I absolutely love most of the work of Squared Eye. So much attention to detail and lovely designs, I always love that. They even went as far as to provide us with two awesome looking case studies based on two of their works – lovely, lovely.
I often use one of their sites, PatternTap.com, to find design tidbits and get inspiration when designing a widget (since I don’t have my LittleSnapper library with me when at work). Most often than once, I found myself trying to search / browse among the stored screenshots for a specific style.
PatternTap provides two ways of filtering images: by tags and collections. I haven’t had much luck using both. Let me explain why.
Are those all?
First of all, when clicking on one of the options above, you get a nice sum of relevant keywords. I always find myself wondering, what, that’s all? Are those all the possible tags that people used? Are those all the possible collections of all users? For some weird reason, this way of showing stuff does not convince me that it’s accurate.
Alphabetical? Reverse Alphabetical?
Are those tags / collection names sorted? If yes, how? I’d prefer it if they were presented in an alphabetical order, I wouldn’t have to scan the whole list to make sure the tag I look for is not included.
Collections without Images?
Some collections I’ve tried (namely Borders) yielded zero images in expected results. How can that be? Why is the collection there anyway if it’s empty?
Dude… wait, what?
Users are notorious of their short memory. Then how come there’s no indication whatsoever of the sorting filters I’ve used in the next page? The breadcrumbs only say, Collection / Sort. Yes, sort, but sort by what? There is a (wise) Reset button, but no obvious way to see what you’re resetting. You have to re-open the Tags or Collections menu to see what’s selected and what’s not.
Plus, uhm…
A tiny “no results” bug!
I may be nitpicking there, I don’t design better than those people but I found those flaws while using their site, not while admiring their work. It’s just some issues that could be easily resolved, in my humble opinion, leading to an even better service.
I don’t read Gizmodo, but I stumbled upon its new (?), threaded commenting system today.
By paying a bit of attention to the way Gizmodo comments are designed, I encountered some flaws.
The notification rows for new replies under the comments are nice and big. They are also placed quite close to the original comment, a method that uses the idea of proximity to simulate relevance. So far, so good.
Nevertheless, they could use some more love: when opened up, the actual comment loads into another “module” (box), so the sense of proximity is ultimately lost and the user’s attention is fragmented between three different blocks – all parts of the same discussion. It gets worse with more replies – check it out:
Plus, why must a user click on either the linked “X replies from” or the author names or the nice big plus icon? For some weird reason, there are two links at the same phrase – both do the same thing. All of the row should be clickable – big shiny happy clickable areas, remember?
Another problematic aspect is the actual reply to comment form.
When the user clicks to add a comment, she’s presented with a threefold list of ways to reply – one of which (Facebook) is disabled for now. Then why even bother add it to the list? It only adds clutter to a supposedly simple thing as a comment form. Just add a tiny notice there somewhere, that Facebook comments will soon be supported, and tada.
Moreover, I’m sure that most users leave comments as guests – why not load automatically the guest comment form then and lose a click? Plus, after the user has chosen a way of commenting, lose the humongous list – it’s not needed anymore. Add a “change mode” link and give the user the chance to go back and choose another commenting method. Simple as that.
Also, what does the “Start a new discussion link” do anyway? I click it, zilch.
OK, enough ranting for the start of a month as productive as October. Have a nice autumn creativity boom, people!
I don’t actually read Motley Fool, but I recognize it can be a good and sometimes fun resource for investors, plus it has a pleasant design that for the most part, shows real attention to details.
So I was browsing around this Sunday morning when I was hit in the face with this:
Notice what’s wrong? No bail out option. No close link, no no thanks button, escape key does not work, nada. All that in the form of a pesky overlay that hides the content. I tried the “Click Here” button to no avail, as you see. I had to reload to be able to read the article below.
I can understand the practice of this, I cannot accept it, though. This is not the way to go to convince people to subscribe in a content site – and to be frank, I don’t think that Motley Fool actually needs this kind of stuff.
Thumbs down.
motley fool, overlay, usability, content
