We all know that users don’t like to stray far away from their default settings. Gmail recently introduced the themes tab to their web service but not only did they advertise it, they actually showed you by changing the colors of your default view. If you are annoyed by the new color scheme then inevitably you’re going to go and play around with the themes. By playing around with the themes you are made aware of them and therein lies the genius. Whether you are annoyed by the change or not, you are aware that you can modify themes. This is a great strategy to think of when introducing new features to your product. How can you subtlety integrate a new feature with your service so that the user is made aware without interrupting their regular flow?

Google also introduced their new SearchWiki that allows you to promote and mark-up links through Google search. The promotion only affects your account but you can see the mark-up of other users. It’s a great feature if you do repeated searches and always gravitate to similar links. The issue I’m wondering about is if the natural ranking ever influences your search after you’ve promoted something. I.e. will you ever see any new links or do all of your promoted links always dominate the search now? I guess the simple answer is to log out and you’ll have the regular Google ranking.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under ui, interaction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.