Random thought... the ability to meaningfully interact with an information source is becoming a must-have for users. It's not just offering tons of features and lots of power that will keep an IP profitable; it's understanding that you don't know how your users are going to use your service. Let go. Be Zen. Relax. You'll actually gain all kinds of insights by imagining yourself as an anthropologist. Put your clients subjects in an information-rich environment and watch how they creatively use the tools they have.
I was playing around with Google Maps' directions feature and finally realized that I could drag any portion of the route to another spot by just dragging the route. I discovered it because Google Maps always routes me through the nearest town, even though I know it's faster to go another way. In a moment of frustration -- mostly, just acting out what I wished that Google could do -- I moved my mouse over the route and suddenly realized, OMG, it's moving the route!
Now I can use it as a way to plan out a series of errands on a map, by simply dragging the route to each location I need to stop at. I'm sure that most of you do this naturally in your head. I am, um, directionally challenged. I could get lost walking from here to the corner. Having a map with the entire route thought through, mapped out and printed off makes my errand-running a lot smoother.
The iPhone is another great example of giving users lots of opportunities to think for themselves in how they navigate through and use the various applications. Want to turn the display 90 degrees? OK! Expand this area? Sure. The philosophy is to let users interact as much as possible with the resource or tool.
So, I guess I'm thinking about how there is added value in an information provider offering less structure and allowing more input (i.e., work) by the user. We usually expect to see more templates, more fields to search, and so on, but all of these require users to act and think in a certain way. What if they want to query in a different way? What if they want to show which terms to emphasize by visually highlighting them (see SearchCloud.net)?
I'm not sure if a user panel would ever volunteer "hey, let us do all the noodling around ourselves; we don't really want those navigational tools"; this is one of those features that has immediately obvious value but isn't something users articulate as a need.
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