Something funny just happened that I wanted to share.<p>You've probably seen Yahoo's new Search Assistant. If not, check it out.<p>Well, I thought it's a pretty neat feature.<p>Until I just saw a young child use it, a regular Yahoo user, who was baffled at the recommendation popup and what it was for, thinking he <i>had</i> to click on one of the recommendations.<p>There goes the actual product, the search engine, out of the window. :)<p>It is soo easy to build in too many features. KISS
Wow, thanks for sharing that observation! What a gem of insight into how easy it is to cross that gray line of usability.<p>Just a week ago I was watching the Berkely course videos from SIMS 141 on YouTube. This one <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYbuDzvWr4s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYbuDzvWr4s</a> featured Dr. Daniel E. Rose from Yahoo! talking about User Experience Issues in Web Search.<p>Part of the video, which was recorded 2 years ago, he talks about some of their UI research and how they believe they can improve the interface a lot, primarily focusing on keyword suggestions to help people remember what they were really looking for when they might only remember part of it or something related. Ironically enough a day or two after I watched that video they launched this new feature.<p>Maybe they should have spent more time observing users. :)
How about those sites that have the underlined key words. Let your mouse stray across one accidentally and wham! There's a little popup advertisement related to the keyword.<p>
That drives me nuts. You know, there's something to be said for a plain vanilla site that does the one thing I want it to do, and nothing more.