However, fractions which do not deviate from the normal number speaking system were handled more successfully.

On the whole, the voice is pleasant and clear. I would be perfectly willing, if necessary, to listen to a longer text with the tool.

But the marketing strategies that Accoona has demonstrated with this project still leave me frustrated. They have not disclosed everything that I felt necessary in order to install the toolbar – namely, that I would need to install additional software after the toolbar and that I would need to register for a 60 day free trial in order to use the product. It’s a minor issue; but I would have appreciated this information in advance.

For your information, the toolbar costs Euro 21.49 – since that information is also obscured from the Accoona marketing information.

After my vitriolic post on MSN’s Search Macros, I’ve been thinking a lot about user interfaces. User interface design is difficult and unpredictable, and is always crucial to the success of any website, web service, or web tool. The bigger companies can usually get away with something new, novel, or unusual because of marketing hype and a strong user base.
But it’s easy to lose track of what you need to communicate to your users.

To me, MSN’s Search Macros fall down hard because they completely failed to communicate – I didn’t even bother reviewing the actual search tool, because the user interface was so unintuitive that it seemed a much higher priority to me. This week I’d like to look at a few other well-known products with an eye to user interface issues.

I’m going to start with one of my own pet peeves – Google’s Account interface. (You’ll only get anything out of that link if you have a Google Account.)

Google Account Management

Google lets you use one account to log in to all of their services. They also have an interface which supposedly provides access to your services and to an account summary. But I can only hope they’re working on this, because it simply doesn’t provide anything that I want from an account manager.

The problems are very simple – this user interface gives you the impression that it will provide access to your services. However, under the heading "Edit Services Info", you are only given access to two services – Gmail and Google Alerts. I am subscribed to a number of additional services – Adwords, Adsense, Analytics and Sitemaps, for example. I would love to have a simple link to those interfaces from this panel.

The "New Services" are clearly quite out of date – and I’d like to turn them off, anyhow, since I have no interest in having these things thrown at me.

Quite simply – Google needs an account manager to give users a centralized place to access or edit all of their services. This interface should clearly delineate links to services versus links to edit account information. Instead, Google provides an account manager, but it does not provide any of the access which would make it useful.