// PRELIMINARY RESEARCH

I’ve read and written so much on browsing behaviour that I feel as though I could write a dissertation. Parallel Browsing Behaviour & Modeling (tab browsing), Horizontal & Vertical Search (search engine use), and how all of these are influenced by mobile & social networks just to name a “PEW” (bad Pew Research Center dad joke).

STATISTICAL MEAT AND POTATOES

In plain english, my research focused on how people browsed the web, how tab browsing was more prevalent to certain younger demographics, how the majority of search engine traffic is refinding the same information over and over (figure below), and how search behaviour is shifting away from traditional search engines. For example within Amazon (vertical search), as opposed to Googling a product followed by the term “amazon” (horizontal). There is so much more to mention but these are but a taste of data delved into.

These may not sound mind blowing but if you see how they intersect in the rhizome they paint an insightful picture of opportunity.

VISUAL-SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE

Spatial intelligence in design is one of the most fascinating fields of study in psychology and an indispensable tool to a designer. Human computational capacity and how we operate as an organic machine dictate many design principles, even if the designers themselves are not aware. Instead of explaining too much, I thought it be better to walk you through an example and how it pertained to Uhber.

Images bridge the gap between data and comprehension. Reading is, after all, simply symbol recognition. With Uhber, this only cemented our design theories.

Note: This is all data from 2008-2012 and before Instagram overtook Twitter in engagement. 

FIRST HAND STUDY

I conducted my own modest research to further corroborate or disprove my initial theories about how people use the web and browse. I canvassed roughly 28 individuals who owned and used more than 1 computer, rejected the default browser of their chosen OS, and browsed the web exclusively using tabs, among other technically savvy characteristics. The most interesting characteristic I found among these “power users” of the web that were not mentioned in any studies was the use of the browser's bookmark bar. All of these users used the bookmark bar below the web address field and due to the limited space would edit the bookmarks to have no names leaving only the favicon to act as a button in which these users would springboard into new tabs.

Many of those in the study even used firefox's built in dividers and would painstakingly organize these favicon “buttons” by categories of their own choosing. When asked how they knew what was what they said they had placed them there, only furthering my previous findings about our spatial intelligence and muscle memory in a digital space. When labels were used the users only opted for single letter, symbol, or the order in appearance to differentiate duplicate favicons with two separate destination inside a given website (ie. digg.com’s homepages and digg.com’s images only would have two urls but the favicon for each bookmark button would look the same.)

BUSINESS PLAN

It would have been ideal to tinker away within a vacuum to focus predominantly on design & product related research, but seldom is anything so binary.

The upside to this research was that it was done alongside Katie. Extensive time and research was put into competition, concerns, demand, financial plans, future plans, industry behaviour, marketing / promotion, and of course everyone's favourite - monetization. These are but the tops of an organization tree with deep subsets of modeling, excel pages, and documents.

(the Google Drive is still alive and kicking should anyone want to see to what extent of merit behind these claims. The same can be said of our Business Plan doc.)

// PROTOTYPING

INSPIRATION

At the time I was heavily influenced by Web 2.0 design (before Facebook timeline), it was the height of digg.com, and the heyday of Diggnation on Revision3. I often kept a collection or complete save of webpages, screenshots, and detailed notes. Twitter Bootstrap (Ruby on Rails) was the biggest jump in web apps and most of the great design worked within the framework -- Uhber was to be no exception.

SKETCHING

Initial sketching began crudely as a series of window marker drawings on an arcade cabinet, progressing into duct tape and bubblegum photoshop wireframes, and eventually blossomed into cohesive blueprints.

VISUAL DESIGN

With the structure of the website solidified, I began by pulling a colour pallet from the JAWS poster (my favourite movie). I then proceeded to the logo, scouring for a look and feel to the font. I leaned on a few friends here and they suggested a font I still love - Haptic.

In an effort to distinguish Uhber from the rest of the web, and to embody a sense of adventure while remaining true to the JAWS origin, I thought of the page as a beach. All great adventures land on a beach and all colours look great set against an ocean. No ocean is an even single colour so I opted for a repeated noise background with everything floating atop.

Favicons were typically no larger than 16px by 16px at the time. I personally love grids and divided up everything accordingly. I tried to incorporate inspiration from my favourite websites of the time but the most important rule of Uhber’s design was “everything at a glance”. There must be no diving, only scanning of your virtual horizon, and an embodied desktop view for bookmarks instead of applications.

// LOOKING FORWARD

Money talks and, like many startups, we couldn’t justify the cost. Looking back we moved along to our second phase of development too quickly, trying to implement Elasticsearch (open source search & analytics) for the search engine portion we were so excited about. After being passed over by Y-Combinator we thought we could make up for the opportunity loss by chasing revenue, but our inexperience cost us everything. It was an amazing learning experience for all of us; it was immensely fun, stressful, and challenging. Even though we may have crashed and burned, that experience has taught me that I am tempered metal.