I recently saw an excellent study by Derek Singleton of Software Advice, Ten Consumer Web UI Themes We’d Like to See in Business Applications. In this post I want to focus on the top five of these that we have embraced for the Darwin Awareness Engine™. Respondents were asked to name their top pick so the percentages total to a 100.
The first one was “fewer screens” with 19% of the respondents selecting it. As Derek said, “respondents were most keen on eliminating the number of screens they must navigate to achieve their objectives. We have to agree on this point; waiting for your page to load is so 1999. With the Awareness Engine everything basically happens for the user on one screen and we have designed the system to quickly bring in fresh content. You can see our basic screen below from the Darwin on Enterprise Social Media.
The Scan Cloud™ of the top terms within your target content in the middle will change as you select new focal points and that will cause a change in the related content within the right column. The BuzzTape™ will move across the top of the screen but you will not go to a new screen as you explore new content. Only clicking on a content title in the right column to take you to the actual content will open a new screen. In this case your original Awareness Engine screen remains in place for reference.
In second place was “Google suggested search” with 14% of respondents. Derek wrote that this “suggests that some users prefer text searches to navigation. Ideally, an application should provide intuitive navigation and free text search.” We do not provide Google search as we offer an awareness engine rather a search engine. However, it is set up to allow for “search” terms that we call “attractors” because of our Chaos Theory roots. These attractors allow you to focus the Scan Could on a subset of content with your target and have the changed focus come to the current screen rather than navigating to a new screen which most search engines, including Google, require.
Third place was “context-sensitive navigation” chosen by 13% of the respondents. The Darwin Awareness is all about context. As you mouse over the scan cloud, related themes are highlighted. When you click on a theme, the related content in the right column is also highlighted. The goal is to allow you to quickly see the context of the themes. When you click to go to an actual content, the original screen remains available for context.
Tied for third was “keyword alerts” also with 13%. While we do not yet provide alerts through another channel such as email, we operate with the spirit of Derek’s comments on this feature. He wrote, that some tools provide “keyword searches that will constantly scan the Twitterverse (or other channels) and provide up-to-the-minute results on a frequent basis. We do operate in real time. We can set up and save an attractor (keyword). Then you can go back to it on a frequent basis so what is happening right now. You can even set up a window and have the Awareness Engine move through your attractors, providing an alert mechanism as you work on other tasks. As Derek wrote, “we’d like to see more user-definable alert mechanisms.” The Awareness Engine offers this capability, we simply keep the action within the application.
Fifth place went to “more white space” at 11% of respondents. As you see above, we employed to principle of as simple as possible, but no simpler. This was the last one with double g figure results. We will continue to refine our UI and welcome suggestions. Thanks to Derek for this survey.
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