I’m on Facebook. I’m not that active there, but I use it sometimes to stalk learn more about the cool people I meet online.

For this ranting, I’m gonna use Petros’s profile, because he’s a cool guy and I know that he started working on github some months ago. He also went on a trip to San Fransisco! How cool is that? I wanna see photos of that trip. How difficult can it be?

The mysterious case of Facebook photos

That’s Petros’ profile page, complete with goofy avatar. I see some random photos on the top strip, but I wanna see all of his photos. On the left sidebar, there’s a (6) right next to photos – so I guess there’s only six photos of him on Facebook? Puzzled. I click on it.

I don’t see 6 of anything, I just see two sections – “Petros’s photos” and “Photos and videos of Petros”, I guess posted by other users. That’s twelve thumbs, so I guess the (6) metaphor got lost in the way.

Let’s start with “Petros’ photos”. The six albums shown seem fishy – I know there must be more! There’s absolutely no other indicator for that, only a tiny link on the top right with a label “See all: Photos”. So there must be more, right? If you click on a link, you’ll see that there are more, indeed. sigh

Anyway, back again. There’s another link to see all videos by Petros. Video’s cool! Let’s click on it.

Nada. My question is – why have a perfectly normal link to something that doesn’t exist? Make it grey. Add a (0) indicator. Remove it altogether. sigh

Underneath that section, there’s “Photos and videos of Petros”. Well first of all, which of them are videos? You guessed it, there aren’t any, eventhough the title hints to it. And there’s a cryptic link on the top right that says: “See all Photos”. I click on it – nothing happens, except that the link text changes to “See all Photos and videos”.

Excuse my french, but what. The flying. Fuck.

Why so unusable?

There’s no question that Facebook is huge. Their developers and designers are hard-working and I understand their struggle to keep up with millions of users every day.

But they should get theis grip together and properly address the gaping UX holes they created over the years.

The whole situation is foul and dangerous. Not for the future of Facebook per se, I couldn’t care less about that – plus, people don’t really care about usability when they stalk their exes or poke random blonde girls.

I consider it dangerous for the future of all web applications though, and for user experience in general. I can already see a full generation of people, hardly ever using web services apart from Facebook, sitting baffled in front of perfectly functional design patterns because they learned it the Facebook way.

Naysayer? Maybe. Pissed off? Definitely.

And I didn’t even touch the “tiny 11px Lucida Grande font” or “horrendous new photo viewer” subject.

Last night, while I was walking towards home, a stranger felt up my derrière.

Thought you misread? Let me rephrase: while I was returning home last night from my weekly trip to Stelios‘ place for our podcast, a random man on a scooter approached me, slowed down, grabbed my bum and drove away.

Here I was, thinking about wireframes and workflows and a Mac app, when suddenly I felt a hand on my ass.

What. The. Fuck.

My first (and only) reaction was shock. I just stood there, totally speechless, and watched him leaving without as much as a shout.

At first I thought I was stupid for not screaming. Then I thought, maybe it was someone I know. But then, I don’t keep grab-yo-bum relationships with anyone apart the boyfriend™, and even he wouldn’t dare to do that in plain sight, while I’m walking alone at night.

Then I realized what happened. And I felt like shit.

Do you know what’s worse? I momentarily felt guilty. I thought – hey, maybe my jeans were hanging too low. Maybe they were too tight. Maybe I moved too much while walking, do I do that really? I must stop it, then, it’s provocative. That stupid female remorse that’s wired in our brains.

I’m not big on feminism and I’ve been quite vocal about it. I think it creates a huge divide between the two genders that’s uncalled for. If we, women, want to be treated as equals, we have to start behaving like we are. The whole thing seems a bit whiney to me.

But one jackass in a motorcycle helmet managed to lessen me and my big mouth to pulp.

That prick.

The subject is touchy. Therefore I won’t tolerate jokes in the comnents. In fact – screw it, I’m closing them off completely for this post only.

Dear Wikipedia,

don’t do that.

Users act by habit. Yours is a search-based service. You moved the search box (the single most-used element of your design) from the center left to the top right. You have a fluid design. People love 24” or even 30” monitors.

Do the math.

It’s a wonder users haven’t started a riot yet. If I were a hardcore Wikipedia user, I’d have started one for sure.

OK, I exaggerate. But you should have got used to it by now.

It’s my lunch break. I enjoy my lentils, while idly surfing around YouTube. I find this new hip-hop promo by the greek band Stavento. I hate greek music but Stavento is a secret crush of mine, plus they feature this amazingly beautiful and talented 16-year old. So I click on it.

I’m watching idly till I stumble upon the most awkward product placement I’ve seen recently. Like the porn flashes embedded to normal movies by Tyler Durden, it makes me cringe.

If you’re really anxious to see it, scroll to 2:45, up until 3:00.

Whut? NIVEA skincare products are now a trend between young, fashionable tweens? And they carry them around in their pockets? Who knew?

Seriously, who approves this stuff?

I hate to point out flaws. Seriously. I get disappointed when I do so because my New Year’s resolution was to be as positive as possible this year. Plus, I’m no perfect myself.

Alas.

So I will speak with facts for this one. No sarcasm, no bitterness, because I respect people’s work. I’ll leave the conclusion to you.

I’m firing up GMail to see that I got followed by the greek department of Tribal DDB, @TribalDDBAthens. Hey, nice! Tribal decided to go social. Since I love hearing about new campaigns and advertising website launches, I follow back. Curious, I click on the link given in their Twitter profile.

Gonk. First hit. Website doesn’t work without the www prefix – as expected by naïve me, even if mr. @hakmem disagrees. It’s just a small thing though, someone mistyped the link while creating the profile, so I go on typing the www, eager to see the site.

Website welcomes me. Well thank you! Quite minimal though. Searching for a menu or something that looks navigational. Woot, a button! It’s in greek and labeled “Client area”. I’m not a client, zilch. Paying more attention to the copy, I realise that it asks me to visit the international Tribal DDB website and select “Athens” from its menu. Whut? I’m a bit unhappy about that. However, I’m determined to find more about their work so I click anyway.

Link doesn’t open in a new page, that’s good. Yay, the site looks similar, I like consistency. Searching for the “Athens” link the greek website told me about. Nowhere to be seen and still, nothing too navigational there, only a bunch of gold copy that’s about awards and not linkable. It’s nice that they’re so successful, but I don’t really care about awards. I’m itching to see work samples. Where are they?

After some seconds, I realise that there’s an enter site link on the left. Sighing on that (and on the “This site is designed for 1024×768″ text on bottom), I click on it.

Damn! A new window. Bleh. It seems that they’re using Flash for their site, but I’m prepared for that, many advertising agencies do. Grinding a bit my teeth I click on the ClickToFlash banner and wait for the loader to finish, thinking the actual website is about to launch. Wrong. That’s an intro.

See that “Skip intro” link up there? Yup, me neither. It’s so pale over the white background it’s painful to look at. And I can’t click on the actual intro to go on. I decide to wait it out and after some (precious) seconds, voila! The actual website.

Now, that “Athens” link. Playing a bit with my mouse over the ever-revolving city list on the left I find it. Wait, what’s “Health” doing between Hamburg and Helsinki? Is there a city named “Health”? Never mind. I click on Athens.

Things are loading. That ever-revolving city-something list on the left is still moving – why? I’ve already selected a city. It’s starting to become too annoying but I’m blocking it out. My aim: work samples. Their menu: that.

I only have 1.5 or 2 degrees of myopia and I still have difficulty reading those menu options. Nevertheless, I click on Work. Meanwhile, the box that’s directly on the left of the menu keeps rotating empty blue cells. I wonder why for a brief moment but then I just click.

Yippie! The interface got larger, at last! Will see some screenshots. I see another revolving carousel and some lonesome logos. Naturally, I click on the carousel, on a thumbnail that tickled my fancy.

The text isn’t selectable but that’s alright. There’re some screenshots for me to check out, but they’re scaled down. I try clicking on them to see if there’s a bigger preview available, nope. I click through the available screenshots but I can’t see a thing. I click on the “view the site” link to see it in all of its glory. Yay! It works. Hmmm….

OK, back to the site. That’s a case study, so there’re three tab things with more info. I see the idea. I click on “Service” but I don’t find anything interesting. On clicking “Result” though, I get some interesting stuff…

“Undefined” alright.

So I leave this to you, dear readers: what do you think? Should I feel satisfied by this web experience? Did I achieve my aim? Did I learn something about this company?

I did. A lot more than you can imagine.

No amount of social media presence can fix a broken web image. Sure, you have a strong brand, a successful company, many happy customers. But seriously, this? I expected better, Tribal DDB.

So. The iPad. Cool, eh?

What, you don’t like it? Think Jobs under-delivered in his keynote? Thinking your tiny Dell netbook can do all that and more, even if you have to crouch to look at the screen and glue your hands together to type?

Yeah, I know. Tablets with full 9.7 inches of ultra-sensitive touch screens are so common nowadays. I mean, these things can even play HD video without crashing their way to reboot, yeah, that’s common too. And the interface? Pssssh, I’ve seen Excel worksheets looking better than that iCal view. And all that starting from $499? Gee, what were these guys thinking.

Seriously, people, get a grip. I don’t know what kind of mystic arcana you believed Jobs would unveil in his keynote, but really, are you that close-minded to think that the iPad is common and overrated? Have you seen many tablet PCs nowadays that look and function as cool and intuitively as the iPad looked in that intro video?

And don’t get me started about the lack of Flash support; seriously, who cares¹. Oh I know – Flash developers care. Look, my fellow developers, I admire your skills but seriously, seriously, don’t you ever think that maybe it’s the time to expand your skills a bit if you want to hop on the bandwagon?

Most developer complaints I’ve heard are based on the loose axis of “yeah I know I could do that and more with Cocoa, but I’m confident with my current set of skills and I don’t want to learn Objective-C”. This is wrong and you know it – this is as if PHP developers absolutely refused to dabble on Ruby & Python because they’re “happy with their current set of skills”. We’re called developers for God’s sake, don’t you think we should develop our skills every now and then?

The iPad is not made for you and me, fellow geek. It’s primarily targeted to people that are still afraid of interacting with PCs, those that don’t have a clue about drivers and web apps and Wi-Fi setup. And this is exactly the kind of people that won’t buy a Linux netbook, dear Open Source zealots – because as much as Ubuntu has made Linux user-friendly, there’s still much filling that shows between the seams.

One could argue that I’m a total iPad fangirl and everything above is the fruit of my utter fangirlism, but I assure you, I’m not that much of a fanatic cookie. I’ll probably don’t even buy the first generation iPad. But I’ve seen people getting it so wrong on the interwebs these days that I’ve collected a massive amount of ranting fume.

¹ Yeah, I know Farmville fanatics, you’ll have to stick to your netbooks to sow your corn, but I don’t really care about you to be frank.

After 3 years of heavy twittering (with a brief pause of some months – seriously, what was I thinking), I have familiarized myself with most of the service aspects, developing some kind of unwritten Twitter laws.

People don’t take well my Twitter presence at times, so I’ve decided to make a post about it and share: am I a bad Twitter-er people? Do you do these things too?

Without further ado, my patented unwritten Twitter laws™:

• If you follow me and I don’t follow back and you’re absolutely pissed (there are some people who still do that), try to reply at some of my tweets in a coherent, non-jackass way. Fat chances are, I’ll eventually follow you.
• An e-mail containing your follow data arrives in my inbox. I always check your twitter page and do a bit of mini-stalking (apart from obvious spambots). If your twitter stream is full of titles + links, you fail. If it’s full of replies to other people, you fail. If you don’t have an online presence, anywhere, you fail. If you have a link to your facebook account or (God forbid) to your twitter account (endless loop anyone?), you fail. If your twitter stream is protected (seriously?), you fail again. If, however, you express coherent thoughts, no matter the language, no matter the subject, you’ll be likely followed back. It helps if you’re kinda hot too, in a steamy geek kinda way.
• You’re absolutely appalled by my Twitter activity and you decide to unfollow me. If your life or work isn’t spectacular enough to keep my interest in you, don’t expect me to stay a follower of you for long. It’s not a matter of revenge: when I follow someone, it’s because a) I admire their work or lifestyle b) I’d like to know them better (that’s more suitable for Greek twitters). If you decide to unfollow me, you don’t want me to know you better, so if I don’t really admire the things you do, poof! I’m gone too.
• Contrary to some predictions, you can make money off Twitter (or social media, as the cool kids call it). Not directly, I’m not DELL. But most of the freelance jobs I’ve been offered were based on Twitter interaction. I consider this a huge success for my Twitter presence and I don’t really care I have yet to reach 1000 followers.
• I’m all for conversations for Twitter, but please. Not lengthy ones. Don’t expect to draw conclusions from Twitter, it’s not for solving complex geopolitical problems – it can give the hints to transfer the conversation to some other medium though (thanks @stazybohorn).
• I’m perfectly fine with you posting links to your latest blog posts on your Twitter stream. Some people are complaining about this, but I’m not. Since I rarely (if ever) fire up my feed reader, it’s a nice way to let me know of your new posts. I’ll definitely check those out.
• What’s highly annoying: littering a perfectly coherent tweet with inline hashtags. #this is not #cool, #people.
• What’s highly annoying #2: auto-tweeting apps. Think gowalla, foursquare and the like. For the record, I’ve used a command-line hack to filter my Tweetie stream of that jargon. You can find it here. (thanks @olrandir)
• Yes, I’m greek, but I tweet in english. I also blog in english. In fact, about 80% of my online presence is in english. Why? Because english is a simpler, more techno-friendly language that reaches to billions of people, and not just some thousands. I’ll always reply in english, except when what I want to say has only meaning to greek followers (that will probably be a reply to someone though). Case study: this joke tweet reply.
• Fact: even if I respect your work, if you’re a cold elitist bastard at Twitter, you’ll always be a cold elitist bastard to me.
• Personal reminder: you can’t DM people that don’t follow you. You can’t DM people that don’t follow you. You can’t DM people that don’t follow you.

Hm, I think that’s all for now. Feel free to add your own pet peeves, usage patterns and unwritten laws.

God I love Twitter.

Flickr credit: directfromcannes

I’m gonna confess something to you, dear readers.

I try too hard not to be a pirate these days. Really.

And by pirate, I don’t really mean trying hard not to talk like lovely mr. Johnny Depp. I’m finding myself more and more trying to find legal ways to get access to music that I love.

One of my latest loves conveniences is Spotify. Really, it’s a music lover’s dream come true, such a great app and great potential. I’m more than willing to pay those 10 euros each month to have access to music I love – but I can’t. Why? My country copyright laws don’t permit it.

I’d also probably pay for movie and movie rentals through an interface like iTunes store. Same story. I can’t.

It does sound insane, doesn’t it? Willing to actually pay (even indirectly) companies to listen to music legally, just because it all gets so convenient and direct after all.

But companies and company policies, being the absolute pain in the ass they are, don’t let me.

How delightfully ironic, if I may say.

All my legal self can hope for is a similar to Spotify model for the iTunes Store, also available to Greece. Some kind of monthly fee with unlimited access to music. Now that, hell I’d pay! Especially for bands and people I love so much. Portishead. UNKLE. Archive. Placebo. Muse. Thievery Corporation.

Till then, sorry chéris, I’ll find other ways to get access to great music and buy illegal Spotify passes through e-bay, alright.

A great pic by juhansonin

Warning! Silly post ahead.

You really think you can get anyway with just being a designer / developer in real life and be done with it?

Think again.

‘Cause you’re utterly wrong.

What today (a vacation day, mind you) had in store for me:

• Placed an online order for my dad and sis new PC because of course, I know better about this stuff.
• Created some fancy photo slideshows for Michael, as I’m the lucky one having a Mac which makes creating all kinds of cool stuff a breeze.
• Responded to my little cousin’s questions on why I can’t help him install cracked games on his brand-new PSP. Try explaining firmware downgrade to a kid and then come back here and tell me “pff”.
• Was patient while family was bugging me again to call Tellas support and ask for a technician to come and check our faulty line. Did not make it today, will probably call again tomorrow.
• Ordered online a slew of tickets for my trip to Paris (ouch, pocket).
• Sent about a gazillion e-mails concerning various pending stuff that must be completed before my vacation.
• Wrote a stupid post on having too much on your head on any given day.

All that in just a few hours. And my job title is (supposedly) Web Designer. What?

P.S. Some uncle will probably call me and ask my opinion on his new fancy ironing board sometime soon, I can feel it.

Today marks the first day of the smoking ban in Greece, at least as long as public enclosed places are concerned.

I won’t go too much into that. I’m definitely pro-ban. I just want to say this:

It’s sad (not to mention pathetic) to see all grown-up people acting like my 9-month old niece when I take one of her toys from her. I’ve seen drug addicts with better attitudes than some of the smokers out there (and I mean it).

If you’re in a closed place and you smoke between non smokers, you suck. If you moan and whine about the smoking ban in everyone around, you suck and you don’t have anything exciting to do with your life. If you decide to follow the ban but light a cigarette in an enclosed place as soon as you see another one do this, you suck and you have absolutely no personality.

Will this ban have any kind of luck in Greece? Probably not, because we’re one of the most dont-fucking-care-about-others nations in the whole wide world.

But some people have got to learn to play by some rules, someday.