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Wednesday, March 25 2009
Dear WhitePages,
Your “suggested locations” dropdown and region searching are broken.
Eg, I want to find “City GPs” in Wellington. As I type “Wellington”, the first suggested location is “Wellington Central”. Aha! I think. They are indeed in Central Wellington.
However, this search yields no results. Neither does “Wellington City” or “Wellington CBD”, even though they are at the city end of Willis St and definitely would be in both those regions. Only plain “Wellington” gives me a result.
To add insult to injury, the suggestion when there are no results is to “refine my search”. But “Wellington CBD” IS more refined than “Wellington”.
At this point, your suggested locations feature is actually more useless and more annoying than if it didn’t exist at all. Either get rid of it, or make your subcategories work as expected.
Yours sincerely
Stephen
Tags: usability ~ catalyst ~ misfeature
Sunday, March 22 2009
The other day I was reading Ryan Tomayko’s blog and I got inspired.
Ryan wrote the Kid templating library which drives this blog, and is quite the Python/Ruby hacker. He also has a very minimalist design. Its principles are outlined here.
With hypertext, the information itself is the interface. The content takes center stage while the chrome and tool areas are placed in the back-seat. This inversion of priorities has created as big a leap in interface innovation as the first graphical user interfaces did to the terminal based applications before them.
And yet, these fine attributes of hypertext are regularly subverted. Since the web’s inception and subsequent boom, people have been trying to get around hypertext’s “limitations” as an interface medium: first with Java Applets and Active X controls, later with Flash sites, and today with Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms. There was a time when sites were authored with the goal of preventing the vertical scroll-bar from ever appearing! The goal is always the same: invert the web’s superior content-oriented interface back to the GUI era and allow for the types of administrative debris so common and accepted in desktop applications.
I have applied them over on my other channel. (I also made a bunch of other improvements, like per-tag RSS feeds, and better 404 handling.)
I often have rude things to say about other people’s usability, so it feels good to get my own house in order. I am interested though in whether there such a thing as best practice design for blogs. For example, are “recent comments” widgets useful? Should you have whole articles rather than excerpts on your home page, and if so, how many? I don’t know, but I’d like to.
Naturally, this blog is still untouched and looks like pus; in fact owing to changes made for the other channel, it’s worse than before. This will not be the case for long.
Tags: usability ~ burble ~ ryan tomayko ~ catalystYour victory dance is a sign of failure
Friday, November 02 2007
Every now and then, having wrestled with some particularly annoying problem and won, I do a victory dance, in the manner of Snoopy.
Having figured out a trivial but time-consuming problem with Alfresco configuration files, I was in mid-cavort when colleague Christine pointed out that in a better world, there would be no victory dance, because things would Just Work.
This is true. If your software makes me do a victory dance, it’s bad.
Tags: software ~ usabilityUsability, or, Physician, heal thyself
Tuesday, October 16 2007
Burble has a nifty comment spam preventer, the details of which need not detain us here. But anyway, the spam-resistant comment process does require an extra step. This is partly to fool robots which mindlessly submit and then go away, and partly so I can do some magic.
I had Iabelled the buttons for the three steps Preview → Save → Confirm. That matched my mental model and the labels I had given these steps in my head.
A little log file inspection revealed that a couple of people had abandoned comments at the Save step. And I realised that by using the word “save” I had given the impression that the user’s comment was already persisted at the second step (it isn’t).
I have fixed the button labels to reflect what’s really happening. They are now Preview → Confirm → Save. And lo, now I have comments.
Tags: burble ~ usability ~ web developmentRendered at 2010-03-14 07:10:08