As StumbleUpon makes these changes, one of the things they’ve begun to emphasize is the iframe at the top of the browser window that you use to navigate through pages as well as build up your profile so that StumbleUpon can optimize the quality of the content it funnels to you. In fact, they’ve relegated all of your activity through the iframe and guess what: you don’t have an option to remove the iframe.

If you’ve been using StumbleUpon for a while – at least before the big changes started to roll out last year – another of the things that may be apparent to you is the removal of any link that sends you back to the content sources. Unless you choose to log out and then view the site, you’re going to view the content through StumbleUpon whether you like it or not.

Brent Csutoras, writing for SearchEngineLand, noted the lack of controversy within the tech industry concerning this change. “When Digg did the same thing by launching their DiggBar,” he wrote, “the tech industry was up in arms and the DiggBar even had an option to close” – an option not available here with StumbleUpon’s new change.

At any rate, StumbleUpon’s giving you a little less flexibility when it comes to opting out of viewing content through their filter. Have the changes affected how you use StumbleUpon at all? Did you even notice? Let us know in the comments section below.

This trend has publishers scrambling to design media that is friendly to readers where traditional web content has focused on videos, interactive graphs, and podcasts. Part of that design will be aesthetic but there is more to it than that.

Imagine tablet news as a source that is continually upgraded right in front of your eyes. All related products and events can appear on your screen.

Mario Garcia has spent over forty years designing newspaper layouts and scrutinizing ways to make things more appealing and now he is faced with the new challenge of tablet computers.

“The tablet is a very unique medium, and you simply do not dump content from the newspaper into it,” says Garcia.

He continues,”Print is designed for the brain and the eye – the tablet is designed for the brain, eye and finger.”

For Garcia it more than just aesthetic design, its about the psychology of the user and creating an experience on the tablet that other mediums don’t provide.

He explains, “People expect more of a relaxing experience there, but every time we go for a total lean-back experience, we discover that people also want to lean forward, for news updates before bed, or whenever they want to get that last update of the day”.

When asked about who he thinks is getting it right with tablet computer editions of news he says The Orange County (Calif.) Register has got his vote. In magazines he claims that Readers Digest has really caught his attention.

It will be interesting to see how tablets continue to change the way we read, dicepher information, and subscribe to periodicals. It’s something I haven’t given much thought to until now.

The doodle was created by artist Faith Ringgold. Here’s the bio she uses on her site:

Faith Ringgold, began her artistic career more than 35 years ago as a painter. Today, she is best known for her painted story quilts — art that combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling. She has exhibited in major museums in the USA, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Her first book,Tar Beach was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration, among numerous other honors. She has written and illustrated eleven children’s books. She has received more than 75 awards, fellowships, citations and honors, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship for painting, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards and seventeen honorary doctorates, one of which is from her alma mater The City College of New York.

Faith Ringgold is married to Burdette Ringgold and has two daughters, Michele and Barbara Wallace; and three granddaughters, Faith, Theodora and Martha. She is a professor of art at the University of California in San Diego, California.

Here’s what Google’s doodle for the day looked like last year:

What do you think of the new doodle? Which do you like better?

Christian Robertson, who leads the Android Visual Design group wrote on the Android Developers Blog:

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is our biggest redesign yet — both for users and developers. We’ve enhanced the UI framework with new interactions and styles that will let you create Android apps that are simpler and more beautiful than ever before.

To help you in that mission, we’re introducing Android Design: the place to learn about principles, building blocks, and patterns for creating world-class Android user interfaces. Whether you’re a UI professional or a developer playing that role, these docs show you how to make good design decisions, big and small.

The site outlines Android’s “creative vision,” design principles, and UI overview, and has sections on style, patterns and building blocks.

Google asks designers to consider three main goals:

Enchant me
Beauty is more than skin deep. Android apps are sleek and aesthetically pleasing on multiple levels. Transitions are fast and clear; layout and typography are crisp and meaningful. App icons are works of art in their own right. Just like a well-made tool, your app should strive to combine beauty, simplicity and purpose to create a magical experience that is effortless and powerful.

Make me amazing
It’s not enough to make an app that is easy to use. Android apps empower people to try new things and to use apps in inventive new ways. Android lets people combine applications into new workflows through multitasking, notifications, and sharing across apps. At the same time, your app should feel personal, giving people access to superb technology with clarity and grace.

How do the apps you use stack up in these three categories?

Adobe Edge Preview is the company’s HTML5 animation tool, and the new version will of course come with new features. The video shows off a bit, including: symbols, clipping, support for web fonts, etc.

Users who have downloaded Adobe Edge Preview 3 before December 14 will find the product expires on December 31. An updated version, 3.1, is available, which extends the expiration date until 4 comes out in January.

While I’d certainly encourage you to read the post in its entirety, there’s a section specifically about “simple” testing, and this is basically a set of tips that pretty much anyone can do. Google’s tips for this are as follows:

• Sample size: Just five people can be a large enough number of users to find common problems in your layouts and navigation (see Jakob Nielsen’s article on why using a small sample size is sufficient).
• Choosing your testers: A range of different technical ability can be useful, but be sure to only focus on trends—for example, if more than 50% of your testers have the same usability issue, it’s likely a real problem—rather than individual issues encountered.
• Testing location: If possible, visit the user in their home and watch how they use the site—observe how he/she normally navigates the web when relaxed and in their natural environment. Remote testing is also a possibility if you can’t make it in person—we’ve heard that Google+ hangouts can be used effectively for this (find out more about using Google+ hangouts).
• How to test: Based on your site’s goals, define 4 or 5 simple tasks to do on your website, and let the user try to complete the tasks. Ask your testers to speak aloud so you can better understand their experiences and thought processes.
• What to test: Basic prototypes in clickable image or document format (for example, PDF) or HTML can be used to test the basic interactions, without having to build out a full site for testing. This way, you can test out different options for navigation and layouts to see how they perform before implementing them.
• What not to test: Focus on functionality rather than graphic design elements; viewpoints are often subjective. You would only get useful feedback on design from quantitative testing with large (200+) numbers of users (unless, for example, the colors you use on your site make the content unreadable, which would be good feedback!). One format for getting some useful feedback on the design can be to offer 5-6 descriptive keywords and ask your user to choose the most representative ones.

Google calls this simple testing the most useful for actually seeing how your site’s fucntionality is working.

Indeed, fresh perspectives that aren’t so close to the site can be incredibly useful.

The post has various other tips worth considering.

Keep in mind that Google is all about user experience, and considers this stuff greatly in search rankings.

and like this:

or maybe ads that were directing you to visit a business’ YouTube page, like this:

It’s a pretty easy and inexpensive way to get people to hop over to your site when they’re already killing an hour checking out friends’ updates on Facebook or watching the latest viral videos on YouTube. Now, with the new-new Twitter redesign that rolled out yesterday, they’re hoping that businesses will begin to utilize their Twitter profile pages in a similar way.

In making their interface easier to navigate and visually more appealing, Twitter is making a push for businesses to direct consumers to their brand pages in what is pretty clearly a siege on an area of marketing that has previously been exclusively Facebook territory. In a new blog post released yesterday to accompany the new design launch, Twitter is now allowing corporate accounts to promote tweets to the top of their page (a pretty savvy way to push a promotion by a business) as well as track the number of retweets of a post. More from their blog post:

You can also control the message visitors see when they first come to your profile page by promoting a Tweet to the top of your page’s timeline. This Tweet helps you highlight your most engaging and important content and better connect with your target audience. The Promoted Tweet on your profile page will appear auto-expanded so that visitors to your page can instantly see the photo or video content that you link to from your Tweet.

Twitter has also quickly gained the upper hand over Facebook in the aesthetic department. In a quick comparison, which McDonalds page is more likely to catch your attention:

Immediately, the McDonalds Twitter page is more engaging and, really, makes the McDonalds page look like an Angelfire website. Granted, McDonalds Facebook followers (nearly 12 million) easily dwarfs the amount of followers that the McDonalds Twitter page has (a paltry 195K). Facebook’s simply been at this social media marketing game much longer and, white bread design or not, basically wrote the rules on how to market via social media. New-new Twitter may very well entice company brands to use their site primarily, but for now it’s got some serious campaigning to do in order to really convince businesses to jump ship from the massive accessibility of Facebook.

As of right now, Facebook can practically operate as a company’s primary webpage with all of the capability it offers and that’s a big draw for businesses. However, Twitter’s new design will allow businesses to post rich media that can be played within the stream of tweets. It remains to be seen how well this can be applied or if it can even match the apps that can be developed for companies to employ on their Facebook page.

You’ll notice I haven’t included any comparisons of Google+ in this competition for corporate activity and marketing because, well… is anybody really seriously using Google+ yet?

While Facebook’s utilities far out-class Twitter’s offerings, the design of Twitter is a really strong selling point. People like clean, shiny things and can be easily lead astray with such pretty attractions. It’ll be interesting if Facebook will up the ante in 2012 and begin offering businesses more design opportunities for their company brand page or if they’ll remain steadfast in their aesthetic uniformity.

The new layout contains a sort-of dashboard-like bar on the left. This area sports all of your subscriptions, as well as suggested channels and the ability to look at popular and trending videos across all of YouTube.

One of the best things about this new setup is that when you click on a specific channel, its video stream pops up in the middle column. There’s no navigation away from the homepage until you click on a video.

Clicking to “add channels” opens up a new channel directory, where you can easily subscribe to channels based on category. These subscriptions will appear on your homepage subscription feed. It appears as though the channel uploads will be displayed by the time of the upload, with option to expand the time frame to include more videos on the feed.

Another element of that dashboard is all the social stuff. As you can see, Google+ is front and center. Videos posted by people you follow on Google+ are incorporated into the new subscriptions stream, a feature that we hinted at last week. There is also the option to quickly connect to other networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can go into your sharing options to choose what kind of seamless sharing you will allow between YouTube various social sites. “Activity Sharing” can include letting Facebook or Twitter know when you like a video, comment on a video, subscribe to a channel and more.

If you want to see the new YouTube homepage, you’ll have to do a little work yourself. Open up YouTube and if you’re using Chrome, press ctrl+shift+j to open developers tools. If you’re using Firefox, hit ctrl+shift+k. Enter document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”; and press enter. Hard reload the page. It should now be in the test layout.

If you want to go back to the old YouTube, open your browser’s cookie manager, search for youtube.com and delete the VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie, says Google Operating System.

Have you looked at the new layout? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

What is acceptable to have above content on a page? Tell us what you think.

As we discuss this, it’s important to keep in mind that as of right now, this is something Google is testing. There hasn’t actually been an update roll-out of this nature to my knowledge, so the effects would not necessarily have been felt by “infringing” sites yet, but from the sound of it, it’s coming.

As far as what actually happens in terms of fallout, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but this is still something site owners and webmasters should be thinking about and possibly preparing for.

Now, this concept of ad-to-content ratio is not new, and it has in fact been a topic of discussion surrounding the controversial Panda update (which Google calls “a positive change across all of its known measurements,” by the way). In fact, following the Panda update, Google (Singhal himself actually) came out with a list of questions that “step into Google’s mindset,” as to how they’re looking at the issue of quality.

On that list is: “Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

At PubCon, Cutts is quoted as saying, “If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it…Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?” and that they’re testing algorithms that determine ”what are the things that really matter, how much content is above the fold.”

Now that part about “what are the things that really matter” could certainly apply to things beyond ads, and this in itself raises a lot of questions.

Here are some questions the whole discussion raises. Some of the answers may become clearer in time, and others webmasters will no doubt be left to speculate upon (feel free to contribute your thoughts in the comments).

Questions:

- Is “above the fold” determined solely by sizes elements of the design?

Screen size has an influence on this. Google did say that mobile (along with social) is the future. It’s certainly going to be a good idea (as it already is) to keep the small screen in mind.

- Is Google going to specifically look at the size of ads above the fold?

Look at EzineArticles, for example (one of the sites negatively impacted by the Panda update – granted, they’ve taken numerous steps to improve as a result). This article page has 7 ads above the actual content (the body). The top ones are very small in terms of space – just a few pieces of text. Even the ones that appear below the title aren’t enormous by ad standards, and technically are smaller than the 750-wide ad standard, but are they distracting to the content?

eHow is probably in better shape on the ad side of things (Demand Media also noted in on their earnings call the other day, by the way, that they were not impacted by Google’s recent “Freshness” update).

- Is Google looking at things like spacing above the fold?

If not, AdSense ads could be most heavily impacted by this, because of the small formats.

- If this is taken into account, how will it be impacted by mouseover pull-downs and things of this nature?

- Will Google run into false positives based on pull down menus and things (javascript, ajax, etc.) – on the page, counted as content above the fold?

Granted, Google says it is getting smarter at understanding the content on the page in this regard. But how smart?

- Will large images above the text hurt you, or is this counted as the content?

For example, many of our article pages will use a relevant image above the article. It’s just one of our templates that we’ve worked into our design:

- In a case like this, do headlines need to appear above the image?

– Will all of this effectively enable Google to really determine webmasters’ sites’ designs to some extent?

It can be very hard for a business to thrive online and not be visible in Google, so businesses will (and already do sometimes, for that matter) feel obligated to make sure their design is pleasing enough to Google to avoid being lost in the search results.

- Will webmasters bow down to everything google ever says?

Please feel free to weigh in on any of these, and share what you think of the direction Google is headed in, in the comments section.

Top image credit: Mike Souza (via Flickr).

Specifically, it’s Matt’s response to a user question:

“How does Google determine page speed? In GWT some pages are listed as very slow (8+ seconds). But I have tested on older computers/browsers and they do not take anywhere near that long to load. Why might Google show such high numbers?”

“The fact is we’re looking at using toolbar data, and that’s using toolbar data only from people who have opted in. But that’s looking at real world load times from people for example, in the United States, we might say, how long does it take to load this particular page?” says Cutts. “And so if we’re looking at that, and it takes a long time, sometimes it’s not necessarily your site. It could be the network connectivity. But it’s a good thing to bear in mind.”

“It’s coming from all these different users, who can have dial-up lines,” he says. “They can have slow connections. And so a lot of times, people say, I’m just going to throw a 500 kilobyte page out there, and they forget there are a lot of people with slower connectivity. So that data is based primarily on toolbar data.”

“And we’re looking at what it looks like for real users,” he continues. “And do if you’ve got a lot of users who are having a slow experience, then that can affect the overall rating. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that only something like one out of 100 searches is site speed such a factor that it would actually change the rankings to a noticeable degree.”

“So that’s something on the order of one in 1,000 sites have truly site speed as a really big issue for them,” he says. “It’s always good to see if you can move a little bit faster and try to return results to users a little bit faster. It makes your website experience more fluid. It makes your users happier. There are studies that say the return on investment is definitely worth it. But at the same time, I wouldn’t stress overly about it.”

Cutts is speaking at PubCon tomorrow morning with Google Fellow Amit Singhal in a session called “Hot Google Topics & Trends.” It should be interesting to see what these two Google search guys have to say.

Cutts also tweeted out a picture of gummy pandas:

Note: The image at the top is from Matt’s personal blog, chronicling his moustache adventures for Movember. That’s from last week. Daune Forrester (Bing’s counterpart to Matt Cutts) told me at BlogWorld his moustache isn’t coming along so well. I believe he likened himself to a Spanish cop.