Recently I had a chance to think about the UI design of Windows Live Search, internet search website from Microsoft. I actually talked to people in Microsoft who are in charge of the UI development of Windows Live Search, and they asked me about my opinion of redesign the UI (user interface) of the video and image search page of Live Search. So, I started to work on several concept I have in my mind. Here, I'm gonna share some point of view with you guys (feed back are welcome):
This is how I started: Thinking out of the box. Because interaction design is always about deeper understanding of user and usability, so I thought about several questions:
1) Regardless of the PC or laptop I'm using to do video search, what would be the best way of viewing video? like watching TV, DVD at home? or watch movie in theater with popcorn? What kind of experience is enjoyable when you think about watching video? For me, definitely not like those using iPod, watching [Lost] TV series on subway.
2) How do people know about a video? from friends? from advertising? or they just meet the new one picked by YouTube's function like related video, or same keyword? More importantly, what specific reason trigger the button that induce a user to start searching video online?
3) How people find online video? Do they use normal search engine? or search on free video content provider like youtube, joost, or Netflix? or pay content provider like MLB tv, iTunes and Amazon?
4) How people interact with online video, other than simply watching it? Do they collect videos like buying DVD in shops? Do they pay for extra services? Do they share video with friends? Do they talk about video with others? Do they use the content of video for any purpose? Can people actually make change to the original content?
After a series of questions, here are the suggestion that I gave to Microsoft:
i. Stronger Video Search
1) Think about different platform that people may use when they browse Live Search website, and design specific page for various platforms, like cellphone, iPod, PSP, car entertaining system, and etc.
2) Tools for social networking: Add more functions that allow people to communicate with. instant chatting, better video sharing, send video as gift, generate social group, location based video search.
3) Hot Filter: create filters that most of the people use. Sometimes when people use google, they type in those keywords that can be seen as filter, for example: [cute cat cartoon video]. You can see that there're some interesting filter that people thought about; video can be seen as type of content, and cute is an important keyword so you don't get a spooky cat barking freaking sound; also the cartoon can be seen as a genre.
As a result, it's important to give what people think of a reasonable filter. By getting back from user data of frequent keyword, it's easy to get what are the most common keyword that can be seen as filter(i.e. MV, hip-hop, funny), and just put these filter on the page so that other users can easily use them.
ii. Better User Interface Design
1) Use metaphor for icon design:
i. Duplicated Video: Sometimes we type in keyword for video search, and get back a lot of videos that are the same, all duplicated videos.
While dealing with a lot of repetition of video from search result, I thought about the concept of SPAM mail. Most of the mailing system use the icon of trash can to deal with spam mail, so we can adopt the idea of trash and create an trash can icon to link to those duplicated videos.
ii. most of the video search web pages provide a filter, let you determine what size of video your looking for.
While designing those filter like "short, medium, long video", sometimes simple icon are more powerful and attractive for communicating with user. For example, for the size wise, people easily think of the size of t-shirt, or coke cups from McDonald, you can grab the image of t-shirt or cups to design a series of icons indicating the size of images or videos. I believe it'd be more impressive than plain text.
2) Use popup windows and AJAX: instead of every time you click on something, it refresh the whole page and user have to wait, better to use AJAX technology that create a small pop up window for detail information, such as video description, video source, and other not-so-important information.
3) Minimalism of Video Description: In my opinion, most of the people don't really care about the video source. Let's say, you might not really wanna know the clip of A-Rod hitting a home run is from ESPN, or MLB tv, or YouTube, or NBC.
So, instead of putting the source in the video description, what is more important to users? Is the simple image thumbnail there clearly tells you about what it is? How'bout get some tag on it? YouTube has a function of input some tag names to a video, so that you can get a rough idea of what the video is by seeing it's tags; Also, you can click on the tag to search related videos. So I think tag is a important clue of content description, and it's simple and clear. Put the tag name under the video thumbnail therefore enhance the searching experience.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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