Spacetime - 3D search results

SpaceTime is just too cool. Consider how much easier it is to actually decide which of the search results you want to check and which you'll discard in an instant.




In the screen shot I've done a Google search and the first page shows the results from Google. The next page shows the first result (a report from iProspect). I can scroll through the results by clicking Next.

So why is this cool? Well - first of all - my decisions of which search results are relevant are much easier - by browsing the pages themselves instead of some text that hopefully was created by the owner of the content (and not Google) it is much faster to check if results are relevant. When (OK - I guess there's an if option also, but I'm pretty much a Google fan) Google ports this onto their common user interface they are again miles ahead of the competition. Man - I just can't wait.

The return of Jakob

Finally - after many not so precise and meaningfull alertboxes - Jakob Nielsen has turned out two in a row which offers some of the "old" provocative observations and alerts, but also some very good advice on designing user interfaces that we sometimes tend to forget in our (well, at least my own) search of new and cool looking application design. I wonder what Jakob thinks of Joost?

Check out the alertbox

Joost (at last)

I've been fiddling around with Joost a couple times now. First of all: The image quality is surprisingly good. The number of shows quite overwhelming. This leads to the first user experience challenge: How to organize this enormous amount of "channels"? This is done surprisingly easy with a left hand navigation of categories. Clicking each category lists the channels within the category in an explorer kind of view with thumb nails. Works pretty well.

There is also a control panel which pops up when you mouse over it. A few of the icons are hard to understand, but most of them are pretty straigth forward what you're used to from other players. They all have mouse-over text to help you along, so no worries there.

The only thing that is so-so is the content. They even have my cycling.tv in a much easier to use way than the original (see earlier post). Unfortunately since it is free (which is nice) they only show content that's fairly outdated. If they could provide a payment scheme I'd be more than happy to fork over my £25 that I paid to cycling.tv to them. I even log in to Joost so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to handle.

Joost really delivers a refreshing view on how you can design user interfaces running on Windows. If you're just a bit interested in interface design I really urge you to try it out. (It's a beta and crashes from time to time - but it's worth a go anyway)