Slaughtering the holy cow - greatness is not forever

A couple of weeks ago, on World Usability Day, I met up with a couple of people in a Manchester pub to talk usability. Our consensus had been that going to the pub was definitely the right thing to do (is this the reason Silicon Valley didn't happen in northern England?) but to keep on message we each had to bring an example of bad design that we thought could be improved.

The first thing that popped into my head was Google. Something I use every day, and that generally makes me very happy, but that I've becoming more frustrated with in recent months. The primary reason for this is that Google lets you search the web, or it lets you search news, or it lets you search images. It even lets you search blogs and video.

My problem is that sometimes I want to search the web and images. Sometimes I'd like to search news and blogs, or perhaps news and video. I can't even find Google's own blog and video search engines without Googling them!

Also, I quite often want to do what Google consider advanced searches. Now, if I was a good geek I'd remember all the syntax to do this in the front page search box, but I'm not. I've only just nailed that it's "-" to exclude a word, not "NOT". And I'm fairly sure I don't use some of the advanced options that I might, because I need to remember they're there - the options aren't available for recall.

So, my solution is to keep the Google page nice and simple - indeed to enhance the simplicity of the page up at the business-end: the text box. But then to add options to search across different types of content directly on that front page.

I'd also like to bring some of the advanced options up to the front page - if I worked at Google, I'd find out what the most popular types of advanced searches were (perhaps they vary by location?) and put these on the front page. As I don't, I've just selected a few at random for the effect.

So, what do you reckon? Do you think this is an improvement?

(Click for a bigger version)

Navigating in the real world

I've been thinking recently about road signs. The long winter evenings really do fly by...

Navigating your way through a city is a complicated problem. There are many thousands of potential routes, many things to find. As a user (or, you might call it, driver) you usually have an idea of where you want to get to, but you need help to choose the right path out of the hundreds available.

You pass through many decision points, and it's important that it's clear to see which one to take. If you take the wrong one by mistake you need further help to get you back on track. And if you get really lost, you need a clear indication of where you are so you can find your way to the correct route.

This all sounds kind of familiar doesn't it? Sometimes, when driving a unknown route (particularly in a new city) you get hopelessly lost. Sometimes though, the signs make it easy to find your way. All of which got me thinking - how do the people designing signed pathways through cities go about it? What's their methodology? How do they work out optimal paths, and make sure they're properly signed? What can information architects and web designers learn from them?

I haven't found out yet, but I'm going to carry on looking. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful.