sugarenia.com

I admit it: I’m a sucker for the current version of Cnn.com. I can almost find no flaws - it’s clean, it’s crisp, it’s sexy and it works.

Recently at work I had to do some research on video sites and I stumbled upon a feature that most video sites have in common: the playlist.

Cnn.com treats playlists simple : all videos are presented with a red “add to playlist” link, which you can (oh gods) click to add the respective video to your list. Populating your playlist it’s just a matter of seconds - you never leave the page and you can always see what’s in and what’s out.

I found a different approach in Wmur.com. You can find playlists there too, but to add a video to it, you have to drag and drop it in the box denoted as “Playlist”. Hmm…

I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t really like this approach. First of all, asking your user to drag from an area and drag to another is kinda risky business - the user can always misclick or lose her selection and get frustrated. And we don’t want frustrated users, do we?

I’m not against the method per se, dragging and dropping is an awesome method that can prove itself useful in a handful of situations, it’s the mechanism of this particular feature that bugs me. Why ask the user to drag (aka make a move with his mouse) when he can just click? What with users using no mice? Mobile devices?

In addition to that, there’s no real feedback informing you that the addition to your playlist has been done successfully. Maybe a small and simple relative image overlay on the video would help the user identify at once which of the videos presented on the right have been added to his list.

Two different approaches of the same feature. My point is - we need to simplify things in web and interaction design in the future, if we want our sites and services to age well. Cnn.com will age well, Wmur.com has not.

wmur, cnn, wmur.com, cnn.com, video, playlist

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm by Sugar and is filed under Accessibility-Usability, Critiques, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.