Comments on: Usability Begins At Home

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:27:44 +0000

A little color? This isn't related to the vicious rumor that I wore all black during my first four years at Endeca, right? I'm quite open to sprucing up the design; I'm just not particularly talented as a designer. I pretty much installed the Cutline theme as is. I'll happily give write access to the site to anyone who volunteers to improve it. Indeed, I am still grateful to David Fauth for helping me migrate from Blogger several months ago!

By: Perry Hewitt

Perry Hewitt — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:19:31 +0000

I hear you about the overinvesting given the propensity of your readers (even the digital communications ones!) to use RSS — but I occasionally click through from Tweetdeck. But would a little color kill you? ; )

– Perry

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:45:22 +0000

Good point, over-investing in the site itself is probably not a great idea. A pity some of the features, like the similar posts widget, don’t show up to RSS readers. And you only see comments when you click through–I find that particularly annoying when I’m reading blogs through RSS.

By: Max L. Wilson

Max L. Wilson — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:09:17 +0000

i access your blog entirely through rss – unless i want to comment. in which case i portal in. heh. i didnt know you had 1 search box, let alone 2.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:28:58 +0000

I’m actually quite open to feedback to improve the site design–though of course it’s most helpful when it’s constructive and pragmatic, given that I try to minimize the IT aspects of my work on this blog.

You’re probably right that people don’t use the search box much–in fact, I suspect most search that do occur are because I leave them around the blogosphere as links, e.g., this search for Gene Golovchinsky.

I have thought of trying to make the main search box more visible, if that’s easy to do for the Cutline theme. Sounds like that would be a good idea.

By: Gene Golovchinsky

Gene Golovchinsky — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:28:13 +0000

The following should not be construed as a rant against your web site design, mostly because I don’t think search is that important a component of this blog. (But I could be wrong on this.)

My guess is that your two search boxes are OK, considering that neither one is particularly easy to spot. One of the things about search boxes, is that people tend to have a strong sense of where they are to be found on the page (i.e., somewhere in the header). The green text doesn’t help either — makes it look like another one of those thingies you’ve got in the right margin.

So if you know where to look, you’re OK, if you don’t, it probably doesn’t matter because using Google/Yahoo to search your site is probably better anyway.

For sites where search matters, there should be a clear site search box, but if there are add-ins with their own look and feel (e.g., Top Posts) they can carry their own integrated search without confusing the user. As long as there is clear visual segregation, your “one search box” injunction should apply to each component.

My guess is that with faceted search, things get tricky if you want to inherit some context into your search. But now we’re clearly in speculation land, and I’d better stop.