The Conversation Of Search

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

Search engine marketing is a foundational element of digital advertising and branding. 133.7 Million people in the US carry search tools with us everywhere we go: Smartphones, tablets, connected computers. But the context and method of those searches are all very different. This is true from a user’s expectation as it is from the search results themselves. The complexity of search goes beyond a search engine’s algorithm. Search, in it’s most recent form, is influenced by your location, social network, the speed of your connection, and your personal search history.

Google Voice Search: The Future of SEO

Enter Voice Search

Although Google has had voice search enabled for the Chrome browser and Android devices for almost a year now, recent updates in the wake of this Google I/O conference enables voice search for a wide variety of devices with a microphone and speakers. Desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and a various mobile devices will now support auditory prompts to begin searches and respond with a results page as well as a spoken response in a synthesized female voice.

Google’s voice search is a significant change in user experience and will act to unify Google’s search strategies. While circumstance, device type, and input method will change the specifics of search, a user’s spoken search queries will be more consistent between devices. Users are not going to be changing the cadence or style of speech based on what kind of device they are speaking to. This nuance will help consolidate a search offering that is customized to a user’s desired results rather than influenced by the size of the device, keyboard, or touch-screen from which the search is beginning from.

A search started by voice is very different from what a user may type in. Although true voice recognition is in it’s infancy, voice products like Siri have shown the wider public that voice input is a great utility. The voice search experiences are also allowing users to become more comfortable with using natural voice cadence for commands and queries. For those of us who are already using voice search, it is becoming increasingly more natural to initiate searches with a single tap and talk action. Mobile devices make this even more natural by virtue of having the devices already in-hand.

The Conversation Of Search

Hot Words are a new feature for Google search that had been introduced as part of the Google Glass project. Hot Words are cues that make sure the computer is listening and will prompt a search. For the moment “Ok Google” is a command that, when followed by any spoken words, will prompt a search. This shift will change search for everyone. Such a command enables near instant access to information regardless of where a user, what they are doing, or even if they have a free hand.

The power of Hot Words is not only in it’s accessibility, but in the habit of access it will form. Conditioning users to search Google (or Bing for that matter) as simply as asking a question and having results read back will change the way we interact with the web and data. One key change is that the results that are read back by Google are a single curated post, typically Wikipedia. Your prized page ranking is now further complicated by search results being read back to the user on load.

The interface (and lack thereof) of voice search is one vector of change. The results–and how we engage with the results–is completely different. For mobile devices and tablets, those results read back, and how search engines like Google and Bing curate those results, will make or break the utility for users. For search engines, this will require a much more accurate interpretation of semantic langauge and implication than the way most users search today. Currently, many users compound keywords, or use know strings together

How Do Brands Take Advantage Of Voice Search?

My professional focus is in healthcare communication and Google search is a small part of a larger shift to making content for users (patients, healthcare professionals) more relevant and more accessible. There is a strategy to provide content in a format, phrasing, or taxonomy that is similar to how an audience will be searching for it. There is another strategy, a more difficult one, that creates a vernacular or phrasing synonymous with your brand that your audience can search specifically for to reach a site or digital property.

Google’s use of language to prompt search makes those search even more colloquial. In addition to a tendency for slang, there is also a need to develop content that will show up high in results for basic questions or difficult to pronounce words and terms. Google will share some of the burden in aligning audiences with quality content, but it is the marketer that will need to keep an eye on fast evolving technology and adjust strategies and tactics accordingly.

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SVG For Web Designers & Developers

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

It’s time for designers and developers to adopt Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for websites and digital projects! Images have been part of the web from very early in it’s development. The inclusion of visuals helped fuel its growth and recently become a focal point for the most popular services on the web. Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Vine, Flickr, the list of website that focus on our visual lives continues to grow. That growth is accompanied be a need for faster computers, increased bandwidth, and larger displays to consume our digital lives. Even entry-level phones provide resolutions that rival those used when the internet’s popularity entered most people’s homes.

SVG for web designers and developers

What is SVG?

Scalable Vector Graphics or SVG is a format for digital graphics that allows images to be rendered using XML as opposed to bitmap data. This has several advantages over pixel data and formats like GIF, JPG, or PNG: lessened file weight, it’s parsable and searchable, and, most importantly, the files can be scaled without a loss in quality.

Many designers and developers are already using vector data on the web without hesitation as Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files. Although PDFs require a plug-in to work, there is increasing support built into browsers. Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox both support PDFs natively in recent releases. The same advantage of highly detailed  and lightweight files are available even more widely in the form of SVG images and graphics.

Vector graphics are nothing new to visual artists. The format has been around for many years, originally supported by PostScript at the dawn of desktop publishing. Among it’s most notable advantages is its ability to scale without any degradation is quality. It does so by rendering points and lines from mathematical data. It’s lightweight and efficient. It lacks some of the subtle details to capture photography, but is ideal for many styles of graphics and illustrations.

A barrier to vector graphic’s adoption for viewing on the web was wide support from browser manufacturers. For many years, Adobe Flash Player provided ubiquitous support for vector art, but it was largely used for animation and as a video player. With the wide adoption of tablets and smartphones, Flash has lost some of it’s luster as a vehicle for vector graphics with designers and developers.

The Problem SVG Solves

What should drive designers and developers to SVG is the need for graphics that are scalable and responsive to support the vast variety of devices we consume the web from. Many designers have already taken to the trend of responsive web design to answer a growing mobile market and avoid creating multiple websites. Doing so requires creating multiple images for the variety of screens and resolutions. Even those designers who create dedicated mobile and desktop experiences still require a library of images in multiple resolutions for various clients. A single SVG can be used at multiple sizes from a single hosted file.

Those mobile users will also benefit from SVG’s compact size. Being able to deploy images that can be full-screen and larger over cellular networks mean not having to compromise on aesthetics when creating designs and interfaces.

SVG images are also an ideal response to new ultra high-resolution displays being sold with new tablets and laptops from Apple, Microsoft, Asus, and several other manufacturers. These displays simply scale images that are not large enough to populate the screens resulting in blurry or lackluster experiences. Vector images, being resolution agnostic, look perfect regardless of the display’s resolution or technology.

SVG Has Some Challenges

Although SVG has the genetics for an ideal image format, it does have several challenges that may impede wildfire-like adoption. The biggest barrier for SVG is legacy support. Although open source browsers like Firefox and Chrome and mobile browser for iOS and Android have supported SVG since their early builds, Microsoft has been slow to adopt the format. Internet Explorer 9, with wide support for HTML5, is the first IE release to provide rendering for SVG. There is a work around available that substitutes bitmap images for those older browsers-making it ideal for those who need to support older operating systems or minimum business requirements for client work.

For artists used to working with vector images, one of the side-effects from working outside of the constraints of bitmap art is the loss of pixel-perfect image management. Because vector art uses math to render art “at runtime” for each presentation, every computer renders the lines slightly different based on how big it is drawn, how it is scaled, etc. This is most evident in fine-line work and how the computer will “alias” high-contrast edges. I believe the benefits far outweigh this small drawback, but it is an important component in the exchange for a lightweight illustrative file format.

SVG image comparison against JPG with high quality compression

SVG files are often noted for the performance they provide for the size and impact. Because this file format uses plotted points to render the artwork and that work is done real-time by the viewer’s computer, there is a point at which the art’s complexity may have a pixel image be the better solution. These situations are not typical and I would put a well prepared SVG file against the same image as pixel data any day.

Like any other decision for a website’s design and coding, there are many different ways to the same or similar outcome. The solutions are as varied as there are ways to experience them. SVG images are simply another tool in the designer and developer toolkit and one that is more widely supported than ever before.

Making a change like this is a barrier for web developers. It introduces questions about compatibility, work-flow, consistency of quality. A web designer or developer is likely to ask themselves what advantages they hope to achieve as a result of using SVG. The response (and decision to move forward), should be informed by the type of content you create.

I work for a healthcare communications agency. Much of the visual content we plan for and build contains charts, graphs, and infographics. This style of imagery, usually originating as vector artwork is an ideal candidate to deploy as SVG. I say so not only because the line art and graphic style will be more crisp and allow for indexed files, but because the power of SVG images is the ability to provide much greater detail to otherwise illegible graphics.

More efficiency can be gained from an SVG workflow can be gained by using various javascript libraries and extensions to allow for zooming in, and expanding images to reveal small print, additional details, or provide enhanced views. For many agencies and content creators this provides a great advantage with less files to manage and a much more responsive user experience.

Bringing SVG To Your Next (Or Current) Project

Obviously, I am a proponent of scalable vectors. I believe they provide a better solutions many graphics online (or any digital project) and also answer a need within the responsive web design workflow. If you are not familar with vector images, you should be aware that SVGs are not a solve-all solution. One disadvantage to the SVG format is that you are storing all of the various points you’ve used to draw an image. If you have a particularly complicated images, the size of the file is going to grow as well. For some very complex image with many lines and points, it may be much more efficient to convert that image into a bitmap for digital sharing and viewing. When in doubt, test and then test again.

There is little reason to delay in adoption of SVG for your web design projects. The support is in place and from almost every major platform-from mobile to desktop to televisions. If you still have questions, post a comment or visit some of the references I’ve included below.

References:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/16/resolution-independence-with-svg/
http://dbushell.com/2012/04/03/svg-use-it-already/
http://alistapart.com/article/using-svg-for-flexible-scalable-and-fun-backgrounds-part-i
http://alistapart.com/article/using-svg-for-flexible-scalable-and-fun-backgrounds-part-ii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics

Follow:

@dbushell
@zeldman
 

PharmaVOICE E-Solutions: Embedded Systems

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

I’ve recently authored a new post for PharmaVOICE looking at how embedded systems are poised to change health in our everyday lives. Embedded systems are those integrated technologies that help power everything from our televisions to refrigerators to our cars. The biggest advances will occur in wearable technology. These “smart clothes” will help us monitor health, athletic performance, and even our emotional state. Read the entire article on PharmaVOICE.

The New Windows 8 Workstation

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

With the RTM version of Windows 8 being released, I’ve had a chance to dabble in the interface and spend some time ‘working’. It’s really quite nice. It’s very usable and intuitive OS for day to day use and Windows 8 has all of the winning components from the previous generation and quite a bit more.

The Windows 8 user experience, formerly known as Metro, is beautiful to look at. The graphic approach to the user interface and chrome is current, user friendly, and honestly, a very relevant solution for both powerhouse desktops and tablets alike.

What has really captured my attention is the integration between Windows 8 and their peripheral platforms. The tablet platform, Surface in particular, seems like an ideal pairing that extends the desktop as a platform and may completely replace it. Windows 8 Phone is also an impressive offering. Despite the smartphone market being well serviced by iOS and Android, I think this new scrappy platform might still have a shot.

I think that for the first time perhaps a decade, Microsoft has a truly innovative solution that can be an ideal platform for Creatives. Crazy as this idea seems, for those who produce content for a digital audience, Windows is a producing an almost ideal offering for writing, designing, developing, and supporting big digital ideas.

The desktop environment itself serves many purposes for the creator (as in content creator). Traditional applications can be run in keyboard and mouse mode and now, through large touch screens and hybrid overlays, users can select, scale, move, draw, paint, and otherwise interact directly with the user interfaces via touch screens. For additional or supplemental input, Windows 8 tablets can be paired with desktops to extend the display or used as a touch input like a Wacom Tablet-ideally suited for creative teams.

That same tablet is an ideal portable interface for capturing ideas. Photographing from life, drawing, writing, recording audio and video can all be done on the device and acted upon using the same software that’s run on the Windows desktop. Content can also be synchronized and used immediately on a desktop interface if additional computing power is required (video being an example of such an instance).

Windows 8 Phone offers another example of a similar scenario. Smartphones have become our planners, wallets, health centers, cameras, notebooks, and sketchbooks. Having a truly synchronous environment would make the lines between these platforms irrelevant and hurdles of the past.

I’m looking at Windows 8 as a bit of a reinvention for Microsoft and would like to see people really consider it as a contender for their workstation. This is a chrysalis moment for Microsoft. Although they have a market majority, they have lost some of their relevance to companies like Apple and Google. This new crop of software is something that shows a renewed attention to users and a serious shot to stay connected to the market they helped create.

I think there is real opportunity for Windows 8 to find a place as a Creative workhorse. As OS X starts to show a move towards a very consumer oriented experience via Mountain Lion, Content authors will need heavy-lifting, high end workstations to create videos, web sites, manuscripts, mobile apps, and new media creations. The new Windows 8 experience can bring much of the user experience offering to users and also support a multi-window, heavy-lifting, experience at the same time.

The Twitter API Compromise

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

Twitter announced last week that they would be making several changes to their API that allows developer to creat applications like TweetBot, Instapaper, and Timehop. These changes are controversial because Twitter’s growth is largely attributable to the geekier-developers that created clients and applications that gave the social network the user experience that made it palatable. Wider adoption happened not through the SMS (texting) interface that Twitter launched with, but through apps and tools for smartphones and other social networks.

Twitter is a community. It’s a living, thriving, and changing group of people that began as a very niche geek clique and grew into the second largest social network in the world. The Twitter icon is everywhere. #hashtags ride beneath every television commercial, cereal box, and even on plumber’s trucks. Tweeting is a ‘thing’. Most importantly, it’s an active community that anyone can use as a soapbox or publishing platform.

The ease of use and built-in community makes Twitter a natural choice for a publishing platform. I simply cannot reach as many people or interact with such a wide group using my own channel. Because of this, I’m comfortable sacrificing access and ownership of what I am creating in exchange for amplification.

I am cognizant of the changes Twitter is making and how those influencers who helped build the social network are questioning the motivations behind the API change. This same audience is beginning to fragment and move to new channels.

As an early adopter and someone who was attracted to Twitter because of a the niche community, I have to ask myself if I’m willing to begin with a new community and abandon Twitter, which is still very active.

APP.NET is a new social network and an example of a new community that has taken advantage of those unhappy with Twitter. It’s captured favor with an open API and a paid service model that should absolve any reliance on advertising for revenue moving forward. The user base is a very tech-savvy influencer group similar to what populated the original Twitter timeline. The appeal is there, but a $50 funding to APP.NET’s kickstarter is the minimum cost to begin playing in this new network.

I’m not going to abandon Twitter anytime soon, but I am intrigued by the model APP.NET offers. It promises a stable environment with a consistent API for developers and a model that is sustainable. Success will depend on how the APP.NET community will grow and how many engaged users will pay for access to this new model of a social network.

The New Microsoft Branding

Posted on by Chris Cullmann

Microsoft is in a year of reinvention. The company is trying to shed an image of stuffiness, slowness, and “uncool” with innovative new products, aggressive marketing, and a significant movement with it’s core strategies. To punctuate these operational changes, Microsoft has released a new brand mark and visual Identity.

The new identity polarized the tech audience. Some hate it, others love it. Like anything coming out of Redmund lately, there seems to be little middle-ground for acceptance.

I think the new logo is excellent. For a brand that draws on 25 years of history in the technology space, Microsoft is very much ‘your father’s computer company’. I think the emergence of tablets as a power-technology and a muddying of the consumer electronics and consumer markets has left Microsoft scared and forced some changes. To survive, the must change their approach to new products and software.

Windows 8 looks to be an excellent move forward from a user experience standpoint and a shift to an iterate-quickly model that Google and Apple are seeing success with. XBox is a massive success in the gaming category. Windows Phone is still waiting for wider adoption by consumers, but it’s well received by the tech community and (based on first hand experience) is an excellent interface and contenter in the mobile space.

Microsoft Logo 2012

I think the new Microsoft brand is an excellent design solution. It embodies Microsoft’s history in the technology space, but is also very current in it’s palette and type. There is a very traditional structure featuring the windows icon on the left. The new interpretation of the “window” is modern, but still familiar. The Microsoft moniker, in medium grey, is set in Segoe–a clean, san-serif slotted to replace a tired Trebuchet as a screen-optimized font. The proportions are conservative and balanced. The palette is carried over from previous versions of the logo, but in the flat, graphic representation reflects the new interface in Windows 8, due for a public launch this fall.

It’s very easy to criticize Microsoft as being conservative or to note that the new branding is an evolution rather than a new approach entirely. This is a perfect move for Microsoft to plunge into 2013 with new products, new markets, and enthusiasm for a reinvention.