I ordered a cycling map from Transport for London today. I think the “personal details” section of their form could do with a little work. All the fields are mandatory, including title (Mr, Ms etc.) and phone number. If you don’t fill these in then you get an error message, although you’re not dropped back to the relevant section in the form to correct your “mistake”.
I’m struggling to work out why your phone number and title could be in any way relevant for the delivery of a free cycle map by post.
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.
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.
I noticed something interesting (well, interesting to me) about online map user interface controls the other day. I was planning a walking trip on the South Downs Way and found a website that had a handy draggable map. Nothing too out of the ordinary there so far.
But, this one quickly had me tearing my hair out due to its completely counter-intuitive controls: if you click and drag to the left, the map moves to the right, drag it down and it moves up. I double-checked with Google Maps just to make sure I hadn’t totally lost it, and yes, sure enough, this is a reversal of standard controls, as much as they exist. Take a look at these videos and compare and contrast:
1. South Downs Way interactive map behaviour (I’m not sure who produced this software)
2. Google Maps behaviour
But, the first one isn’t actually as daft as you might first think, it just uses a different metaphor. Google Maps (and Yahoo, and just about every other online map tool I’ve used) use something like a concept of a standard map on a table top that you stick your hand on and drag: drag it down, and it moves down. On Google Maps, the pointer turns to the image of a hand when you click which emphasises this metaphor. The South Downs map however, puts the mouse in the role of the walker. Hence if you go forward, the landscape moves behind you; go left and it moves right (kind of).
Clever as this is, I can’t see it catching on. Not only does it break with the convention of other online maps, it also contravenes the standard direct manipulation controls of just about every other software package I can think of.
Incidentally, I looked at Yahoo Maps for comparison, and to be different they reverse the zoom in / zoom out control compared to Google Maps. Just to be different I guess, but this is still very annoying and for me, counter-intuitive. In fact I find Yahoo Maps in general a little clunky — I’m sticking with Google for this one I think.
Yahoo maps: reverses the position of zoom-in / zoom-out. The scale indicators (”Country”, “Region”, “City”, “Street”), although in principle useful, just got in my way.
