Wanna see something cool?

Post #244,779 by tuberculosis 2/15/06 6:10:44 PM Reply	Wanna see something cool? My team has been working very hard on this for about year now. It is the mother of all AJAX apps for us and we expect it will vastly improve your ability to find exactly what you want. You need Windows and IE 6 to see this (for now - Firefox and Safari will be out after a QA cycle in a couple weeks). Go to the main page and choose "Apparel & Accessories". In the search box enter a couple terms ("blue dress" or "men's hat"). Note the collapsable outline controls on the left - play with them to try to improve your selection criteria. We call this Attribute Based Navigation. (To compare with the old experience, try it with Firefox or something else). This ability to do complex selection based on multiple attributes with real time update of results will roll out over all shops over the next couple months. This is the pilot. While apparel is kind of cute - I think the huge win will be electronics. BTW, this will not be available to 100% of visitors until sometime after 4:00 pm PST. Right now you have about an even chance of seeing it. Cheers. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,781 by admin 2/15/06 6:18:28 PM Reply	Very cool, but slow. I assume that will get better as time goes on, though. Reminds me of an AJAX version of newegg's category search. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #244,786 by tuberculosis 2/15/06 6:52:15 PM Reply	Really? Its pretty fast here - which part feels slow? A huge amount of work went into tuning it to "feel" responsive. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,796 by admin 2/15/06 7:48:20 PM Reply	5-15 seconds per category click And it took me a while to notice the "Loading" message. You'd be better off clearing the product area during loads, I think. I thought it was hung or broken at first. This is on a connection that was doing 1-2MB/s (yes, that's a capital B) on a download from Oracle yesterday, so I don't think it's bandwidth. :-) Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #244,805 by boxley 2/15/06 8:09:47 PM Reply	your problem is the application :-) /me/dux Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #244,815 by tuberculosis 2/15/06 8:42:20 PM Reply	hey man, its just a little javascript and some html "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,813 by tuberculosis 2/15/06 8:41:26 PM Reply	That's pretty atypical as to your other suggestions - you'll have to convince all the random people (our lab is quite sophisticated) we got to try it out that this is less confusing to them. You'll get used to it. :-) "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,841 by admin 2/15/06 9:45:02 PM Reply	Typed in "men's hats" And played with the categories. They were all slow, pretty much. It's not a matter of "getting used to it". If the first experience is bad, some people aren't likely to come back. I'll run it past my wife; she's probably fairly indicative of the sort of average consumer you likely get. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #244,876 by tuberculosis 2/16/06 1:06:00 AM Reply	Categories will be slowest all others will be much faster. Reason is that you are moving to a whole new instance of the app/page when you switch categories. IOW, when you switch categories, you're kind of "rebooting" the experience. The theory is you know what category you want, then refine with the other elements. So category might get hit once or twice, then the rest of the time will be spent on the other refinements. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,912 by admin 2/16/06 9:11:51 AM Reply	They were all slow. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,053 by tuberculosis 2/16/06 9:10:05 PM Reply	All what's were slow? Gimme a script or something because you might as well say "the program is not working right" for all the help that gives me. Categories are new pages - they're no more slow that navigating to other pages. Furthermore - they are "searches" - they call the search service with the category name as the term. Collapsable pickers further down (like "special sizes" and such) are Ajax-ish controls. From my home it is pretty fast. Can't be proximity as the servers are in VA. :-/ Finally - how long has IE been running? It leaks like a sieve and spending more than a few minutes playing around with one of these makes it slow down by about 2 orders of magnitude (it leaks about 4M per background request last we measured). I also think you ought to try firing up Firefox and IE 6 at the same time and try to do the same thing and see if its an improvement. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,054 by admin 2/16/06 9:35:11 PM Reply	Don't remember exactly. Men's hats. Start narrowing it down by whatever: vendor, size, color, whatever. It was all slow. It was a brand new IE session opened specifically to try it out. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,113 by admin 2/17/06 11:25:13 AM Reply	Tried it again this morning. "men's hats" Click size category: instantaneous. Click checkbox next to any size: 5-10 second response time. I showed the interface around here and to a few other people outside of work: everyone had the same comment I did: "how do I know it's doing anything?" I'd point out the "Loading" message, and comments ranged from "That's stupid" to "I never would have noticed that". Consensus is you should blank out the currently displayed products and put the loading message there. But of course, we're not a lab, we're just users. ;-) Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,116 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 11:53:20 AM Reply	Well, I should mention that we had a big animated gif we put over the middle of the stuff and people "HATED" it. I will pass along your comments though. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,134 by admin 2/17/06 12:49:06 PM Reply	Re: Well, I should mention that we had a big Bickford did some research on this: - 50% bail after 8.5 seconds without proper visual indication - switching to a watch cursor delayed the bail-out to 20 seconds - an animated cursor is good for a minute - a progress bar will keep them waiting until the second coming. Our own internal testing supports this. We've got one of those annoying animated gifs on a search page that takes a while, and we found that people dislike it, but they dislike it less than not knowing what's going on. At the very least you should consider changing the cursor. Even moving the "Loading..." message to the product area would be a big improvement. The problem is that people notice changes on the screen by movement. Small-scale changes aren't noticed unless there's a color change involved (so maybe putting your Loading message on a yellow background would be sufficient), and the subtle animated dots behind the Loading message aren't big enough and don't change quickly enough to draw the eye. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,140 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 1:05:47 PM Reply	I've seen some of that research a few problems we hit were 1) browser rendering is slooooooow (and fiddly and usually wrong besides) - so adding additional progress indication actually made your results take more than twice as long to arrive 2) gif animation stops when the JS interpreter is running scripts and during iframe loading - which made people think it had crashed 3) First impressions are one thing - but people pick up on where to look for progress indication pretty fast and then they're OK with it being less obvious. For instance, I wasn't initially too shot with Safari's use of the url field as the progress bar indicator (especially when everyone else used an animated icon in the upper right) but I got used to it pretty fast and it seems fine to me now. 4) The search api wasn't designed for this interaction model and so the backend is doing some fairly convoluted processing right now. The api is being enhanced and additional indexes are added. So - again - it will improve. But I'll speak to the designer this afternoon and see if maybe an additional indicator might not be a bad idea. Perhaps changing the bar color where the Loading... is placed to draw your eye. That would be cheap and easy. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,143 by admin 2/17/06 1:13:08 PM Reply	I don't think it's slow enough to need a progress indicator The color change would probably be sufficient. Alternatively, I've had good luck with fade effects (opacity). The apparent motion draws the eye pretty well. The trick is to make any changes to the screen gradual in some fashion so that it's still changing a split second later when you look at it. Half a second seems to be a good sweet spot -- long enough to serve as a good target, short enough not to annoy. That page uses an iFrame? Any reason for that as opposed to DOM manipulation or innerHTML? Safari's bar has the benefits of both a color change and movement. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,168 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 3:17:15 PM Reply	There are two ways to do "ajax" XMLHttpRequest or you put a hidden IFrame on the page and set its href (which populates it) then get its contents. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,186 by admin 2/17/06 5:52:08 PM Reply	Yeah, I know that. I was asking why you picked that method. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,196 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 6:28:53 PM Reply	Lots of reasons many of them historical. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,197 by admin 2/17/06 6:31:38 PM Reply	Were any of them technical? Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,224 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 8:14:11 PM Reply	Yes it is not subject to these limitations Security Issues When the XMLHttpRequest object operates within a browser, it adopts the same-domain security policies of typical JavaScript activity (sharing the same "sandbox," as it were). This has some important implications that will impact your application of this feature. First, on most browsers supporting this functionality, the page that bears scripts accessing the object needs to be retrieved via http: protocol, meaning that you won't be able to test the pages from a local hard disk (file: protocol) without some extra security issues cropping up, especially in Mozilla and IE on Windows. In fact, Mozilla requires that you wrap access to the object inside UniversalBrowserRead security privileges. IE, on the other hand, simply displays an alert to the user that a potentially unsafe activity may be going on and offers a chance to cancel. Second, the domain of the URL request destination must be the same as the one that serves up the page containing the script. This means, unfortunately, that client-side scripts cannot fetch web service data from other sources, and blend that data into a page. Everything must come from the same domain. Under these circumstances, you don't have to worry about security alerts frightening your users. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,225 by admin 2/17/06 8:16:07 PM Reply	Yeah, those don't affect us at all. We're entirely single-host (virtual, of course) based. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,231 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 8:25:05 PM Reply	So I showed you mine what's your's do? (BTW the progress indicator is being redesigned next week) "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,239 by admin 2/17/06 9:17:00 PM Reply	Re: So I showed you mine Bond trading tools. One is a market evaluation tool, the other is a specialized trading desk application for a particular type of bond. Realtime information updates coupled with AJAX techniques for displaying and manipulating orders and so forth. Regards, -scott
Post #245,247 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 10:35:02 PM Reply	Is this for a trading house or general consumption? "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,249 by admin 2/17/06 10:37:38 PM Reply	Both. At least the evaluation tool is. The other is strictly for traders. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #245,145 by admin 2/17/06 1:15:45 PM 2/17/06 1:24:38 PM Reply	Another idea: A quick pulse effect on the line item being checked would signal that something has started as well. As it is just checking the box doesn't seem to do anything if you don't notice the loading. Visual feedback that you've started an operation as opposed to just changing local state is very important. The only reason I didn't go looking for an "Update" button was that you'd said it was AJAX. :-) I have a big AJAX application that's going into production next week here to which I added fade effects and so on; at first people laughed and thought it was just a ridiculous developer video game mentality, but then they started to realize the importance of change indication. Additionally, gradual changes are much less jarring to the user that simply inserting or removing rows and the like. We have another app in development that doesn't do that, and the difference is quite apparent. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..." Edited by admin Feb. 17, 2006, 01:24:38 PM EST Expand All History
Post #245,214 by ben_tilly 2/17/06 7:40:56 PM Reply	ICLRPD - a progress bar will keep them waiting until the second coming. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #245,119 by Another Scott 2/17/06 12:01:25 PM Reply	It's only a second or so here, but I am in VA. I'm still not getting the way it's filtering stuff though. Searching "men's hats" -> Showing 1 - 24 of 12319 Results Click "Special Sizes" -> Showing 1 - 24 of 12319 Results Click "Big and Tall (10)" -> Showing 10 Results Of those 10 results, 6 are shirts, 1 is a fleece stocking cap, 1 is a fleece ballcap, and 1 is a "trucker's cap". On the other hand, if I go to say [link\|http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/common/search/search-results1.jsp?Ntk=Products&QueryText=men%27s+hats&_D%3AhasJS=+&Go.y=0&Nty=1&hasJS=true&No=0&Ntt=men%27s+hats&noImage=0&Ntx=matchall&N=4887&_DARGS=%2Fcabelas%2Fen%2Fcommon%2Fsearch%2Fsearch-box.jsp.22&Go.x=0\|Cabelas] and search for "men's hats" I get 4 pages, 71 items and they're all hats. If I go to [link\|http://www.llbean.com/webapp/wcs/stores/search?langId=-1&searchTerms=men%27s+hats&startRec=1&numWanted=5000&loggedIn=0&page_type=null&hotBG=0\|LL Bean] I get 3 groupings of results of 38 total items, the vast majority of them being - wait for it - men's hats. I don't think the UI is the major problem with your new toy. I think the logic behind it needs to be cleaned up substantially. If I have entered a fairly restrictive search like "men's hats", I don't want to look through T shirts or 12,319 items to find what I'm looking for. It's great to be able to drill down in "men's hats" to find hats that fit a big head. But a T-shirt isn't a hat. Categories that don't work right are going to frustrate your users and have them go somewhere else. Don't try to be more clever than your users. HTH. Cheers, Scott.
Post #245,131 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 12:46:58 PM Reply	Its actually data quality and it will improve. Some of it is the fault of the merchants. For instance, for a certain manufacturer we found capitalized, all lower case, all caps, caps ending in TM caps ending in R (as in Registered), and all variations of these you can imagine. I still think its way better than what we had before and as data quality improves its gonna rock. Thanks for the feedback though. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,138 by drewk 2/17/06 1:01:51 PM Reply	Firefox? You said Windows/IE only in the first post === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #245,167 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 3:14:01 PM Reply	I meant compare experiences - is this better or not? FF still shows the old experience (for now) "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,172 by drewk 2/17/06 3:23:12 PM Reply	Ah, got it In reference to Scott's observations, though -- and I don't have IE on this box, so haven't seen the new interface yet -- even if the new version is better, if it looks like it's not doing anything it could be perceived as worse. I've seen pages that used javascript to do things faster than hitting the server. The total time to complete the activity was shorter, but because the cursor didn't change to the hourglass people thought there was a delay before anything started happening. We used javascript to change the cursor shape to the hourglass and the perception completely changed. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #245,174 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 3:32:40 PM Reply	Yeah, that's the timing tuning I was talking about sounds like we've got a few more tweaks to make. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,891 by pwhysall 2/16/06 2:55:26 AM Reply	Slick as snot here 3.4GHz P4/1G RAM, XPSP2 I likes. Peter [link\|http://www.no2id.net/\|Don't Let The Terrorists Win] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home] Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
Post #244,784 by Another Scott 2/15/06 6:30:06 PM Reply	I don't quite understand the way it's categorized... If I search for "blue dress", why does it put up these Categories on the left "Narrow Your Results" heading: > Women (3170) > Kids & Baby (480) > Men (1083) > Accessories (1206) > Shoes (2405) while it shows 1-24 of 5744 results on the right. If I'm looking for a blue dress, why does Men, Accessories, and Shoes show up? I guess I don't see the logic in it. I can see having a "You might also be interested in ..." link for Shoes, etc., once I find the blue dress I'm interested in, but this early in the search it just adds clutter, IMO. It looks like it's got potential though. :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #244,785 by tuberculosis 2/15/06 6:50:50 PM Reply	There is some overlap I mean, an obvious first question I'd have would be why are there men's blue dresses? We're broad minded but not that broad minded. However, you'll find that choosing "mens" (try it) shows you a large number of blue dress shirts. Not so wacky after all. It may turn out that you only like Armani stuff, open brands and choose that. Then numbers are counts of matches if you were to add that term. So in our example, you'll see that Armani doesn't seem to make any blue dress pants (there's a zero by it and the link is disabled). This has exposed a number of data quality issues like never before. This will improve over time and for buying complicated stuff like computers, electronics, and so on, this is gonna be the bomb. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,823 by drewk 2/15/06 9:13:12 PM Reply	About time It's apparently taken longer than you [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=205086\|first thought] to make this work. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #244,874 by tuberculosis 2/16/06 1:03:02 AM Reply	You know what took forever? We had great up front specs - good mockups - solid description of interaction models - some of the most complete specs I've ever seen. However, its take so long to get the "feel" right. The little bits of timing and transitions you can't really capture in a paper specification (or even prototype). Learned a lot there "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,913 by drewk 2/16/06 9:12:29 AM Reply	Gee, I guessed wrong I thought for sure you were going to say, "Making it work in IE6." === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #244,930 by jbrabeck 2/16/06 10:33:11 AM Reply	That's a given A good friend will come and bail you out of jail ... but, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "Damn...that was fun!"
Post #245,117 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 11:54:57 AM Reply	That also added significant time there is some astonishingly elaborate code to make the back button in IE work the way people expect it to (most of the time). That was a month all by itself. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #245,062 by boxley 2/16/06 10:11:10 PM Reply	well scrutinzer doesnt like blue dresses [link\|http://www.blackbagops.net/seaside/html?_k=jLwmMFgw&_s=OQOiIcgWMcTtqjaO\|http://www.blackbago...=OQOiIcgWMcTtqjaO] Error Type\tOccurrences Structural Errors\t6 Attribute Errors\t237 Other Html Errors\t2 CSS Errors\t251 nice recovery from blew dress though, thanx, bill Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #245,133 by tuberculosis 2/17/06 12:47:51 PM Reply	scrutinizer doesn't like almost that whole domain :-) That's kind of why I wrote it - to make a point to some people. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush

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