Analytic Design Group

It’s been a year full of wonderful (travel!, new job!) and some not so wonderful experiences – lots of false starts and surprises. Thankfully, things have turned out very well in the end, but the trend continues through December. As a last test for my endurance and patience, my husband got very sick with the H1N1 flu and was unable to help with any holiday preparations. None. My young son and I kept waiting for him to get better so that we could cut down a tree (repurposing a tree from our crowded yard), but the days kept on sliding by.

Should you ditch your favourite search engine and move over to Bing? Probably not - and here is why, from a user experience point of view.

The problem is that there is nothing in the Bing experience that makes me say "Yes! This is what was missing in Google Search." or "Wow, this is an awesome new way of presenting search results". Bing does not enhance my search experience. I do not see any value in using Bing over my current default, Google.

http://wave.google.com/

I have had the above link open in a tab in my browser for weeks. It was a reminder to watch the Google Wave demo. The demo is an hour and twenty minutes long, so finding that much time to watch is not easy. Also, the video starts with some pretty hefty promises about how “Google will surprise you” and “show you an unbelievable presentation of what’s possible in the browser.” I’ll admit I was quite skeptical and the thought of sitting through more than an hour of hype was not very tempting.

Three weeks ago I was at CANUX 07 listening to David Armano’s talk, The Fuzzy Tail, where he described an approach to fostering collaboration and innovation at Critical Mass.. His approach to achieving collaboration and innovation is to combine a hierarchical structure with a collaborative model.