Speech Central - an iPod for text to speech technology

Text to speech technology is available for so long time. During its evolution it became reliable and usable, so much that at some points you can't make difference between synthetic speech and real human speech. Still, you can't say large percent of population uses this technology, although its benefits are more than obvious.

But the same situation was with MP3 players - they were clearly ahead of CDs and audio tapes but still most people used the latter. And then came the iPod and changed everything. From the technology point, it was nothing new. But from the  human-machine interaction point, it was a revolution. It enabled most people to interact with MP3 technology in a meaningful way.

Speech Central is the app that raises the bar for text to speech to the level where you can really enjoy it. Most of the text speech apps are heavily dependent on the interaction with the screen, which pretty much breaks down their usability cases - you need to set up everything in advance to use the app on the go and as we all no we don't do that well.

But Speech Central doesn't need screen at all except for the initial settings - after you set up the sources for headlines (and it can be any web site), you can just enjoy browsing those sites when you are running, commuting, doing house work or any other moment when you can't really reach the screen.

Access bar could be so powerful

Some time ago, I posted about Access bar and Natural language navigation. Part of it was implemented in Firefox 3. But after using Firefox 3, I find that applied concepts have many shortcomings:

• I see that most people still don't use natural language, but are rather using location bar the same old way. I guess that big part of the problem is that there are two boxes, and one is not sure which one he should use. Eventually it might be the case sometimes even with the expert users (myself), as they are not sure whether they have something in history or not. If I am not sure where to type, I search Google, as it is more sure that I will get the result. After a time it turns into the habit;
  
• just the fact that location bar has URL on it by default (except on start with blank page) translates into my subconscious need to type in URL and not natural language, not to say about influence on discoverability - finally, you shouldn't be typing natural language in the box with URL;
• if you try to search bookmarks using location bar, many times they won't appear, so you have to go to Library and repeat the thing. And then after a time you go directly to Library to avoid the hustle. It might even happen with history, but it is more rare case so it doesn't turn into habit.
• Sometimes I am not sure which result is the wanted result, and if I am wrong, I have to search again
  
• Obvious complaint is that location bar searches only Titles, and not the full page, so it might be the case that I am not able to find keyword.

All in all, my perception is that it has usability (but limited) for me, and not so much for the average user.

Now, the solution:

So the main idea is:

• keep just one box (access bar) for navigating the Internet, and make it the box that appears first. This box is more like a search bar, as location bar is now moved to the right, and its only purpose is to show URL. Location bar is disabled and you can't type in. If you click on it I guess it should have an icon to copy URL. Access bar will now show your previous search, and thus instruct you that you should normally continue with another search.
• the hardest part - integrate Google search into results. Here is how it should work - based on the frecency of results from its index browser calculates quality of internal results and decides how many slots it should reserve for the Google results and what should be their position. There should be always at least one slot for this purpose, and those slots are indicated by search icon. At first slots appear disabled, and when users pauses typing, they fill in with results (just like Inquisitor extension). Of course, whenever you use Google, you also get sponsored results, as Google wouldn't provide this any other way. The one who doesn't like may disable this in options.
  
• this is not dropdown, but overlay on page. The purpose is to make it possible to middle click results and keep overlay shown as tabs are opening in the background. I put even pin icon, so that users not familiar with middle clicking or control clicking (and unfortunately there are lot of them) can open multiple pages in background with plain clicking. Of course there should be also and keyboard shortcut to do this, like shift+alt+enter
• at the bottom of the overlay there is the option to continue search through one of the options: History, Bookmarks, Google, other engines. Ideally, Firefox should collect all engines one ever searched (like Chrome) and show it here, but by order of how many times one used them for searching. Eventually, they may disappear after some time of not using, to keep things cleaner.
• of course, there are Google suggestions in tooltip. One can switch to them by pressing right arrow, or by clicking mouse.

Just to note that things would have looked a bit cleaner if tabs were on top (like Chrome), as you could get overlay closer to access bar. But it would also look very good with Sidebar navigation I have mentioned before.

Natural Languange Navigation, a bit more

After showing idea in previous post, there are several more things I would like to explain user scenarios. This interface is made for two things: when user wants to see site he visited, and when user wants to visit new site and is very well aware of what he is looking for (like specific company, institution or product site). In first case (which is more frequent) he uses left column of drop-down. In the second case he uses two other columns.

I think that with this concept, unifying of search bar and location bar is not necessary, as search bar should keep its functionality when user does complex searches and searches for something generic, as whole search engine page is necessary then, and it is easier to get it through search bar. Also, user may want to submit data to different forms and sites, and search bar is handy in that case.

Natural Languange Navigation, finally

I have touched this topic at Access bar. After some rethinking, this is how it looks at this point:

This means that user should not type in URLs any more, and that natural language is used for navigation. Of course, user can type in URLs, as browser can easily recognize them and follow them, but this is just a backup solution, and it shouldn't be primary way of navigation. As user types in, he gets Google suggestion (and form history) in the tooltip. Pressing the left key moves pointer to tooltip, and it is very easy to select whole the phrase.

On the other hand, drop down has three parts - History of visited pages, Google search and Google sponsored searched (I am talking about Google here as Firefox default engine, probably it could be other search engine too). Every column contains list with page titles and domain URL. Though I would prefer total removal of domain URL, at this point it is still useful to ensure that there is no fishing. History column is replacement for old address bar list (but should bring to ease of use due to Natural language navigation), while Google search is something innovative and should add up both to productivity and ease of use. Sponsored search is something that is definitely necessary, as it is hard to imagine that Google would give away so much revenue. Eventualy, in this column ad text could be possible, as it might be required by publishers.

And when the user comes to new site, its domain name should appear in access bar, to ensure that user is aware of the site he visits and to prevent fishing.

Finally, this concept should work well with Sidebar navigation, as it has no permanent wide elements (though drop-down is very wide :) ).

Sidebar navigation

Though there is no clear statistics on this (as different sources may vary), I think that most people will have 1280+ horizontal resolution within 3 years. And large subset of this will be wide screens, which vertical resolution won't be significantly higher than today's standard 768. Unfortunately, just small part of this will have pivot function to make them vertically oriented.

In such environment most documents will leave unused horizontal space, which should be used for something meaningful by the programs. At this point, I will focus solely on how this problem should be solved with web documents/browsers. First of all, though web design may vary in the future, wide sites are not likely to appear, as reading too wide columns is not ergonomic and you can expect unused horizontal space to appear here.

The idea is to move all navigation to sidebar. That way, all vertical space is freed up, while only horizontal space that is expected to be unused is used for navigation. Of course, easier said than done. Some of the elements will be tighter than they are today, and there is lot more free space that should be filled with something meaningful. So, here is the mock-up of what I propose:

Keep in mind some remarks:

• Address bar is much smaller. Even current UI elements of Firefox used here would function much better if they were a bit less wide. With this width, there is no sense to display all URLs, but it is not a big problem, as they are not meaningful anyway. I would suggest Natural language navigation to fill that gap, but will leave it for the next post.
• Search bar is a bit smaller, but it shouldn't be a problem
• Navigation buttons are the same, I just tweaked them a bit from Firefox - Stop/Reload button is already standard in Opera/Safari, and unified back/forward history from IE7 is also a good stuff.
• The rest of the space is used for different sorts of link collections
• Hidden tabs - there might be more intuitive name for this, but it relates to tabs that are not shown on tabbar due to tab overflow. At this point, tab overflow is not discoverable - try to open tab in background while overflow is active, and you'll have no feedback that something is happening. With this solution, hidden tabs area would increase its size by 1 slot (and history would lose that one slot) where newly opened tab would appear. And with some nice smooth scrolling animation it would look very cool. And if lists get too big, there could be scroll bar on right side. Personally, I had big trouble using current list of tabs in Firefox as list contains both visible and invisible tabs, which makes it too big, while I think that proposed hidden tab list would be very user friendly.
• Recently closed tab is another function that is totally indiscoverable in Firefox. Same smooth scroll animation would make it very effective and easy to use.
• Bookmarks could be solved in different styles - at this point I think that there should be top used bookmarks, while pressing the + sign area would significantly increase and show all current bookmarks (thus no need for bookmarks menu).
• History is just least of recently opened page, and it reduces the need to keep that item in menu.
• With all these changes, menu bar becomes narrow enough to fit into sidebar,and there is no need to extend it to the full line. Actually, current menus were made at the time when resoulution 640x480 was widespread, and they really took whole the screen. Now it is really time to revise whole the system.

And, as said before, this new concept adds a lot of more visible vertical screen. Here is native Firefox for comparison:

Access bar

This is feature that your future browser should have. You are probably very well aware that web site addresses (aka as URL) are not user friendly. Using URLs is exactly like asking people to learn MS-DOS commands to handle files.

Most people are not aware of even single URL. In reality people are only aware of brand names, so if www. + brand name + .com works everything is fine, if it doesn't then there is trouble. And if one is after some specific page, which might be: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox, situation is more or less helpless.

So let's switch to my father. He navigates the Internet by typing in what he wants to find in search box of a browser, and then he selects page he wants to go to from search results. It is very intuitive, almost always works, and everyone can learn within seconds. Still there is a problem with this type of navigation in today's browsers - this is thought to be only second way of navigating, which means it is far from productive, and fairly unsupported.

So, let's ditch both address and search bar from your browser and keep just one box that handles both thing: Access bar. It should act like following:

1. Drop down of address bar should show on its top several pages that are visited, whose title (or better whole content) matches phrase in access bar, and they should be ordered by frequency of visit, it should be possible to expand list if necessary;


2. Next section should be devoted to top search engine results, which should be also expandable (and there should be general option to show both title and text description);


3. Finally, there should be several search engines listed, to do full search with keywords in Access bar (and this part should be also expandable);


4. It should be easy to recognize if someone types in URL, as every single word processor does this, and in this case browser should go to exactly that address.

One should also note that browser must provide solution to mix search results with sponsored search in search results section, as it is highly unlikely that this would be implemented otherwise, as it would have negative commercial effects.