SortFix Powered Search Blog

Archive for the ‘Gui and Design’ Category

Hiya! All good?

It’s I again, bringing more good news.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how we could improve our users’ search experience and suddenly we realized, if you can share blog posts and other things on different social media sites, why not create an option that enables you to directly share the search results you like?

For this reason now, when searching on SortFix, you’ll be able to tweet, buzz or post on facebook any search result you want.

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The Ipad is something different. This device defers from other tablets especially because of its interface and usability behavior. It’s also different from the Iphone or other smart phones and mobile devices because of its size. One of Apple’s goals, I think, is to replace our portable devices such as laptops and notebooks, and not the iPhone or other smart phones.

Ipad

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In our previous posts, we mentioned (by the way of course) that soon enough our new design will be launched. Well, soon enough just became… Now!!! This post is all about it.

Sortfix New Logo

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As some of you may have noticed, we’ve added a search widget on the sidebar. So now you can search the web from the sidebar of this blog.

Sortfix Search Widget

The better news is that it’s not exclusive to our blog.

Just go to our ‘Get Widget’ page, and you’ll have Sortfix Improved Search at your fingertips:

Thanks to Yohay Elam of Forex Crunch for his help with this.

About two months ago, we wrote about our current toolbar and announced that we are working on a new SortFix ToolBar™ extension to further improve and enhance the users’ search experience.

Now our new ToolBar is almost ready. Here is a first look at the new ToolBar.

Sortfix New Toolbar on Google

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About three years ago, in the early stages of SortFix, we started usability testing the SortFix Search User Interface (SUI) with our parents, sisters, brothers, and friends. We implemented the system as a program and our algorithms were calculated on the users’ computers.

Due to the fact that we didn’t have any funding back then, we had to be present at every search session with any family member or friend.

Our usability testing method back then went something like this: We gave our “subjects” several search tasks. We sat by them quietly as they undertook the search. Without helping them in any way, we studied the way they searched, observed where they ran into difficulties, and saw what part of our SUI wasn’t clear enough. We asked them questions and worked to improve the system’s interface bit by bit. Our method wasn’t particularly efficient, but at the time, it was cost-effective!

SortFix SUI Concept Sketches

Then we decided to upload the SortFix SUI to an online environment and test our system on even more users. We asked our family and friends to tell their friends and families to start using our new tool. At this point we got a lot more feedback. We had a lot of debugging to do, but it was worth it. Instead of doing a focus group on just 30 users or so, we actually reached 10 times more — without paying a dime.

SortFix SUI Concept Sketches

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Since a good GUI (Graphical User Interface) is essential to the success of a program or application, it can often be the hardest part to develop. The app’s programming can be perfect, but if the GUI is annoying, nonintuitive, or cumbersome the application will ultimately fail.

Key Ideas Behind GUI Design

The basic rule for good GUI design is that it is intuitive. A user interface that interferes or distracts will cause the user to feel overwhelmed and confused. To create an intuitive application, the GUI must be predictable and consistent in its behavior to the user. A simple GUI that is both predictable and consistent offers and ideal atmosphere for usability.

The SortFix GUI

SortFix algorithms extract related-terms, called Power Words™, to help the user to describe and refine the search subject in detail.

SortFix SUI

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On my last post I talked about the progression of GUIs, on this post I will try to different our SUI – search User Interface from a non GUI search engine.

As a child I was always fascinated by computer graphics and especially user interfaces. No, I wasn’t a geek exploring and researching user interfaces, but many of my decisions — which computer game to play, what kind of computer I wanted for my 13th birthday — were based on the design of the computer’s GUI.

All of my friends bought early versions of IBM’s PC XT 286, which had only a CLI and no GUI. I didn’t go with the flow. I preferred the AMIGA computer (Amiga 500),which was far less popular, had less games, but had absolutely stunning graphics, games and resolution. The AMIGA boasted an early edition of a Windows-style operating system.

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In these days of the Internet, everybody knows that good design doesn’t necessarily mean the website is good. Websites must also provide an intuitive and simple way for the user to interact and navigate.

The most important innovation in the field of human-computer interaction is the graphical user interface, a.k.a. GUI, which has become the de facto industry standard for communication between us and computers.

GUIs are not only implemented in common operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS, but are used to operate and control handheld devices, portable media players, gaming consoles and much, much more.

From CLI to GUI
Having emerged as an alternative for solving the steep learning curve of command line interfaces (CLIs), GUIs have made computers – and computing — far more accessible in terms of ease of use. CLIs required commands or series of commands to be typed on the keyboard.

MS-DOS's Command Line.

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