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Google’s 2005 Zeitgeist is up. It’s a look back at search trends over the last year. If you are saying to yourself, ‘Who cares?’, than you should read John Battelle’s ‘The Search’. According to John these trends are not simply about who is searching for what on the internet. It’s a magnifying glass view of our culture and is anthropoligical in nature. Anyway, just read the book.

Moving on, do you notice anything different about this page? Google must have actually hired a designer because this site implements a very clean and fluid design that looks much nicer than their drab home page. Maybe it is the fact they are finally using color. Anyway, I noticed this move on the Google Analytics page as well. Again they are using color and traditional navigational elements, both of which seem to be new for Google. The conversion university is another example of their design shift.

This new trend for Google should be interesting to watch.
technorati: google | search | design

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After reading Jason’s latest post on Signal Vs Noise about bigger text, I took a look around here and realized the font is really small. So, I upped it .1em and I think it looks much better and is much more readable.

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There are many new trends I would like to see adopted on the web. So many things on the web can be simplified down to instinct. I wrote a week or so ago about the need to create something that is so usable that it takes no knowledge to use it…like an escalator. I’ve been trying to think since then what satisfies my requirements. And it just sprung on me.

One of the most widely used components a user interacts with on the web is forms. And forms are in dire need of an overhaul. Most forms are designed wrong, meaning non intuitive and/or ugly. There are many, many problems with forms today but that can be a topic of another post. Anyway, forms need to be simplified. Although I have discontinued my use of Odeo, they have done a magnificent job with their redesigned registration form.

In instances where forms have single functions, such as submit, the following functionality is perfect. By now users are trained to hit the enter key on their keyboard when searching Google. So why do we need submit and clear buttons? The answer is we do not.

I have only seen this on Google Talk and iTunes, but I think it’s a remarkable simplification idea in the area of web form usability. Basically they have no buttons and rely on the user’s intuition to click enter. Google talk has no ’send message’ button, but they also have gotten rid of this when searching in Google Talk. See the image below:

When you start entering text, the ‘X’ button to the right appears. Clicking it clears the text. Pressing enter on the keyboard submits. iTunes does the same thing. See the image below.

This is a great feature and I would like to see its use more in forms on the web.

technorati: css | design | webdesign |

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I was looking around Best Buy’s site for an item and came across their podcast section. I thought that a bit strange. Check it out here.

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You may have noticed the new feed icon/button.

Matt Brett made a set of vector based images here.

A lot of people are adopting this as a new standard. I think it’s great. How many mainstream readers are going to click on a button that says ‘xml’ or ‘rss’. This is a great attempt to move rss syndication into mainstream by making it more usable and natural.

Thanks to the Firefox team for creating it. Thanks to the Internet Explorer team for adopting it in it’s up and coming version and helping to push it mainstream. And thanks to Matt for giving us all some vectors to replace those ugly buttons.

UPDATE: after posting this I saw Matt had created a new site dedicated to the adoption of this standard. Check it out.

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