Last year we started a pilot of Google Phone Search where users from Hyderabad and Delhi could call a toll free number and search for local businesses or movie showtimes. We believe that speech recognition and voice access to information is a very important technology for India because it helps us reach users who may not have access to PC or are on the move all the time.
Starting today, users in Mumbai and Bangalore can also call the same toll free number 1-800-41-999-999 at no cost from any phone to search for local business and movie showtimes and get the results by SMS. For example, if you are looking for pizza delivery businesses you can call and say "pizza" and your area name (like Bandra in Mumbai or MG road in Bangalore) to get listings near you.
We are continuously working towards improving our speech recognition technology but it is still not perfect and it may not recognize you at times. We will transfer your call to an operator after 2 recognition failures who can assist you with your query.
So go ahead and try Google Phone Search for free and send us your feedback on how we can serve you better.
Tip: Add 1-800-41-999-999 to your phone book today!
As discussed in the first blogpost in this series, there are several steps involved and issues to keep in mind while designing mobile-friendly websites. One should always start with the user, and that's what we do here - in this post, we look at how to design the user experience for a mobile-friendly site.
Its a different world / Know thy user
A mobile user is completely different from someone who accesses information from a desktop. A mobile user wants to check email in a bus, view friends' photographs waiting in a line, wants to find out stock quotes any time anywhere and is looking for help when lost in an unknown place. A mobile phone too is completely different from a PC - it does not have a large monitor, completely usable keyboard and a fast broadband connection like a PC.
Fig 1:The world of mobile phones is very diverse
Screen-size makes or breaks the experience
As mentioned earlier size of the screen and the keyboard are one of the biggest constraints to be kept in mind while designing websites for a mobile phone. Do not make the website for just one screen size and one kind of keyboard. Make it generic or carefully choose a handful of common target screen sizes ofyourusers. The screen size on mobile phones today ranges from 176x208 to 320x480. Add to this different dpi ,orientation and browsers and it makes the world of mobile devices very diverse. But here's the bright side: a mobile phone user normally only wants to do the one or two things frequently on your website. Keep the primary features and information in mind and make it very easy for the user to discover them and use them.
Fig 2: The most common screen sizes and orientations
Typing is painful
Don't make the users type a lot because even on the smartest of phones typing is not as easy as on a desktop. Make the site more click based. If the primary use cases demand keyboard input from the user, give auto suggest as the user types and have incremental search for items wherever possible. Up & down is better than sideways
Keep the site contents as vertical as possible. Expanding the site horizontally results in bad user experience while scrolling back and forth. Also some older phones only allow vertical scrolling. Also repeating the header contents in the bottom of the page is a good idea since it makes it easier for the user to switch to a different use case instantly without scrolling a lot.
GPRS is slow, unsteady and costly
In terms of quality and cost to the user, GPRS has a lot to catch up in comparison to the normal broadband internet connections. Unlimited data connections are still not available everywhere. 3G networks are still a dream for many countries. And many of the cheaper data plans have high loss rate and exceptionally high latencies for SSL connections. Keeping all these considerations in mind, the website should not have too many images and data. It should maintain the right balance between richness and latency depending on which device the user is using.
Having thought about user experience, we're now in a position to explore technologies that will help implement our design. In subsequent posts, we'll look at mobile markup languages, compression & transcoding, and javascript & ajax among other technologies that will enable us to build the user experience we've designed.
Posted By: Chunky Gupta, Software Engineer & Ram Brijesh, User Experience Expert, Google
How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to? It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives, and it's precisely the question you can now answer using Google Latitude.
Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather.
And with Latitude, not only can you see your friends' locations on a map, but you can also be in touch directly via SMS, Google Talk, Gmail, or by updating your status message; you can even upload a new profile photo on the fly. It's a fun way to feel close to the people you care about.
Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application. Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see. For instance, let's say you are in Rome. Instead of having your approximate location detected and shared automatically, you can manually set your location for elsewhere — perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls . Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis. So for each person, you can choose to share your best available location or your city-level location, or you can hide. Everything is under your control and, of course, you can sign out of Latitude at any time. Check out this video to learn more about the privacy features.
Finally, since we'd like you to be able to use Latitude with any of your friends, we've been working hard to make it available to as many people as possible. Today, Latitude is available in 27 countries, and we hope to add more soon.
Ready to share your location? If you have a mobile smartphone, visit google.com/latitude on your phone's web browser to download the latest version of Google Maps for mobile with Latitude. Latitude is available on Blackberry, S60, and Windows Mobile, and will be available on Android in the next few days. We expect it will be coming to the iPhone, through Google Mobile App, very soon.
No smartphone? No worries. Visit google.com/latitude on your desktop or laptop to install the Latitude iGoogle gadget and share your location right from your computer. If you have Google Gears installed in your browser (you do by default if you use Google Chrome), you can automatically share your location; otherwise, manually set your location to let your friends know where you are.
Visit the Google Mobile blog for more details, and check out the video below to see Latitude in action.
Posted by Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google mobile team
