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As I promise, I’ll write a series of articles about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The prologue of this series had defined some terms from HCI theory. This article is focused on web interfaces, especially website search interfaces.

First rule: do not return “No results” on any search. Try to find some answers for the user even the keyword is something like “asdsad dfdsf sdf”. If your site sells something, user should always have the opportunity to buy.

Second rule: suggest keywords. There are two ways of suggesting keywords: in the search box and on the site as links.

In the search box: Using javascript you can make your search box smarter by suggesting keywords in the same manner as Apple does on their website.

On the site as links: We found many implementations for this kind of keyword suggestion. One of them is called “tag cloud”. I prefer this implementation because of simplicity. Users easily see a list of keywords: “cat, dog, animal, bird” without any action (click in a search box, type a letter etc.)

Third rule: Do not return too many answers. Messages like “We found 123231 results for your search” are not welcome on sites other then search engines. People rarely browse more the 50 results and it doesn’t make sense to show 1000.

Forth rule: Organize results by importance. If you sell books, for example, you will prefer to return the results ordered by book popularity and not alphabetically or price ascending.

Fifth rule: Offer different sorting and filtering criteria. Allow user to sort books by price, by author or by year, for example.

All those rules will make user’s life much easier and most probably will come back happily.

On January 16, 2008, Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President Sun Microsystems, Inc., made a big announcement: “we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP”. The most popular open source database is used by millions of users for small home-made projects, blogs or small websites and by thousands of companies for their enterprise solutions. Is enough to mention companies like Google, Nokia and Yahoo! and everybody will realize how important this acquisition is.

Sun spent more then 30% of their Cash & Cash Equivalents (of $2.7B) and Continue Reading »

I was very happy to discover MOSH, a great social network made by Nokia for their happy users. I believe the title says all: “MOSH - mobilize and share (by Nokia)”. You can build a community, share applications and files with them, have fun, search for useful stuff or promote your applications. I can’t hide that personally I’m a huge fan of Nokia. I love their phones, their software and now I love their internet presence.

When we are talking about mobile applications we have to admit this area isn’t very popular right now. People use their devices as a ancient phone with music. Probably things will evolve in the feature and maybe this market will grow at least as fast as Continue Reading »

I found some rumors about a not so far release of PAMP for S60. What PAMP stands for? The answer is very simple: Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP. The release and demonstration of PAMP capabilities will be made in January 2008 at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas.

I also found PAMP was tested on Nokia E90 and worked well but some problems with memory consumption must be solved. The platform will support LAMP based applications and will provide access to the core functionality of the phone. Continue Reading »

Do you have a good idea and you want to build a mobile application? Google helps you and much more then that: Google pays you! With the Google’s $10 million bounty put on application development for Android, development teams can penetrate the market. Intellectual property rights will be retained by developers but they have to grant Google a license for testing, evaluations and Android platform promotion.

Good news so far, but please answer my question: Is Google strong enough to compete with Symbian (72.4% market share), Linux (13.3% market share), Windows Mobile (6.1% market share) or RIM (5.3% market share)? Continue Reading »