sugarenia.com

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.