Safari launched Safari version 4 Beta on Tuesday. There’s some good things and bad things about it.

I won’t go through every facet of the update (you can find a list on Apple’s site). I’ll be focusing on the features that stand out to me the most.

Tabs

Tabs are the most obvious UI change in Safari. In version 3 and earlier, Safari had inverted tabs placed below the address (and bookmarks) bar.

before:

Now, tabs are integrated into the top window bar and serve 2 functions:

- a draggable bar to move your application window around
- a group of individual tabs you can cycle through

after:

the bad: Because the top bar is now serving a dual function, it’s harder to focus/select an individual tab. This is because Safari’s first response to an interaction (click/press) with the top bar is to treat it as an application window you can drag. If the interaction hierarchy were flipped, and tab selection was first priority, window dragging would prove to be nearly impossible.

While you can focus a tab by carefully clicking anywhere on the bar, it takes a few tries, unless you start to train yourself to move straight to the right corner of a tab, where you’ll see the ‘grip’ lines.

Bottom line, Fitt’s Law is being comprimised.

the good: On a positive note, about 20 pixels of vertical screen real estate is gained with the combined browser/tab bar. Economy of space is a great thing and it’s especially relevant on laptops.

Web Inspector - Design Consistency & Data Visualizing

A great feature that I probably won’t be using very much is the Web Inspector. For developers out there that use programs like Firebug within Firefox, the Web Inspector will look very familiar. It allows you do to look behind the scenes of a given page and view the HTML and style sheets as well as see how quickly all the elements within a page load. Coupled with the Activity window, it’s a great way to debug websites.

Like all things Apple, its not only how well the Web Inspector works that makes it great, but how well it’s visually designed. When I toggled from Elements view to Resources view, I was again pleasantly surprised to see that they had appropriated repurposed the iTunes Resource visualizations for the iPod and iPhone:

Web Inspector - Resources:

iTunes - iPhone capacity:

RSS Feeds

I don’t get the option to choose what application/service I want to use to read feeds when I click on the RSS icon in the address bar. Firefox gives me the option to choose Google Reader.

What happened, Apple?!

Address Bar & AutoComplete

This is the clincher for me. Safari 4 Beta does not let you type in any part of the address, or title, of the site you want to go to. This has become an integral part of navigating the web for me and the best improvement from Firefox 2.

It’s a feature that’s easy to overlook until you don’t have it anymore, then you realize you can’t live without it.

Summary

Safari 4 is in many way’s a solid step up from from Safari 3. Nothing feels broken or incomplete, and it is dramatically faster (as reports have claimed). Along with the autocomplete issues, the lack of add-ons is the only other major drawback that’s keeping me from switching from Firefox 3. Adblocker, Delicious, Tabs Open Relative - sure I only have 3 add-ons, but they make a world of difference when browsing.

For the non-techie user, Safari is an excellent choice.

It’s like a Porsche without power windows and door locks - sure they’re drawbacks, but the car still drives like a dream.

People often begin a new year with outrageous predictions. This year a number of articles have suggested that online advertising is over-hyped and not producing, and that marketers may not / should not continue to shift media dollars online.

We’ve just read one of these articles that includes a quote from the ever provocative Jakob Nielsen saying that ‘people don’t see graphical ads at all,’ and that online ads drive little or no interaction. This is a pretty bold statement considering that over $4.6 billion was spent on graphical media in 2008, and nearly $25 billion in total online media. Is he right? Could all these on-line marketers be getting it wrong? You decide.

Click-through rates are low…but produce results

The standard click through rate for graphical ads is .1 - .2%, or one to two users for every thousand times the ad is served. This statistic backs up Mr. Nielsens’ finding that they are somewhat like superfluous images on many corporate websites; you know they’re present but they’re primarily ignored. But a number of studies clearly slow that there are many benefits beyond the immediate click, and that users are ‘seeing’ the ads. Similar to traditional media, these results are seen over time and not immediately.

There’s no denying that search marketing is effective, and Jakob Nielsen suggests that marketers move their spending to search. Most companies we know spend too much time focusing on display ads to the detriment of search. But comScore has just released a report quantifying the lift resulting from a combination of display advertising and search running concurrently. This lift – 155% with the two combined over search alone – is seen on both paid and organic searches and clicks. It appears that it’s not just the search copy that gets a user to act, but the positioning and branding from the marketing the user has recently seen.

In a recent panel study, comScore also found that visits to an advertiser’s site increased by an average of 46% over the four weeks following first exposure to a campaign. And this interest in the advertiser is valuable – they’ve documented a 27% increase in online sales and 17% increase offline by comparing test and control consumer behaviors.

Studies dating back to the earliest days of the Internet have noted lifts in brand awareness and perceptions based on online advertising. A few progressive organizations have largely reinvented themselves through online campaigns.

How can this happen if the ads are invisible?

Jakob Nielson is most likely using eye scanning technology to form the basis of conclusions. Our friends at ETRE have done some nice heat map studies for retailers using this technology and we ourselves use it for some usability testing. But the technology maps the focus on the eye rather than the full peripheral vision of the eye. I would expect users to focus on the content of the site and not focus on the ads. But just because they focus somewhere else does not mean that they did not see the ad, as all of the long-term benefits show. This affect has also been observed in numerous newspaper advertising studies. You never know that tire sales make up 10% of the paper until you need tires.

There are proven techniques to improve response

Many advertisers have seen that certain aspects of Nielsen’s observations are correct and have taken steps to break through the limits of traditional static graphical online advertising. Larger placements, rich media, highly tailored message, and video are all becoming a part of the typical online advertising tool kit.

The ad serving powerhouse DoubleClick has consistently shown that larger standard units (300×250pxl) receive more user attention and clicks. Even larger ads, when available, are even more powerful. This may be because users notice the larger placements much more readily than smaller ones which tend to blend together.

Rich media ads – those with significant motion – also generate more responses and awareness metrics than static graphical ads. Pointroll, a major rich media provider, generates a 116% lift rate over standard banners, and average 10.6 seconds of engagement with its ad units that expand or change as users interact with them. Even as the novelty of the placements has waned, the positive lift remains.

A study this past summer of social networking site users found that 58% of the nearly 800 respondents say that very few of the ads and offers they’ve seen match their interest, and another 29% say none do. Yet 39% will occasionally respond to online advertising in general, suggesting that is if the offer or message is compelling they’ll participate. But Forrester found that marketers feel they are regularly targeting offers to specific audiences, so we’d recommend really testing whether your offer is as lucrative or interesting to your audience as you assume.

DoubleClick has reported that online video ads see interaction rates twice to four times higher than graphical ads – typically ranging from .4 to .74%. Although more expensive to produce and traffic, this lift is further enhanced by both the ability to measure the length of the brand engagement and the average amount of time spent with the ad unit – 19.1 seconds for 30 second placements.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, speaks with Joshua-Michéle Ross of O’Reilly Media, Inc. about the evolution of search and how it relates to RIA. Cubitt explains how Roundarch and FAST have worked together to bring search out of “the little white box.”

FASTforward’09 Interview: Geoff Cubitt, CTO, Roundarch
Joshua-Michéle Ross
February 10, 2009

Next week Roundarch will participate as a Silver Sponsor at FASTforward ’09 in Las Vegas. FAST, a Microsoft subsidiary, will host the conference which focuses on FAST’s technology platform and enterprise search solutions. We are very excited to be a part of this event because by partnering with FAST Roundarch has been able to develop first-of-its-kind tools to solve complex issues for our clients and take search out of the white box. Roundarch has worked with FAST to develop rich web solutions that work with existing content management systems and integrate search technology into an environment that is efficient and a joy to use. We will have a booth in the Partner Pavilion at The Mirage so stop by and check out our solutions.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, will be presenting “Financial Services and the Role of Search” on Tuesday (2.10) at 1:20 PST in the FASTforward ’09 Partner Theater. The presentation will focus on the evolution of search as Rich Internet Applications become increasingly vital to the success of Financial Services.

Please contact us if you want to plan a visit during the event or just stop by our booth (#302).

At Roundarch we often work behind the firewall - which for people not familiar with our terminology, means we work on projects we’re not allowed to discuss, much less show publicly. As designers, not having a public audience/forum for our work can be both liberating and frustrating. So when Sam Lessin and Chad Stoller from drop.io contacted us to assist them in redesigning their simple yet powerful service, our ears perked up. Not only would we have an opportunity to creatively contribute to a product we all believed in, but we could do so publicly without risking the ire of valued but secret clients.

I can’t stress enough how useful their tool really is. I use it all the time. I have used it for an internal Roundarch presentation on Cloud Computing as well as for other personal things like picture drops and quick file transfers (when my IM craps-out). The ways in which to use their service seem to grow with each user’s imagination.

Roundarch and drop.io
Roundarch was brought on board to work with drop.io for a few reasons.  As a company, we are focused exclusively on designing and building leading edge digital experiences.  We are known in the industry for tackling the toughest design challenges and for bringing both breakthrough design and enterprise scale technology.  We are also known for being a leader in the development of Rich Internet Applications.  This is really a long way of saying we understand design, user experience and technology and we know how to bring them all together seamlessly.  We also understood that drop.io has a long-term road map for the services it provides.  The old design was quite a bit confusing and not able to keep up with new technologies and service improvements.  They needed a design that would complement and grow with future services.  We understood this challenge and were able to collaborate on a design solution.

The Challange
Drop.io is “Simple, Private Sharing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy service to understand. Simplicity can sometimes be confusing. Retaining simplicity while providing a design that was easy to use and understand from day-1 was our primary focus. The real design challenge is that if a user is new to drop.io, and they’re given a URL to go to from someone, say, at a party who has just taken some photos among friends, when that user arrives at that URL they’re deposited right in the middle of a “drop”. No context. No on-boarding. The user just wakes up in a room and needs to figure out what it all means. So the nature of their service is simple: online storage space where files of any type can be dropped, viewed and shared, but partnering with Roundarch was critical to presenting their service to the novice user in an easy, understandable way.

At the core of the drop.io service is inputs, views and outputs - but their old UI and design strategy didn’t reflect this. Switching views was confusing, output controls and parameters were located in a few different places and their choice of using the color red (to be ironic) was amusing to only a few. Our task was to collectively figure out a UI template that met a few key criteria: input, view and output needed to be clearly defined and the design had to be extensible for co-branding and personalization. We also wanted to target Drop.io For Business (DFB) with a template design and information-page that showed the flexibility of their service for businesses.

The Process
We began by taking their existing logo and “growing it up” a bit. We chose a beautiful and clean typeface (Archer) and chose a simple typeset execution.

Our next task was to nail the header. This was critical because the header is really where the concept of the service is expressed in the navigation of the site. Input, view, output became Add, View & Share. By keeping that functionality hidden but handy we eliminated the need for users to hunt around the site to trigger functionality. The trick was that when the user is browsing their drop, we wanted to keep the maximum possible vertical space for their content. It’s only when the user wants to do something with the drop that we wanted to surface UI controls (while retaining the statefulness of the page).

From there we chose to execute the body elements, the actual content of the drop, in a clean and simple way that clearly separated drop-content from any customization the user might choose to perform and future-proofed the content-display area from any other view paradigms drop.io might choose to implement moving forward. At the forefront of our minds was scanability. We needed the user to quickly scan the page and understand where their drop content was located. Through the use of iconography and a change in type size we were able to accomplish this while adding to the aesthetics of the experience. Lastly, we addressed the home page. Like most of the rest of the strategic planning for this site, the home page had a trick to it we needed to get just right. Unlike most homepages, the drop.io home page was most likely not the first page a user new to the experience would see. This is because users most likely would encounter drop.io in the context of viewing someone else’s drop. And in that scenario, the user would be deposited in the middle of a drop as explained above. So their drop page is really their homepage and their homepage is really their drop-provisioning page. It was in this light that we wanted to streamline the process of beginning to use their service as much as possible. 4 steps vs. 3 steps is a big deal in the web 2.0 world of zero patience. We solved this by defaulting certain settings in a collapsed menu and brought the number of steps a user had to do in order to create a drop down to two. Name it and put files in it. Done.

The Results
Needless to say the project was a success and all sides were thrilled with the results. I encourage you to check out drop.io for yourself.  As I mentioned earlier, this is really an outstanding service that will continue to push the limits of what can be done with file sharing and beyond (geotagging, freedom to upload from many sources, collaborative sharing options, etc.).  Sam Lessin sums it up thusly, “Roundarch did a very nice job learning about our product and our future feature roadmap and then helping us conceptualize some of the design vocabulary necessary to meet our immediate users needs, while still leaving us open to future growth and extensibility.” Agreed.