I wrote about the Evolution of Auto Complete a few posts ago, This post is about the best Auto Complete I have ever seen (I Don't know how I forgot about this one, shame on me! :). Read the text in the picture below: 
Source: http://www.friends.hosted.pl/redrim/Reading_Test.jpg Our brain is such an amazing auto-complete tool, and I always get excited to see great Priming effects. Our brain already seen these words in the past, and due to that he is able to re-create the correct word even though the word is all mixed up. Pay attention that the first and last letters of the word are in their correct location, to give the relevant clues for our brain to re-create the word (Top Down processes)
I came across a few weeks ago by chance (Thank you StumbleUpon) with Bart Bonte's games, and I fell in love with them in just a few seconds. I fell in love with its simplicity, and with its creativity level. (The man is a genius).  What makes Bonte games so brilliant?
- Most of them do not include any instructions on how to play the game, you either get it, or try until you do.
- They require you to think differently every time, sometimes it requires you to think outside the box, sometimes you need to think in a very methodological way, and sometimes you just need to do the obvious. But you always have to think.
- When you pass a stage or finish a game, It always gives you a good feeling of accomplishment, you feel like you gained something by playing. Didn't play so many games that gave me that.
- The games are very simple and creative, each game has its own "spirit".
2 games I really adore and I must recommend you to play (I feel that I need to warn you that these games are highly addictive): I'm so happy when I witness such a great combination of simplicity, cleverness and creativeness ,Bart Bonte is certainly one to follow.
 A a usability professional I'm a bit ashamed that I didn't know anything about it, and more ashamed that it didn't occur to me to do some Guerrilla Usability on my neighborhood myself.
If you don't know what is Guerrilla Usability, I'll explain shortly - It means improving usability level with methods that require a minimal budget. And what I mean by "Guerrilla Usability raid in your neighborhood"? Walking around finding things that are so horrible to use in your own neighborhood, and making them a little bit (or sometimes much) better. (see notes on the example below) I saw some wonderful examples of such guerrilla raids when i viewed the blog post Users fix parking ticket machine interface themselves in etre company blog. There I saw some examples of such raids people did to very un-usable products in their neighborhood, here the best example: Parking ticket machine: 
Oh and one last thing, this reminds me of a really cool project that was done in a small supermarket in Israel - web2.0 supermarket - you must watch it: I fell in love with the raid idea. If you got any cool examples or raid opportunities, let me know.
Came across a blog post in Techcrunch on a cool company Snapily, which is currently in Beta. Snapily allows you to upload pictures you want to print (As Business card, Birthday invites and etc..) and create all sorts of effects on the printed version, for example - 3D effect, Morphing effect, flipping effect. In addition to that, in the end of video, they mentioned that soon they will also be able to offer another product effect - To present a "video" in the printed picture (made from a couple of consecutive frames from a video you upload). This is an amazing effect. Can't wait to see that one! It was done before in one way or another ,but their implementation just hits the target, a really cool product, Hope it looks the same in real life as in the video.
I read an interesting blog post on the article "Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception" in The mouse trap blog.  In general the experiment described in the article found that "Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions".
The blog post took the article conclusions in to one direction, and I want to take it in another. From brief reading, the article made me think of a creativity and not psychosis... Illusions, imagining things, conspiracies and etc... these can all be examples of creative thinking, and high imagination. To be able to create things from nothing requires a lot of creativity. Think about it, it might be good to feel lack of control, we don't need to control everything or be afraid of loosing control. Sometimes it is good to flow to where life takes you. Next time when you are trying to think of a creative solution to something, or to discover the next big thing, think about it.
 There are a lot of people out there that don't know they can use Google to refine their searches and to apply the search box for many many more functions. (In Part 1, I'm going to list here all the functions I found that can be used in Google's search box (Feel free to add more), and in Part 2 I'll present some Gmail shortcuts).
All the functions that I'm going to present below are operated from the search box. But easily they could have been operated not by the search, but (for example) by a tool box, or a select box or in many other ways... Am I suppose to remember only my 5 favorite functions from the massive options? Wouldn't it be easier if I had an option list? I guess the simple answer is that Google expect the pro users to remember what they need to use, and they don't think these options are relevant to all. So here it is a pretty full guide, you will find a lot of useful options here. A guide to Google shortcuts (First some links to nice sources I gathered, of unique shortcuts): And some additional functions that do not exists in the above links:(some of them taken from Google web search help) Google ignores common words and characters such as where, the, how, and other digits and letters that slow down your search without improving the results. If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can make sure we pay attention to it by putting a "+" sign in front of it.
Example: peanut butter +and jelly To search for web pages that have similar content to a given site, type "related:" followed by the website address into the Google search box.
Example: related:www.cnn.com Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to ‘fill in the blank’ by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished into the Google search box.
Example: Isaac Newton discovered * To see scores and schedules for sports teams type the team name or league name into the search box. This is enabled for the English Premier League, National Football League, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball.
All sports data provided by STATS, Inc.
Example: san francisco 49ers If you’re looking for results from Google Book Search, you can enter the name of the author or book title into the search box and we’ll return any book content we have as part of your normal web results. You can click through on the record to view more detailed info about that author or title.
Example: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (~) immediately in front of your search term.
Example: ~fast food Google’s spell checking software automatically checks whether your query uses the most common spelling of a given word. If it thinks you’re likely to generate better results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”. Click the suggested spelling to launch a Google search for that term.
Example: Expolasion To find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you, type "movies" or the name of a current film into the Google search box. If you've already saved your location on a previous search, the top search result will display showtimes for nearby theaters for the movie you've chosen.
Example: movies 94705 If you’re looking for a store, restaurant, or other local business you can search for the category of business and the location and we’ll return results right on the page, along with a map, reviews, and contact information.
Example: Italian food 02138 To see home listings in a given area type "housing", "home", or "real estate" and the name of a city or a U.S. zip code into the Google search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. Clicking the "Go" button on the results page will display details of individual homes that Google has indexed.
Example: homes Los Angeles Google ignores common words and characters such as where, the, how, and other digits and letters that slow down your search without improving the results. If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can make sure we pay attention to it by putting a "+" sign in front of it.
Example: peanut butter +and jelly To find pages that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms. For example, here's how to search for a vacation in either London or Paris: vacation london OR paris You can use Google to search only within one specific website by entering the search terms you're looking for, followed by the word "site" and a colon followed by the domain name. For example, here's how you'd find admission information on the Stanford University site: admission site:www.stanford.edu Feel like a number? Numrange searches for results containing numbers in a given range. Just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms. You can use Numrange to set ranges for everything from dates ( Willie Mays 1950..1960) to weights ( 5000..10000 kg truck). But be sure to specify a unit of measurement or some other indicator of what the number range represents. For example, here's how you'd search for a DVD player that costs between $50 and $100: DVD player $50..$100 If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com web] will show the cached content with the word "web" highlighted.The query [cache:] will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache. For instance, [cache:www.google.com] will show Google's cache of the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "cache:" and the web page url. The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page url. The query [info:] will present some information that Google has about that web page. For instance, [info:www.google.com] will show information about the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "info:" and the web page url. If you begin a query with the [stocks:] operator, Google will treat the rest of the query terms as stock ticker symbols, and will link to a page showing stock information for those symbols. For instance, [stocks: intc yhoo] will show information about Intel and Yahoo. (Note you must type the ticker symbols, not the company name.) If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] will find pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the "site:" and the domain. You can search a specific file type, for example: filetype:doc Allows you to search for a link or an anchor text - allinanchor:get more referrals If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the title. If you include [intitle:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title. For instance, [intitle:google search] will return documents that mention the word "google" in their title, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (title or no). Note there can be no space between the "intitle:" and the following word. Putting [intitle:] in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting [allintitle:] at the front of your query: [intitle:google intitle:search] is the same as [allintitle: google search]. If you start a query with [allinurl:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the url. Note that [allinurl:] works on words, not url components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, [allinurl: foo/bar] will restrict the results to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in the url, but won't require that they be separated by a slash within that url, that they be adjacent, or that they be in that particular word order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints. If you include [inurl:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the url. For instance, [inurl:google search] will return documents that mention the word "google" in their url, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (url or no). Note there can be no space between the "inurl:" and the following word. Putting "inurl:" in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting "allinurl:" at the front of your query: [inurl:google inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl: google search]. Putting "Acronym:" in front of an acronym, you will receive results with the acronym explanation. for example: Acronum:P.S If you start a query with SafeSearch: you will exclude adult oriented search results. for example: Safesearch:breast I hope I gathered most of the possibilities out there of the giant Google search engine.
Came across this very unique demo of a "Painting game" by Ian Dallas What fascinated me the most, was the fact that in this game you reveal the world by splattering paint around. You decide where to splatter paint and what parts you think are crucial to be revealed in order for you to progress in the game. It will be interesting to see if all people will splatter the same things or not, do we view the world differently? do we need the same visual "anchors" to understand the world we are in? Very creative and innovative, but regarding game play, would we be able to splatter paint for the entire game?
The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
 Few posts ago I wrote on another Google experiment - Keyboard Shortcuts. This new experiment is a bit different.
Google accessible view, I presume, was created for disabled people who can't see well (This is why its called accessible view...). I am very glad to see that "Accessibility" is embraced for Google .  What the Accessible View gives the user, is a very simple and intuitive navigation alternative, that allows him to browse the search results. You can navigate between results by using the keywords "J", "K" (very similar to the keyboard shortcuts experiment)In addition "N", "P", & the up/down arrows (Very good improvement for the keyboard short cut experiment) allow you to do almost the same.
The added value here is that the results are highlighted. But it is not just a highlight of the results, but a sort of magnifying-glass view of the result. The magnified area floats in different layer above the actual results page. This solution is great for people who have difficulties seeing, as they can magnify the text even further by using the "=" key or the "-" key, and in addition if the user has a screen reader (commonly used by blind people) - the result that is currently highlighted, will be read to him, and only that (nothing else in the screen will be read to him, as this might distract them). Few insights:  I will not recommend using it for people who have no difficulty in reading, as the floating layer of the highlighted result, is floating above other results as well, and because you can't see the next results or the previous one, it is very hard to have good orientation when navigating between the results. - J,K,Up and Down keys have the same functionality, they allow you to navigate between the results (but not to jump to the next index page). Using "N" & "P" do the same, but also when you are standing on the last result of the page, pressing the key "N" will send you to the next index results page (and the other way around with "P"). what I find confusing is why do we need different functionality for these buttons. Either create buttons that will allow you to jump between index pages, or just use the same functionality as the "N"&"P" keys, for all buttons. This way it will have a better logic to me in terms of user experience.
- Too many buttons that act the same, well I realize its an experiment, but why can't you decide?
Keep them coming Google, you're doing good to the user experience and accessibility.
In the last few months I witness an impressive advancement in the auto-complete function of browsers, web sites and application. So I decided to summarize the evolution of it, in terms of User Experience. In the beginning there was (and still) Internet explorer
In Internet explorer 7, the auto-complete only complete if the browsing history string starts with the exact string the user wrote. for example, if you write the string "A", only web sites that start with "A" will appear.
And Google said, let there be Google Suggest
 Google suggest, is literally suggesting the users search terms according to the the strings the users entered into the search box. and in the same principal of the Internet explorer, it mostly suggest the matches from the beginning of the search terms.
There is only one small user experience problem as I see it, sometimes the string I enter will be more relevant in the middle of the sentence, but due to the fact that Google has so many suggestion to give that match the beginning of the phrase, you almost never see suggestion that include your string in the middle of the suggested search term. (I had to write "hesaurus" to receive the suggestion that doesn't start with "H" and got "Thesaurus"...). I wonder if the Google algorithm take it into consideration.
And Mozilla saw the light, and created FireFox 3
The big improvement in FF, is that the auto complete searches the string you enter in the address box, not just in the beginning of the phrase but in the middle of it and/or in the site description, all according to how relevant it is according to the user browsing history.
Today a short and easy domain name is not something so common, and many domains today are created from half words or a couple of words, and this is not so easy remember. The FF auto complete was a huge improvement in terms of user experience, as users no longer need to be so accurate, and remember exactly the domain name, they only needed to remember part of it or how it is described.
And Google said, let there be Google Chrome
In Google Chrome the address box and the search box are combined to one. If the phrase you enter exists in your browsing history it will suggest a web site, if it doesn't it will suggest that you will search for this phrase.
So simple and so smart, why hassle the user to click between two boxes that are so relevant to each other, when he can do it in one.
And when something makes your life so much easier, people find out many ways use it.
Good friends of mine, created the startup Predictad, They give advertisers a new place to advertise in - in the suggest box. The ads that appear. are relevant to the user search phrase. This gives the publishers and the advertisers a new way to earn money or exposure.
I wrote this post because I saw today a nice post in the weblog of 37signals - Signal vs. Noise, a nice enhancement Highrise made to their auto complete tool.
Something in particular caught my eye, Their auto complete tool, also know how to complete strings that not exactly match (For example if the user wrote "danrimon" (my name), the auto complete will also know to search for "dan rimon"). This is pretty cool, although exists in other places, including Google Chrome, but for some reason I only noticed it when i saw Highrise video.
This made me think, What's next?
The purpose of the auto complete is to help users, then why not take it to the next level:
- One obvious improvement - correct spelling mistakes.
- The other thing is more interesting in user experience terms, and this is Auto-Complete with filtering. what do I mean? If I want to search the word "Water" for example, I can write instead "trewa" (Why is that?), because this string includes all the letters of the word "water", but mixed. What the auto complete algorithm should do in my mind is suggest all the strings that include these latter in the relevant possible combination (and filter the words that do not include these letters or part of them). This simple change will solve a lot of most common mistakes we do when we write in the Internet. mix the letters because we write to fast and do not pay attention very closely.
If you have any more interesting auto complete tools or just more insights - feel free to share.
As a cognitive psychologist I found this video very funny and interesting. Dan Dennett, a philosopher and a cognitive scientist, puts our Mind & Conscious on the spot light, and by experimenting with some clever "mind tricks", he shows us that what we see, is just what our mind wants to see. Some questions arise from the lecture: - Does the mind have a will of its own?
- Why do we see things in a certain way and not the other?
The lecture doesn't fully answer all of that, but it gives you a lot to think when you observe the world, and all the information out there that our mind "decide to see" and more interesting what it ignores. My 2 cents: The world we see out there, is the world "we" decided we want to see, but we decide to see only part of it, not for no reason. The world is too complex for our brain to understand, too much information to process at once, this is why our mind filter things and interfere with the way we "see". I guess that in time, we will be able to process more and more information, to really experience the world and its wonders. But for now, lets just keep an open mind.
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