1 post tagged “ask.com”
Sorry I haven't written in a while. I'll talk more about that in a future post.
Ask.com has come out with a new "experimental UI" called Ask X. While I appreciate the effort to differentiate from first-tier players, the focus on whiz-bang UI flies in the face of good user experience. Search engines should focus on relevance more than window dressing. But, if you're going to focus solely on the window dressing, have the common decency to put up some nice curtains, for crying out loud.
I seriously thought this was fake when it was sent to me.
Ask.com designers really need to understand the web landscape. I wonder how many of them use digg.com? What about 37signals software? I'm guessing few if any. Red to blue gradient? Bevel and embossing? It's gross and cheap looking. It feels more 1997 than 2007.
Ask.com executives: make some budget to allow designers to attend a UX conference. Or make your designers use brilliant leading edge websites like Vox, Threadless, Amazon's new gold box ...
Violating the Google Principle.
Regardless of the window dressing, search results brought back still aren't relevant. Instead of doing test searches I never do in real life (like "Seattle" or "wedding") I did some real searches (like "online mba" and "nicole richie dui".) Although the narrow and expand results are novel, I never find it vectoring me to more relevant results. I usually see the same links when I "narrow my search" or find a bunch of irrelevant cruft in "expand my results"
So, regardless of the window dressing, Ask.com hasn't won my heart or mind by achieving their core objective: helping me find what I need quickly. That's the search engine secret sauce, not some attempt at slick UI. Haven't we learned anything from Google, people?
