For a moment, think about the multi-touch screen from the iPhone and the wand movement of the Nintendo Wii. Then, layer on facial recognition technology, electrical activity in the brain, etc. We’ve had the touchpads from laptops and that funny little eraser-head thing in the middle of keyboards for a while. We’ve also had fun with the webcam feature that lets you put animated hats, masks, etc. on people in real-time in video. All of these things are either here or close to here in some way or another and we are on the cusp of all of it coming together whether it be in Windows 7, or otherwise.

Right now in our industry, we depend on a mouse for a lot. We, at times (and should more than we do), make accommodations for ADA compliance, but, for the most part, we rely on a user’s mouse (and only one of the available buttons) to help them navigate what we produce. Our jobs are about to change; usability and creativity is about to jump to a whole new level. Are we ready to make this leap? Are we ready to accomodate for the next generation of navigation? Imagine all the new fun we can have when users are flipping away at our sites and applications as Tom Cruise did in the Minority Report. It’s an interesting time to be us.

The other day I dreamed up a simple backyard project I wanted to do. I went to the Web site of a popular national home/garden supply store (you know who) to get the answer to a seemingly simple question: “How much do 8” x 8” x 16” concrete blocks cost?”

I happen to know this company sells concrete blocks, because I see them in warehouses when I visit the stores, but “Do you sell them?” might be a question some site visitors would have, too.

So I entered “concrete block” in the search field, and clicked the button. This is the online equivalent of walking right up to the Customer Service desk at the front, and asking, essentially “do you sell concrete blocks, and how much do they cost?” But the search results, amazingly, included no concrete blocks of any size or shape. Not pavers, or caps, no full-size or half-size blocks, adobe-look, dry stack… nope. Just glass blocks. 3 pages of glass blocks. 31 products related to glass blocks, a masonry saw blade, and some kind of resin-based paver tile.

Here’s how I see this kind of gross incompetence from a Web site’s search feature: I just walked up to the customer service desk at a big construction supply business, asked about concrete blocks, and got a blank stare and a bunch of irrelevant suggestions (“How about these lovely glass blocks?”).

If you run a business, would you put up with staff who treated customers that way? Of course not. If your front-line customer service people can’t provide basic answers to simple, common, easily-foreseeable questions, like “How much are concrete blocks,” you obviously either hired the wrong people, or you need to train them.

If your site’s search feature can’t provide reasonable results to simple queries, maybe it’s not the right search technology, or maybe you haven’t “trained” it right. Be sure your search feature can handle misspelled product names, for instance, and that it “knows” drywall and sheetrock are the same thing. This requires some customizing and configuring. But just like training new employees so they can represent your company well, it’s a wise investment, and well worth your time.

If you want to have some fun, try searching for “bricks” at the same site. One of the results is a LaCie “Brick” Desktop Hard Drive, but no actual red, clay, building-material bricks.