Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at Greek, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, several Google properties and we have an bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.

Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

For the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. It showed that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task: finding relevant information.

In addition to search research, we also use eye-tracking to study the usability of other products, such as Google News and Image Search. For these products, eye-tracking helps us answer questions, such as "Is the 'Top Stories' link discoverable on the left of the Google News page?" or "How do the users typically scan the image results — in rows, in columns or in some other way?"

Eye-tracking gives us valuable information about our users' focus of attention — information that would be very hard to come by any other way and that we can use to improve the design of our products. However, in our ongoing quest to make our products more useful, usable, and enjoyable, we always complement our eye-tracking studies with other methods, such as interviews, live experiments.

Posted by Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden, User Experience Researchers