Tom Van de Zande > Recent Status Updates

Daily me, the newspaper perfectly custom-tailored to your interests— so custom-tailored, in fact, that you lose the serendipity and surprise that we've come to expect from reading the newspaper... It's a mind-narrowing experience, not a mind-expanding one

We don't have time to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future refernce. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then drew upon our previously considered conclusions.

We don't have time to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future refernce. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then drew upon our previously considered conclusions.

Aim to delight your target audience for their core tasks and hope to please them for the secondary tasks.

Greatness is not a matter of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.

We all have a strength or two in life, and I suppose mine is the ability to take a lump of unorganized information, see patterns, and extract order from,the mess — to go from chaos to concept

Een tekst ontleende zijn waarde aan de inhoud, maar zijn effect werd gemeten door zijn helderheid en sierheid

Productivity on the Web is bases on the principle of selfservice. • The best self-service tasks have high frequency and low complexity. • The worst self-service tasks have low frequency and high complexity.

We don't like Google because it's a search engine, we like it because it's a find engine. So you don't manage the ability to search on your website. You manage their ability to find on your website.

We are realizing that we should not be managing technology or content, but rather our customer's experience as they seek to complete a task. It's not organizational productivity that we should focus on. Rather, it is customer productivity that should mlnopolize our attention.

Information needs to be organized by how people are thinking when they need it.

In a world that is increasingly running on content, the quality of content—rather than the quantity of content—determines success.

Don't make the common mistake of managing the technology or the content itself. Manage the tasks your customers need to complete, using the content that your organization publishes.

On instant results: However, if we select one of these, it bypasses the search results page entirely and takes us directly to a product specific landing page. Rather than suggesting alternative queries, the search box provides "instant results" in the form of a set of matching "best bets" for products and resources.

The purpose of autocomplete is to search within a controlled vocabulary for entries matching a partial character string. By contrast, the purpose of of autosuggest is to search within a virtually unbounded list for related keywords and phrases. Autocomplete helps us get an idea out of our head and into the search box; autosuggest actually throws new ideas into the mix.

On the web, users can search for almost anything, with few constraints over topic or medium. By contrast, in site search (ie search on a specific website), the choices are usually much more restricted, which presents an opportunity to provide further support in the form of "placeholder" text and other prompts to help users construct meaningful queries.

One of the fundamental concepts in human-computer interaction is the notion of affordance: the idea that an object's design should suggest the interactions that its function supports.

User experience is a little like chesd—it takes minutes to absorb the principles but years of practice to apply them effectively.

Five example mode chains from the domain of enterprise search are listed here: 1. Comparison driven search (Analyze-Compare-Evaluate) 2. Exploration-driven search (Explore-Analyze-Evaluate) 3. Strategic Insight (Analyze-Comprehend-Evaluate) 4. Strategic Oversight (Monitor-Analyze-Evaluate) 5. Comparison-driven synthesis (Analyze-Compare-Synthesize) (Russel-Rose, Lamantia, & Burrel, 2011)

A further influential framework is that proposed by Gary Marchionini, who developed a model consisting of three major categories of search activity: Lookup, Learn and Investigate. It reflects the holistic nature of search, subsuming the concepts of findablity, analysis, and sensemaking.

Compared to desktop search, mobile users perform a larger number of shorter sessions, with a focus on completing specific tasks quickly.

Search experiences are shaped by the task context: information retrieval, information seeking, work task, and culture. Each of these layers provides a unique lens through which to view the search process and understand the types of design support that are appropriate at each level.

Usability advocate Jared Spool found that information scent is strongest when links accurately describe the page they represent, are free from jargon and marketing slogans, and feel clickable. He also found that reasonably long titles tend to work better than shorter ones, with links of 7 to 12 words being most likely lead to a successful outcome.

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over-abundance of information sources that might consume it." — Herbert Simon

George Miller portrayed our species as informavores: creatures hungry for information.

Photography mirrored the external world automatically, yielding an exactly repeatable visual image. It was this all-important quality of uniformity and repeatability that had made the Gutenberg break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Photography was almost as decisive in making the break between mere mechanical industrialism and the graphic age of electronic man.

The wheel and the road are centralizers because they accelerate up to a point that ships cannot. But acceleration beyond a certain point, when it occurs by the means of the automobile and plane, creates decentralism in the midst of the older centralism. This is the origin of the urban chaos of our time.

The wheel is an ablative absolute of feet, as chair is the ablative absolute of backside. But when such ablatives intrude, they alter the syntax of society. There is no ceteris paribus in the world of media and technology. Every extension or acceleration effects new configurations in the over-all situation at once.

The transformations of technology gave the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being.

In the "implosion" of the electrical age the seperation of thought and feeling has come to seem as strange as the departementalization of knowledge in schools and universities. Yet it was precisely the power to seperate thought and feeling, to be able to act without reacting, that split literate man out of the tribal world of close family bonds in private and social life.