Bijna iedereen is wel lid van een ‘sociaal netwerk’, of het nou een netwerk is met een ‘fun factor’ zoals Hyves of Facebook, of zakelijk als LinkedIn. Door de vele sociale netwerken beginnen gebruikers een beetje ‘netwerk-moe’ te worden. Niet voor niets is het woord van 2009 ‘ontvrienden’ geworden. Dit is jammer omdat we pas aan het begin staan van de vele ontwikkelingen die social media ons kan geven. Continue reading →
Popularity: 22% [?]
Search is getting the dominant way to navigate trough the web. The first web generation started out with a web-directory (the good old Yahoo, Altavista times), nowadays the start of every web-visit is search. Websites changed a lot because of this. menu’s, sitemaps and breadcrumbs (the whole web experience) changed because the homepage of every website is not the usual landing page. A search-box is almost essential on every website.
More websites are using a search-box the give users fast access to their information. Not only because websites are getting bigger, also because search is an automatic process. The “Google-Generation” does not care about menu’s they directly use the search-box to find the information they need, even if a website has just 5 pages. To make the search box accessible it needs to be on ‘the right spot’.
eye-tracking heatmaps tell us that most visitors are scanning a page in a ‘F’ figure. Two horizontal lines (mostly the horizontal menu and the first header) and a vertical line (a vertical menu). search-boxes are mostly places in the right-upper corner within this ‘F’.
Most search-boxes are just a text input field with a button to start search. Sometimes they got a ‘advanced’ search possibility. After examining loads of boxes I came to some general conclusions:
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Popularity: 3% [?]
