Designing a website, or a User Interface for a program is hard work. One has to study people and their often hard to predict and difficult to quantity decision making processes.
For instance, google.com shows a clear knowledge that user’s get distracted by anything other than the task at hand if presented with multiple options. Thus their site has one main focus… a search bar. They, are are after all, a search company.
But what if User Interface designers, and website designers started to pay attention to the actual math behind user interactions? Like living organisms, what if the website or user interface adapted to the user? For instance, if the website knew that people browsing on cloudy days liked a more cheerful design why wouldn’t it brighten up the background?
Or perhaps in Yahoo’s case why not reorder the sidebar links in order of most clicked on? What about Yahoo’s search bar? Might that feature become larger and more prominent?
Why aren’t websites and Program designers doing this already? They may be, but the sheer volume and dynamism of large user bases makes it a very difficult and ever changing job.
I suggest that website and User Interface designers move to a design framework which includes the ability for the site or program to collect user statistics, and then reorganize itself according to some preset rules. Flex, Flash, php, python and a host of other programming languages could all support these features really easily. And if you can’t think of a better optimization algorithm, simply allow the user interactions with the site to be a sort of genetic algorithm.
While it’s not a perfect analogy… it’s pretty good. What’s your favorite analogy for constrained optimization?