One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.

The "Favorites" tab has been renamed "All" and includes every site a user ever liked, including multimedia content. Similarly, the "What's New" page, which displays sites a user's friends and subscriptions reviewed, has been renamed "Recent Activity."

In the new interface, shares are found in the main Discover tab and display the list of sites that were sent to a user by mutual subscribers with direct-share permission. Soon, the site will display sent as well as received shares.

The once-retired Similarity Meter, a diagram showing a users' Favorites similarity with other users, is being resurrected. And by popular demand, group shares will no longer be available in bulk; users will have to select other users within groups to share items with them.

Design changes that limit user choice in favor of overall site consistency are threefold: List view rather than a grid view is the default for all profiles. In contrast to the 22 background colors once available, a mere seven of the most popular color themes are now being offered for profile customization. And the visual editor has been scrapped. "Rest assured," the site reads, "we are still working on making sure all your past blog entries look good in the new interface. Some text customization will still be allowed.

"Our goal is not to limit your creativity, but to place emphasis on content and ensure a consistent user experience." An admirable aim, indeed; we think StumbleUpon is working in a good direction with these changes.

We also admire the new drop-down menu for tags:

Users are able to toggle back and forth between the beta redesign and the old site design over the next month. "To switch back to the old look," the site says, "simply click on the Beta link located on the main navbar (see image below) and on the following screen click the Leave Beta button. To return to the new interface, use the link Click here and try the new StumbleUpon! located at the top of all pages in the old view."

Now, when web users click to see lists of the people they follow or who follow them, they will see more information than just avatars and usernames. The new, improved pages contain full names, locations, most recent tweets, a one-click follow button, and a drop-down menu of possible actions, including @replies, DMs, and blocking. UPDATE: After a commenter pointed out that scanning for non-following users just became more difficult with the new interface, we would like to point out that there's an app for that. You're welcome. We love you, too.

Here's what the options look like for users you follow:

And here's what they look like for users following you:

Also, you can browse through other users' followers/following pages and exercise about the same list of functions:

Finally, users can toggle back and forth between a simple avatar/username list and the new, expanded list. The drop-down menu and follow buttons remain:

On our wishlist of Twitter improvements, getting more follower information was quite high, and this improvement does a bit to meet that need.

Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.

Technically, what Wilson did was come up with an interface combining an Electroencephalogram, or brain wave monitor, with an on screen keyboard for selecting letters. The system lights up each key on the keyboard but is able to notice a difference in brain activity when the desired letter for input is lit. Wilson compares it to clicking through multiple letters when texting on a mobile phone.

Once you've found a new way to input text - what are you going to do with it? Use it to Twitter, of course!

Clearly, there's some gimmickry going on in the news of Wilson's interface. Who knows if this is better or worse than saying that a technology is developed to assist physically disabled people when it's really going to be used by the military? Wilson does say that the technology will be helpful for people with active brains but immobile bodies. Now they'll be able to Twitter, among other things, he says. Fair enough.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we're proud to have the #1 Google search result for the phrase "Internet brain implant" for our post The Internet Brain Implant: Why We Should Say No. Today could be a good time to go re-read that post. New interfaces are cool, but the sanctity of free, independent thought is very important. Wilson's work is no brain implant, but it does seem like an important thing to check in with ourselves about.

To be fair, Twitter is clearly a revolutionary technology that we use throughout every day. Anyone who wants access to that tool ought to have it and Wilson's work may increase access.

We presume many more uses for his work will be found if proven commercially viable. For now, though, we can remember today as the day we learned about the man who Tweeted with his mind.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner. We hope you'll at least think about joining us there.

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

The Ubiquity project aims to solve problems involving today's web applications and how we interact with them. Atul Varma describes this on his blog:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it's difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox's UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don't scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they're running on; and Greasemonkey doesn't prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

To solve these problems, they're developing Ubiquity which will let you apply textual commands (called "verbs") to whatever you're looking at on your screen.

As an example, say you found a typo on a friend's blog. Instead of copying and pasting the sentence into an email, you could use the Ubiquity UI to highlight the problem text then launch Gmail's compose screen with some default information already filled in (like "From the page Aza's Thoughts:) to introduce your email.

Atul also notes that the Ubiquity interface is currently activated via hotkeys, but that's just for the time being. Their ultimate goal is to have the program more deeply integrated with Firefox so it could be accessed from UIs that already exist - like contextual menus or the AwesomeBar.

To keep tabs on the status of the Ubiquity project or to download the code, you can visit their project page here.

Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Users are not stupid, and in fact, they were overwhelmed with choices presented in traditional UIs. The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual - presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures. Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces. But can these UIs become the norm? In this post we take a look at the rise of the contextual UI and ponder if they will cross the chasm.

Windows UI - The World Of Never-Ending Choices

Looking back at the years when Windows dominated our lives one can hardly believe what we put up with. These interfaces were massive and overwhelming. Each application was full of screens with huge numbers of options and settings.

Every imaginable choice was thrown at users at once and it was up to the poor user to figure out what to do. To cram more information onto the screen, the interfaces of that era used tabs. At some point Microsoft invented the ultimate UI element - a tab with a scroll button in the end which allowed the user to page through hidden tabs.

Another philosophy of the old UI approach was that the user wants to see all information all the time. Instead of building UIs that responded to the way that people actually interacted with the tool, the user interface opened up all possible choices at all times. Naturally, this is completely overwhelming and confusing to people.

The only way to cope with complexity was to introduce a standard set of widgets, such as tables, combo boxes, check boxes, etc., so that users at least had some familiarity with UIs from program to program. But on top of that, there was a myth spread that users were stupid and would not be able to understand a non-standard UI.

The myth was supported by the fact that a lot of people do not respond well to sophisticated visualizations, like graphs, heat maps, or treemaps. While this is true, it doesn't mean that people can not figure out new user interfaces. The proof comes from Apple, which continuously innovates with new UIs for its software products. Also, recent social web applications have made a strong case for simpler, contextual user interfaces.

Apple's Revenge

Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple over 10 years ago, the company has been on a roll. The secret sauce behind Apple's success is a strong investment in software. In turn, this has meant a lot of innovation is user interfaces. Many years ago, when I myself was blinded by the standard Windows UI, my boss told me that user interfaces are cheap. He meant that building new UIs from scratch makes sense, because the UI is so essential and so important to get right that you shouldn't just reuse code and widgets.

Steve Jobs and his team know this all too well. Apple's UIs evolve constantly, taking on new forms and seeking simpler ways of delivering a superior user experience. What is remarkable is that you always know how to use Apple's products. I watched this over and over again. From my 4 year old daughter to my 83 year old grandfather, everyone I know could use an iPhone right away. iTunes has so few buttons that it is impossible not to know how to use it. And so does iPhoto and every other program developed by Apple.

In addition to simplicity, Apple has for years been using a contextual approach to user interfaces. Apple widgets react to user gestures by changing shapes and presenting more options only when it makes sense. And the latest web applications have got the contextual bug from Apple.

Contextual User Interfaces on the Web

It is ironic that it took web UIs so long to discover the elegance and simplicity of context. Since its dawn, HTML lacked the sophisticated widgets that are present on the desktop and web UIs were always considered more primitive and slow. Contextual, AJAX-based UIs actually seem faster because they do not reveal all possible choices to the user. Instead they focus on surfacing just the bits that are necessary and then surfacing more based on user gestures.

A good example of context-based UIs can be found in modern video players. The controls in these apps are hidden until the user moves the mouse over the player. Depicted below is the player from Vimeo.

Another typical element of contextual UI is modal DHTML dialogs. Regular modal dialogs are annoying to the user, but the modal DHTML ones work great because they bring the actions into the spotlight. For example, the dialog below comes up when the user clicks on Embed option in the screen above.

Note the contextual options in the screen above. The user can either preview the video or customize its look. Neither of these options are required so they appear as closed off toggles. If the user decides to explore the option, the toggle simply expands as shown below.

Another important breakthrough in the contextual UI approach is the realization that function is more important than design. The famous Apple mantra that design is the function is true, but not everyone can design like Apple. Lots of web sites in the nineties ended up with designs that were overwhelming and needlessly flashy. Those designs paid more attention to colors and forms than to the function. The new UIs are different, because a lot of them are purposely plain. They favor CSS over images, and focus on function and context instead of knock-out looks.

Lots of companies got the context bug. Flickr, Digg, and 37 Signals are just a few that use contextual interfaces. Our next example comes from the literary social network Shelfari, which developed a contextual UI for interacting with individual books. The remarkable thing about this UI is that it violates a lot of classic principles yet it succeeds in delivering the necessary functions in a contextual and compact way.

When the user mouses over a book, a contextual popup comes up containing information about the book and a set of associated actions. Part of the popup is a button/menu (sort of like a button and combo box) widget that allows the user to provide information about what he or she did with the book. The first thing to note is that combination of a button in a menu is not standard, yet it makes sense because it saves a click for the most important action. Secondly, the menu is effectively a popup within a popup, which is a big no-no in the classic world, but works well in this context. The elements of the menu are not buttons but check boxes, which allow multiple selection - another violation of classic user interface elements, but which works very well in this context. What is remarkable is how intuitive this gadget is - you are interacting with it in the context of a book and each choice is simple and clear.

Such clarity and simplicity was never present in the old interfaces. Clearly, this new approach to UIs is great, and early adopters are loving it. But will it cross over to the mainstream?

Can Contextual UIs Go Mainstream?

Crossing the chasm is a tricky thing and many cool technologies that are endorsed by early adopters fail to do it. Even though simple, contextual UIs make sense, the old UIs are still holding on strong. One of the early examples of a company that has adopted the new approach to user interfaces that we found is the Hertz car rental site. Hertz had one of the less user-friendly sites around, with a dull, "click-to-load next page" sort of UI. Their new web site features an intelligent contextual UI, which enhances and simplifies the process of reserving a car.

For the transition to happen the new approach needs to be embraced by more mainstream web sites. Will they go for it? The answer depends on whether they will think that the new UI approach, with contextual choices, is more complicated. Certainly there will be people who will say that consumers are not smart enough to figure out where to click. The concerns might be amplified by the fact that each contextual UI is unique and so won't be familiar across the board for users the way the old UIs were. Still, it seems, based on our experiences over the past few years and on the impressive track record of Apple products, that simple, contextual UI have a chance to finally win out over their complicated Windows rivals.

What do you think - can contextual UIs become the new standard for creating user interfaces? What are your favorite contextual UI elements?

An excerpt from an upcoming book by Luke Wroblewski, "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks," posted on A List Apart helps to point out the issue with sign-up forms on the web. When you're recommended a new web service to check out, Luke writes "you arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form. We can do better."

Instead of forcing users through a dreadful sign-up process when really they just wanted to take a look, he promotes the idea of "gradual engagement." After you play around with a web service and get an idea about what it does, you can then choose to take the path to complete your profile in order to create an account, save your work, share the results of your creation, etc.

Luke uses a few examples to make his point: one, Geni, an online family tree creation tool lets users make a family tree as soon as they visit the web site. Of course, as you fill out your name, you also enter in your email, so while you're busy building your tree, you're also being sent an email from the service, reminding you of your account details if you ever want to return to work on your tree. However, this vague "did I just create an account?" design may have worked for Geni, who generated 5 million profiles in 5 months, we would argue that it should be more obvious whether you are creating an account or not.

Geni's "Sign Up" Process

Another example of gradual engagement came from TripIt, a service which lets you plan your trips. The interesting thing about TripIt is that the service also ditches the sign-up form for a more interesting option: you just email plans@tripit.com when your travel plans, be them airline confirmation email, hotel confirmation emails, whatever. TripIt extracts your name and email from the form instead of forcing you to enter these details yourself.

Personally, I recall Twiddla (our coverage) an online whiteboarding service, as implementing the "try-before-you-buy" option really well. Upon visiting the Twiddla homepage, a big button "Try it now in the sandbox," lets you test out the service along with other users in a public sandbox. This way, you can not only try it out for yourself, but you also might see someone else testing a feature you would have otherwise missed. You could also just click "Start a New Meeting" from the homepage and instantly use the Twiddla app with the others who you invite via email, no signing up required.

Twiddla's Buttons

Trend #2: We Really Care

Another trend spotted in the wild is UI design that shows customers that the company cares about them. Take Samatha Warren's experience with Wufoo, an app that helps you design and build online forms. After finding herself in need of tech support, she noticed an odd form field on the Support Request page: "Emotional State."

The drop-down included choices like excited, confused, worried, upset, panicked, and angry. Samantha chose the feeling that best described her mood ("worried", by the way), and then made a startling discovery:

"As I made my selection and moved the curser to hit the submit button a feeling washed over me that was unlike anything I had ever felt with a webservice online. I felt like they cared. I felt confident that my problem would be solved. I felt like I was contacting PEOPLE who have beating hearts, and families, who had felt worried about their missing contact e-mails too. How very humane of them!"

WuFoo's Support Form

Some say this is cheesy, others find it annoying, but WuFoo isn't the only service to utilize this idea.

Xobni (our coverage), the "social network in your inbox," also asks for user feedback by asking you how you feel. They built the "Are You Happy?" box. From a Xobni employee's blog, Gabor Cselle describes why:

Instead of a popup, we add a little box on the bottom of the sidebar every couple of weeks and ask: "Are you happy?" There are two buttons, Yes and No, and an optional comment field. This is the most lightweight method of collecting user feedback. Note that:

1. We're not popping up an annoying window.
2. We ask a simple question.
3. There are only two options – "yes" and "no" - and no Send button.

Xobni's Emotional Feedback Pop-Up

While an argument can be made that opting out of the happiness check should be more readily available, apparently most of their users don't seem to mind. The feedback is 90% "Yes."

A more obvious place to find "emotional feedback" form fields is on people-powered customer service site, GetSatisfaction.com, (which, by the way, also forgoes a long sign up process by allowing you to fill in a basic form - name, email, CAPTCHA, with further profile information optional.)

Company feedback, ideas, and questions can tagged with a smiley/frowny face depicting how you feel. After you select the face, a box pops up to allow you to pick out a related word like "happy," "anxious," "indifferent," or "unsure."

GetSatisfaction's Emotional Feedback

While emotional feedback doesn't work for everyone - some find it patronizing, especially when they're reporting a critical issue - an opt-in emotional feedback box could at least gather information about requests/complaints and help a company analyze and prioritize their incoming feedback.

Conclusion

Gradual engagement and emotional feedback are only two of many UI trends seen lately, but two that stand out as they seem to be ramping up in terms of usage by web companies. Hopefully, more companies will take note that there are a number ways to generate accounts for their service besides the traditional, boring sign-up form, or at least start supporting OpenID as an alternative.

As for emotional feedback? It's a more risky choice since some users detest it, but done right, it could bring a new level of information about to product feedback while making users feel valued by the company.

Do you have any examples of either of these trends that you want to share? And...how does that make you feel? 

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

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