Vertical search on a Semantic web

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Posts Tagged ‘user experence’

Vertical search on a Semantic web

25 Apr

What is Vertical Search?

A vertical search engine differentiates from a regular search engine due to it’s focus on a given subject or content type.

Topic focused vertical search engine
A great example of topic based search is Trip Advisor, a website with great information for people who are looking to travel.

Content focused vertical search engine
Media Type search can be found on sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr and others, where you search within specific media file types.
For example when I’m looking to fix CSS bugs my basic instinct makes me search on Google but if the first page doesn’t return the best answer for my problem I use Delicious, for books I use Amazon, etc.

The advantage of using a vertical search engine is that it will narrow the amount of information indexed which will result in more relevant search results.

What is Semantic Web

Semantic web can be interpreted as an intelligent, self-learning web. The future of semantic web will belong to services that will understand the user and deliver them the best answers for it’s need.

While it’s not perfectly clear for users, semantics have been implemented on several websites for a while now. Amazon was, as far as I know, the first site to implement a semantic user experience when it started suggesting further products based on users preferences. When a user bought a book, Amazon’s software would recommend other books based on purchases made by users who have bought that very same book. The result was a massive increase of sales and profit.
Google also is improving it’s search engine by reordering search results based on user navigation history.

So it’s fair to say a semantic web, or Web 3.0 as some call it, is each more a reality and not a trend. This brings me to this posts topic:

Can Vertical Search Engines coexist in a semantic web?

Personally I see vertical search engines as a the first step into the semantic web concept. I believe some people will say there completely separate things and I’d love to hear a different opinion on the subject.
If I want to find a needle inside a huge barn and know the needle is inside a haystack, I’ll search only inside the haystack. The haystack is my vertical search engine.

Using the same metaphor with semantic web once I’m inside the barn I’ll get a suggestion the needle is probably on the haystack, along with a picture of how the needle might look like and also where in the haystack it will probably be.
Eventually, once I find the needle, related subjects such as strings, other kinds of needles, groups, etc would be suggested as a complement to my interest on the needle.

Being the first time I searched for something I would also get suggestions related to hay and the haystack but if I show no interest in that, further similar searches would not retrieve those suggestions.

What do you think about the future of vertical search? How can it grow in order to survive on a Web 3.0 environment?

4 Comments

Posted in Web Development

The Gutenberg Diagram in Web Design

07 Mar

The Gutenberg rule points out a user behavior called reading gravity which is the western habit of reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom. It can be represented as a simple diagram that splits a page in four quadrants:

Gutenberg Diagram

A Primary Optical Area
a strong follow area
a weak follow area
and a Terminal Area

The higher left portion of the page is the user primary focus, it’s where the eyes will automatically focus regardless if the user is searching for something, wanting to read or just doing a quick scan on the page.

The second stage of the reading habit is moving to the higher right portion of the page, you can think of it as a follow up from the left portion but less important. It’s not a good idea to break the reader’s experience created from the starting point. Meaning that if you have a call to action the user will stop at this point and act.

The lower left portion is the blind portion of the Gutenberg diagram, although readable the user will not give much importance to content in this area of the page.

When the user reaches the lower right portion of the page there is a break in the reading / page scan process and the user will need to take an action. This is the perfect spot to insert call-2-action such as buttons, links, forms, video, etc.

By understanding the reading patterns of the users who visit your website you are able to place the most important content in the areas where they will be most effective.

If you’ve read about web users reading patterns you probably read Jacob Nielsen’s report on the F-Shaped Pattern that shows the lower right area as the less important area. I wouldn’t say this theory is wrong but consider the F-Shaped pattern for users that are scanning the page and the Gutenberg Diagram for user that are reading or genuinely interested in the content.

F-Shaped Pattern

For example, a user is searching for information about the Gutenberg Diagram and reaches this article. The user will look at the diagram image and read the lines above the image starting an inverted Gutenberg Diagram.
If the user is looking to buy a product on E-bay I believe the primary pattern on the product listing pages will be a typical Gutenberg Diagram.

On the other hand when a user is searching for information on a search engine and finds multiple articles about it, the user will engage an F-shaped pattern when visiting those pages trying to find quick and concrete references to it’s search.

Complementary readings:

1 Comment

Posted in Web Design

Nikon Virtual Touch

24 Feb

The future of technology is augmented reality. Nikon decided to take Digital Cameras to the next level with their Coolpix series and have recently introduced the Nikon CoolPix S70 with touch screen allowing users to get more interactive with their cameras and reducing the camera size.
Apart from the camera itself Nikon also released a place where you can see navigate pictures using a webcam and gestures removing the need to touch or click.

Visit Nikon’s CoolPix website and try their augmented reality experience using your webcam and basic gestures to navigate and zoom their gallery.

1 Comment

Posted in Productivity

Get 10% off your ticket for UX-LX

23 Feb

UX-LX is a user experience conference held in Lisbon, Portugal during the 12th, 13th and 14th May 2010 with a wonderful speaker panel and several workshops.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get a discount coupon that will give you a 10% off on any ticket purchase. Get your 10% discount now before February 2010 and save over 200 euros. No catch, no email or registration required from me, just simple, direct indications on how to get your 10% discount.

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Posted in Marketing

6 WordPress plugins for better user experience

07 Feb

Allow your users to Subscribe to comments

When you allow users to leave there opinions they might want to follow up that conversation. Although it’s possible to do that by subscribing the comments RSS they might want to get email warnings instead.
I’ve been using Subscribe to Comments for years and I’ve found a reasonable number of users subscribing to comments on posts they have given their opinions. Allowing your readers to choose if they want to be warn when there’s an update on a specific post is improving the user experience.

WordPress Subscribe to comments plugin

Users can edit their comments after submitting them

One of the most embarrassing comments I’ve ever made was about 2 years ago on a popular blog. It was past 1am and I was finishing up some work when I did a pause. I read an interesting post about SEO and left my comment. Fortunately I went back to the post again and re-read it. I ended up noticing that the comment I had left was pure nonsense. I wish I had the chance to change that. Would save me some embarrassment.

For that you have a plugin called WP Ajax Edit Comments which allows all users to edit their own comments without the need to be registered or logged in.

Better printing experience

One other subject I take in consideration is printing. The most common practice when someone wants to print an interesting post is printing the whole blog layout or printing a selection. But the best practice is when a user chooses to print and will only print what he wants.
For this you have two options:

Create a specific CSS for print
Use a plugin for that effect

Personally I prefer to create a specific stylesheet for print and apply the layout I want. But WP-Print plugin does a terrific job
and it’s a very good alternative for hand-coding your printing styles.

iPhone, Cell Phone, PDA navigation

Recently I just ended my mobile internet contract. The reason is quite simple, I don’t use it that much and when I do I don’t really get to visit the websites I want. Smashing Magazine has a mobile version of their website but, for example, Abduzeedo doesn’t and when I tried to reach it with my mobile phone it jammed it with too many images, javascript and information that I didn’t want to see.

WordPress Mobile Pack plugin will help you adapt your WordPress site to mobile browsers and not just iPhones.
Again you can do a specific CSS stylesheet for the effect but the plugin covers that very well.

Speed up your website

How often do you visit websites and when they take too long to load their content you simple leave them? This is common on websites that are hosted on shared servers and have a considerable amount of traffic.
When someone visits your site or blog the server gets requests to display everything on that page. When you have a site with heavy images or simple allot of images it’s normal that page loading time takes longer than it should.
Fortunately for WordPress powered sites there’s WP Super Cache that will cache the pages making the loading time faster thus improving user experience on your website.
For small websites or pages with little content or not so rich in images you might not notice much difference.

Give users a quick navigational reference with a Sitemap

Usually when you speak about sitemaps on WordPress you are refering to XML Sitemaps for Google Webmaster Tools, Bing’s Webmaster Central, etc. In this case I am speaking of a page with a reference to existing links on your website.

This is important for 2 primary reasons:

Users have a quick reference to categories, pages and posts separated by category
Search engine robots have a place to crawl to your posts thus indexing more pages for your website

There are many plugins to create sitemaps on WordPress. Personally I recommend Sitemap Generator WordPress plugin for this effect.

5 Comments

Posted in Tools, Web Development

Mário Andrade

Posts Tagged ‘user experence’