Usability Issues. The Tooltip. The YouTube Movie.
It is my believe that users are looking for simple, though useful applications. Although my recommendation engine was providing users with suggestions in terms of music, movies and books, they had to perform the time-consuming operation of looking up on Google or specialized entertainment websites each and every one of these suggested resources in order to find out more about them.
Users should be able to easily find out more about Emmy’s suggestions, so, to simplify this process, I came up with the tooltip idea: A small “?”-shaped icon near each suggestion, that, upon mouse-over, triggers a tool-tip that displays information about that particular item.
I wrote a script that grabs information about bands and movies from Wikipedia, but I still have to validate each and every one of these teasers due to some non-standard issues that lead to grabbing the wrong articles every once in a while. I started with the most popular resources, and as for today, Emmy know about a couple of thousand items.
After a while, I thought that this can be furthered improved by presenting the user with a YouTube video regarding each resource. A song for music, a movie trailer for movies.
This way, he or she can now make a first impression about every one of Emmy’s suggestions, without having to perform a single click.
I still have some further improvements for the preview tooltip on my todo list, like a mechanism for preventing “no longer available” movies to appear.
Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 11th, 2008.
