Another property in the Google monopoly

Google’s Call me feature invokes images of Skype, except it is integrated into every internet user’s control center: email.  If Google is able to turn Call me into an easy and internationally accessible part of their platform, it could provide Skype a fair bit of competition.  Integrated user interfaces make things easier for the user.  If users only have to log into one service to email and make phone calls etc. an organization like Skype could take a hit because they do not offer the wide range of features that Google, and by extension Gmail, does.  Luckily for Skype, not everyone is a Gmail user.  Still, Google’s newest feature shows once again that they are fearless about trekking into various internet services terrains and are not hiding the fact that they want a share in all of the properties that make up the world wide web. So is Google trying to create an internet monopoly?  That’s a bit of a sensational stretch, but at the very least Google makes it clear that they want a share in everything and do not want to make life easy for their competitors.

The implications for UX and usability design

If the media and advertising industry is digitalizing itself then obviously interface design concepts like usability, user experience design etc. will play a central role in the implementation of new digital business practices.  Companies will need online advertising and commerce to be as efficient as possible while maintaining an element of authenticity and desirability known from the traditional print environment.  Thus, the market for those specializing in UX and usability design will be wide open and full of opportunity.  This will likely lead to innovations in the UX and usability design fields as the cutthroat world of digital business will force designers to gain the competitive edge not just in creativity and productivity as usual, but also in measurable impact, such as online conversion rates.  Hence one may well argue that a growing digital media industry could mean a creative renaissance for the usability and UX industry as well.

But even if screen designs have already been made in some hi-fi graphics software (e.g. Photoshop, pidoco° can add value to the process by bringing interactivity to static screens. Adding ‘click areas’ to the finished screenshots enhance the collaboration and interaction capabilities of a former static screenshot. Colleagues, clients and test users can now easily be integrated in the designs process and online discussions can be held. Just like web conferencing, but with real-time editing never seen before!

The advantages of such a wireframing software are obvious: through the interaction features you get a much better impression of how your concepts work with the user and whether all possible use cases have been considered. Findings from user tests can be applied easily since the interface sketches are not fixed forever on paper, but interchangeable with re-useable layers, stencils and link references. And those already mentioned prefabricated stencils accelerate the sketching of interface concepts even more.

Being digital or even completely web-based, some interface design tools also allow you to perform remote user testing through expert reviews and one-to-one user tests with shared screens and integrated audio/video communication. The test sessions with all annotations can be documented right within the tool (in case of the one-to-one test session they get recorded on-screen) and a specification can be exported as Word doc.