Nuance (the makers of T9 predictive text) just opened a one-month beta of T9 Nav. What can I say? Run, don’t walk, to sign up. I was converted with the first keypress.

What does T9 Nav do? It gives you instant search access to everything in your phone. You use the number pad to enter letters as you would with text messaging, and T9 Nav searches your phone on the fly for anything that matches.

For example, SARAH = 7-2-7-2-4. If I press just 7, I get a long list of 99+ items. When I press 2, there are still 99+. At the next 7, though, it’s down to 54, and by the time I reach the last number, 4, there are only four items to choose from. The application searches contacts, calendar and to do items, bookmarks, music and more. You can click directly on a search result item to access or open it. Stunning. Just stunning.

1. T9 Nav is really, really easy to use.

2. It doesn’t interfere with dialing, it just takes place above the dial input field.

3. Results are lightning fast, even instantaneous, and complete. A far cry from the native Nokia search, which only searches — slowly — by first name/last name OR company name (depending on how the content appears). I’ve got it loaded on a Nokia E65, by the way.

Thank you Marek of PMN for sending the link, and thank you to the great guys at Nuance for totally disrupting the mobile user interface. I doubt that I’ll ever directly access my contact list again.

Awesome stuff, friends.

It’s a big day for our server, anyway. Engadget used my photo of the Samsung charging station at LAX (part of this post) in one of today’s stories. I’d like to think that someone at Engadget is tracking my blog, but I think we need to chalk this up to Google Image Search. :.)

The whole tagging thing is interesting. I think of tagging information as bookmarks for life. I’ve been doing it for ages, but now there are plenty of tools to help me do it (not that I use them).

Tagging is a reaction to search technology, and is proportional to the use of Search as the interface to the data. If you usually search for a contact in your address book by name, you aren’t likely to do lots of tagging in the notes field. On the other hand, if you usually do a search by, say, title (”Barber”) or where the contact lives (”London”) then you might.

Just the number of ways that we mentally search for a name or number — by first name, last name, company name, city, event where we met, job title, appearance (”the bald guy who sat next to the CTO”) — is astonishing. It’s all the more astonishing that my Nokia E65 only searches contacts by first/last name or company name (but not both — depending on how the card is listed.

I’m very sensitive to the way names are spelled: once I know how someone spells their name, I rarely (if ever) get it wrong. No Mark for Marc; no Allen for Alan. The spelling is an inherent part of the way I see the name in my mind when I think of the person. There have been a few occasions where I got a spelling wrong upon introduction (my fault or the introducers), and I’ve compensated for that by spelling the name incorrectly in the contact’s notes field. So one unexpected part of tagging data is tagging it incorrectly, too, so that it can be found by people making a mistake.

All of this rambling is a long way of saying that I think there’s still a huge opportunity for improvement to the interfaces for searching content on our mobile devices.

From a MEX interview with Ken Blakeslee of WebMobility Ventures:

I often am in situations where I know the info I need is available, I just can’t get it [on the mobile device] – frustrating. But it keeps the voice traffic up! – “hi, are you near the computer right now? Great, can you check on the bla, bla, bla…?”

Isn’t it pathetic that this is still true, two years later?

Somehow, I just had the opportunity of trying the new Google Alerts service today. Stupendous, whether by email or on your iGoogle homepage! From the site:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• • monitoring a developing news story

  • keeping current on a competitor or industry

  • getting the latest on a celebrity or event
  • keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

This is not to say that I don’t find Google’s ability to convince me to give them information about myself creepy…

An informed post on Google Phone’s Android Community blog, summarizing my MEX article, published earlier this week. (Android is Google’s recently announced new open-source platform).

[Note that Power2B is a technology company, not an interface design company. We study interface needs and future trends, and then innovate to enable those dreams to become reality.]

“As the many thousands of people who have Google as their homepage already know, search can be as simple as a box on a page.  Mobile search, however, requires something of a paradigm shift; no matter how glossy the UI, tactile the interface or clever the design, emulating desktop search on a cellphone is a frustrating, scroll-heavy experience.  Sarah…, of interface design company Power2B, discusses the demands for a semantically-linked, three-dimensional mobile search environment in an article for MEX today, resolving in what she calls “mesh connectivity vs. linearity” — where search navigation is guided one step at a time through a series of clarifying options.”

You can find a presentation of my thoughts on using patterns in nature to inform interaction models in today’s issue of the MEX Newsletter (the PDF version is posted here). Many thanks to Marek Pawlowski of PMN for the invitation to contribute to MEX’s ongoing user experience education. Preliminary work on this theme was first presented at MobileMonday Helsinki in June 2007.

Sarah is co-founder and director of research and development at Power2B. In this special article for the MEX newsletter ‘Search Patterns in Nature: Informing Computer Search Interfaces’, she discusses how natural phenomena provide a blueprint for a more efficient mobile search mechanism. The technique utilises an ‘always forward’ methodology, combining semantic information with a new method of presenting and navigating results to reduce cognitive load and help users reach their desired result more quickly.

Note dated May 30, 2007:

“My gosh, there is so much going on in Search this week as to not be even funny.

“BTW, note that not only does Quintura offer search for kids, but ‘Coming soon Quintura for Women…’ Can you imagine what’s going to happen when Quintura for Men hits the web?!”

However, upon revisiting the site today, I see no sign of “Quintura for Women” (although the kids’ link is still up). What a pity. It would have been so much fun to see how the tag clouds formed.

I’ve been fascinated by tag clouds, and the utility they offer by presenting multiple levels of information in an integrated and intuitively navigated way. Why are tag clouds “acceptable” and used in some contexts, and not in others? Why do I feel that a desktop-viewed Quintura-like presentation is less likely to find uptake than the tag cloud in the right column of this blog? When are tag clouds appreciated, when avoided? Which factors have the most influence: type of information? UI context? interaction means? search context?

By that last suggestion (”search context”) I mean to ask, Does it matter what kind of search I am performing? For example, when I use a tag cloud to find a post in a blog archive, there is a limited amount of data being shown to me, but that data probably includes what I need to know (what tags are available + how many of them there are, or how popular they are). The tags do not tell me anything about the chronology of the blog postings, the authors of the posts, the server location where the posts are stored, or even very much about the content of the posts. But that’s OK for the purpose at hand.

On the other hand, when I do a search on my desktop (or laptop) computer, it’s already hard enough for the search engine to figure out what I’m actually asking. (Does “rice history” request information about the history of grain, politics, or a university?) Presenting the results with a little bit of contextual content allows me (the user) to sort relevance for myself, based on the actual data. Presenting results in a tag cloud makes it harder to embed that content, making it less relevant for my use case.

On the other other hand (think Thai goddesses here), embedding the contextual data within the tag itself would partially offset the limitations of the tag cloud. Even better, embedding the path to the data and its related data would provide a means of searching within the tag cloud image itself. Enter semantic visualization.

Semantic tagging (of whichever type) describes the links and connections between different “nodes” of data. Semantic tagging has been primarily focused on providing the ability to computers to search large amounts of data intelligently — meaning, with “understanding” of the relationships within the data. However, a user interface that organizes information based on semantic links provides an opportunity for the searcher to navigate through enormous amounts of data very rapidly, according to whichever connections are meaningful to him or her at that moment. It allows for new connections, new relationships, and new meanings to be elicited through visualization of data connections. In fact, I’m not sure whether the semantic web will turn out to be more important for automated search or for human navigation of the results.

Those Quintura tag clouds are not, strictly speaking, tag clouds. They just appear to be so at first glance. They are tags leading into semantic groupings of information nodes. [I just love the way they present the visual mapping. There is something so alive about it. Which is why my husband bought me the Visual Thesaurus from Thinkmap. Not because I use a thesaurus all that much, but because I love to play around with it, and to create interesting collections of words. (Stop snickering.)]

Which brings me back around to some exploratory work I did this summer on mobile search UI. You can take a look at the early work as presented at the MobileMonday in Helsinki here.