Archive for the ‘User experience’ Category

Don’t make me wait!

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I wanted to check out details of the Futurism and Richard Long exhibitions on the Tate website yesterday. On the Tate’s home page there is a rotating clickable “splash” image providing details of various exhibitions and events. Much to my annoyance the details of the Richard Long exhibition were quickly replaced by other information. There was no way to navigate back to it so I had to start exploring the site to find what I wanted. To be fair there is an “exhibitions” link as well as a navigable events calendar, but to locate what you want you need to do a fair amount of scrolling and there’s no obvious way of sorting events.

Tate home page

I would have preferred to have had some way of navigating through the information on the splash image — for instance, some carousel-style controls or something along the lines of the BBC home page:

On the BBC home page, there are clear controls to change the splash image — they even tell you what you’ll expect to see.

The problem with the Tate approach is that each image displays for about five seconds. I counted six images, so that’s thirty seconds you need to wait if you want to take another look at something that caught your eye. One sure way to frustrate your users.

Gmail new features announcement

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

I logged into my Google Apps Gmail this morning and was greeted with this — an announcement of some new features:

New features in Gmail

I really like this approach — summarising the new features in a lightweight overlay with two clear headings: one announcing the new drag and drop functionality relating to labels and messages, and the second answering the question, “where did all my labels go?”. If you’re left in any doubt, the two diagrams nicely sum things up. There’s some clear calls to action in there too — the “Ok” dismisses the overlay and the “Manage labels link” allows you to decide for yourself which labels you want to appear on the left.

The functionality itself is quite interesting — it’s the closest Gmail has come so far to emulating the traditional folder set up found in many email clients. If you drag a message, it gets assigned a label and automatically archived, so it doesn’t appear in the main inbox. Gmail’s lack of folders has never personally bothered me; in fact I tend to find that using folders is quite often a short-cut to losing mail. Still, it’s quite useful when it comes to things like mailing lists which can quickly overwhelm your inbox.

A valid drop target is indicated via the label name becoming highlighted in inverse, e.g. white text on a blue background which is pretty intuitive. The tool-tip, “Move x conversation[s]” also changes colour to match. It’s less obvious when you choose an invalid target — in fact you get no feedback other than nothing apparent happening:

Valid drop target in Gmail

A valid drop target in Gmail.

An invalid drop target

An invalid drop target

Links round-up 16-22 March

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Not a huge amount going on links-wise this week, but nevertheless a few interesting ones in there.

Last week I got hold of Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil. They’ve published all their examples on Flickr which is a handy reference.

On Tuesday I checked out some of the buzz from the SXSW interactive awards. Lost Zombies was terrific fun — a project to build a Zombie documentary / drama via a community (what’s with Zombies at the moment? People love them — check out Survive the Outbreak too). Anyway, this is a really interesting idea, although one I imagine which might end up looking a bit like the film in Son of Rambow when the entire school starts to get involved if the producers aren’t too careful.

We Tell Stories, another winner from SXSW is a digital fiction site produced by Penguin. I love the idea of things like this, although there is a tendency for any kind of hypertext fiction to go down the “Fighting Fantasy” books route. If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about or were too busy talking to girls in the mid-Eighties, these books were adventures in which you got to make a choice of what you wanted to do at key points in the story (if you decide the kill the evil witch of Swqkssx then go to page 100 etc.).

On Wednesday I learned why the Japanese don’t like the iPhone (too basic for very sophisticated mobile users apparently, well, amongst other reasons). Moving forward to Friday I got back into serious Web Development land and started enjoying the wonders of CSS border radius (Firefox and Webkit only, naturally). You might notice a couple of rounded borders on this site, although I tried not to go too mad, difficult though it was. Also, I checked out a couple more typography and grid layouts site. Because you can never have too much of that kind of thing can you?

Saturday’s link was a only child and came courtesy of Twitter in response to me pimping my post about useful usability sites I’ve been looking at recently: Johnny Holland: it’s all about usability. A site “exploring the interactions of experience design” no less. All articles are written in the voice of the eponymous Johnny, so there you go. One I will be dipping into I should imagine.

So that’s it for this week. As always, these links are brought to you via the Internet and my Delicious bookmarks.