Ask.com Turns Up the Heat
by Paula Thornton
“The heat is on, on the street…”. The Glenn Frey hit song came into my head this morning as I saw 2.0 in action in an ask.com network TV commercial. They’re leveraging 2.0 features as a differentiator against the competiton, with middle America!
Of course, the association to a music track was incited by the commercial itself because they showed how the results interface displayed and recommended an audio clip that was immediately available to launch. But in the commercial there was a 3rd column that was decidedly missing in my test below.
A quick self test reveals the following 2.0 features:
- auto-recommender in the entry field
- a cleaner interface in general, including a results page that moves the entry box to the left, equi-distance to the top of the screen with the results (take a hint FAST)
- results lines that can be ’saved’
What I didn’t see was the balloon pop-ups (that we typically reference netflix.com for their product roll-overs as an example) that were displayed in the commercial [I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one — the Friends and Family commercials hit the airwaves just a few weeks after the IT group at MCI had been contacted to ‘consider’ the realm of changes that had to be put in place to support it].
I’d want to then see an assessment from my industry colleague Derek Featherstone (whose name didn’t come up in the auto-recommender!) as to how accessible all of these features are. 2.0 features are not inherently inaccessible — their creators simply have to be designing for accessibility from the start. Leaving the question unanswered, “Did Ask.com go the full design distance in their quest for differentiation?”
Thanks for pointing it out, Paula!
