[User Experience]

I haven't written about Microsoft for a while, but that's a given -- the latest Microsoft-related blip on my radar came months ago, when the PC giant planned to open retail stores all over the world. I think that article was more about ridicule than praise, though -- the move reeked too much of the catch-up game Microsoft has been playing with its rival, Apple.

I've also written volumes about Microsoft's most dismal creation yet, Windows Vista. Microsoft is currently working on its upcoming OS, Windows 7, which they hope will be every bit as acceptable as Vista was miserable. And on the helm of things is the little-known head of Windows Experience, Julie Larson-Green.

Larson-Green was also part of the Vista project, but at a much smaller scale. Nonetheless, she was responsible for one of the few good things that came out of Vista -- Office 2007. If you've tried Word 2007, you may have noticed that the interface had changed quite a bit. Instead of clunky menus and toolbars, the word processing program now uses "ribbons" -- sets of related command icons that change depending on what the user is doing.

Apparently, after sweating through a tolerable learning curve, users found that the ribbons actually increased productivity and usability of the program several times over. They didn't have to go deep into menus and toolbars to use a certain command -- it was now much easier to quickly produce documents. Office 2007 became a sleeper hit among Windows users, and Larson-Green was rewarded by a much bigger role in the Windows 7 project.

Reviews for Windows 7 has been fairly positive so far -- beta testers loved the fact that they never had to deal with Vista's pesky security alerts and unnecessary eye candy. For most, it was like a safer, more usable version of Windows XP, which many consider to still be the best OS Microsoft has come up with -- despite, of course, the paper-thin security.

You may have never heard of Julie Larson-Green, but now that you do, you'll probably be joining the chorus of praises -- or ridicule -- for her work when Windows 7 rolls around. I myself am pretty confident about her work -- she seems to be the only top gun in Microsoft who learns from their company's past mistakes.

(Is now thinking about switching back to Windows.)

(OK. No. Not really.)

I remember the day when I gave up all hope for Internet search engines. That was when the search results I got on page one were filled with nothing but useless instances of the keywords in my search query. Then Google came into the picture and revolutionized how search was done, and suddenly the Internet was useful again.

But today, Google seems to be plagued by new kinds of search problems. It seems that most Google searches I do these days seem to come up with Facebook profiles and Tweets right on page one – not really the kind of information I find. It's usually easy enough to find the relevant hits at first glance, but when Twitter “pollution” gets so bad that it knocks Wikipedia off the top spot, it's a pretty serious hurdle.

This isn't the first time Google faced this kind of problem. In the early parts of this decade, the rapidly-growing number of blogs also began swamping search results. They fixed this problem fairly quickly by adding a blog search feature, but even this remains hard to work with to this day.

Granted, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has made the Internet more useful and enjoyable for millions of people. But there are still some strange creatures out there who use the Internet for only its informational capabilities and not its recreational side. These creatures are the ones who move the world, and when they no longer have Google on their side, they may need to start looking elsewhere.

It's going to be a strange world where people start using other search engines over Google...

Still, it's not the first time Google got hounded by such problems in search. Even with their constantly changing parameters and indexing procedures, they still sometimes struggle to bring relevant results to page one. This is probably the reason why Google is keeping new search engines like Cuil on the horizon – if Cuil gets its act together and starts bringing better search results, “cuiling” might soon make it to the dictionary too.

Suddenly, searching on Twitter doesn't seem like a bad idea. For one, social media platforms seem to pick up on breaking news much more quickly. Google is great at giving you news stories that happened eight hours ago. But for news as-it-happens, it's probably better to look through relevant Tweets.

Of course, Google can just buy Twitter...

It would seem that universal design – that is, design that can be utilized by anyone and everyone – is a growing trend that might soon keep in pace with other trends such as going green.

Apparently, end-users have had enough of designs – and design laws – that make certain things usable by some people but unusable by others. Let's take for an example the lowly toilet bowl. Most toilet bowls and public bathrooms are designed in such a way that they're virtually unusable by people in wheelchairs. What's worse, building laws in most places around the world think the only solution is to provide a separate bathroom for the handicapped. (Most of these building laws haven't been updated for decades, besides.)

The guys at Google think of just about anything, don't they?

Google recently released a new feature on Gmail called “Mail Goggles.” Named after the term “beer goggles,” which can sometimes cause you to make a fool out of yourself after having one drink too many, Mail Goggles can help prevent you from sending e-mails on late weekend nights that you'll probably regret the next morning.

Fig. 01

...Flock!?

Whenever I "Check for Updates" on Flock 0.7, I would get something like the above (Fig. 01), and this would go on for many months.