The toolbar, with big clearly marked buttons, itself is found at the top of the interface design below the Address Field but above the Tab bars. It is itself distinct in the same red and white colors of the Austrian flag. The colors also add to the legibility of the text. The toolbar has its own search bar on the left of the interface design unlike the top right customary search bar of the browser itself. This, I think, is a good touch because it serves to further distinguish it as not being the same as full internet search but rather specific. Clicking on a service in the toolbar automatically launches it in a new tab leaving your hitherto browsing unaffected. The challenge now for the Austrian government is to work on incorporating their services into the interface designs of other browsers that work with different operating systems. Hopefully other governments will be close by behind them.

Expert Users are Longtime Users

So what is the main benefit of obtaining user experience feedback from experts?  The fact is that at one point, everyone was an amateur— even the experts. Amateur users grow into expert users, just as your interface design matures over time.  That is why expert users play such a vital role in usability testing new developments for extant interface designs. Experts are longtime site users, users who have shown commitment to the evolution of your website, users who have buttressed your interface design’s success by sticking with it over the long haul. If you are running an eCommerce site you want to know what makes it most usable to your most loyal customers—the expert users. You want to keep their business as returning customer often make up a considerable portion of business for an e-commerce website. So increasing your interface design’s usability for expert users will make your site sustainable because you will be appeasing a core group of users who keep your website relevant and your business running.

Much like Android, VP8 came to be a Google product by way of acquisition and, likewise, then released as open source code and available royalty-free for a number of uses such as online and mobile video. The VP8 video codec is paired with the open-source Ogg Vorbis audio to form the WebM container format which is directly aimed at providing high quality video compression for use with HTML5 video. Is there an immediate impact on the interface design of websites? Not really, but interface designers and web developers have to think carefully about which users they’re targeting when implementing video into their interface design. These decisions are more pronounced when developing a website that requires natively hosted video (i.e. not using YouTube embedded videos) because one has to decide on which format(s) to use. For now Flash is still the most popular player but, say, you are targeting a significant amount of iPhone users you’d have to use an alternative. And since Apple has embraced H.264, the use of that codec brings with it its own set of baggage as we saw with Nero. So, is open source the right way to create a video codec standard? Quite possibly, but we will have to wait and see what lies ahead.

With HTML5 looming, video codec standards have recently become a hot issue popularized by the oh-so public feud between Apple and Adobe. Up until now Flash has been the preferred video format on the web due to Adobe’s Flash Player being installed in most web browsers. The HTML5 video tag is intended to become the new standard way to show video online. The question is which formats should be supported in the tag. Despite its tremendous popularity Flash remains the property of a single corporation, Adobe. Apple favors the H.264 codec and due to the success of the iPhone, iPod Touch and now the iPad (which don’t support Flash) many popular sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and CNN, to name but a few, now have all or a growing number of their videos available in the H.264 format in addition to Flash. Criticism of H.264 is centered on the patents leading to most users of the format to pay licensing fees leading to the software company Nero to sue the licensing authority of the codec. This is where VP8 comes in.

In what ways does Google have a better interface design?

At first glance I found Google to score higher on usability. Firstly the advanced search option was more clearly labeled on Google as ‘advanced search’. The blue letting immediately made it clear that it was a clickable link. On Bing this option was only labeled ‘Advanced’ and even though underlined it had the same font color as the text next to it. The news items results for my search input (which in case you were wondering was Snoop Dogg) appeared much higher whereas on Bing I had to scroll down all the way to the bottom of the screen. Google adheres to the quasi standard of showing the login option in the top right corner, while Bing puts the ‘Preferences’ option in that spot, requiring users to search for the login.

Where I found Bing to be better was in displaying related searches on the left side whereas Google displayed them at the bottom. Another neat feature of Bing was when hovering over search results and having the option of activating a pop-up box on the right of the link with more information from the website without leaving Bing. Clicking on an image in Bing revealed a better interface design. In Google a frame of the interface design reveals metadata about the image but only that image. Bing allows you to view the information contained within the website where the image comes from right within Bing but also shows all the image results on the left with a scrollbar. The start page of Bing offers a more compact setup for entering a search, while in Google the user has to move his mouse quite a distance to search for images, videos and others. The background image serves to unify the main parts of the page, while all peripheral options are faded back into the grey frame. Tooltips for search categories in Bing also enhance its usability. Finally, Bing does not distract the user by offering an equivalent to Google’s famous “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

What strategy is Bing adopting in order to one-up Google?

Bing has also added a new ‘Entertainment’ section dedicated to music, movies, TV and games. What this essentially means is that Bing once more incorporates a lot more into its interface design even allowing users to play videos, songs and online flash games right within Bing. Where Google seeks to be your transit point connecting you to your destination, Bing seems intent on being the destination.

New Operating System

The iPhone 4G interface design will likely be powered by the new iPhone OS 4. The key new feature for this system is the facilitation of multitasking—users will be able to run apps simultaneously and switch between them with fluidity.  For example, users will be able to instant message a friend, look at photos and listen to their playlist all at once.