I love BrightKite.com. I’ve previously marvelled at its witty login screen, which shows a, well, log. The recently released iPhone app is very polished and one of the most beautiful apps I’ve used on the iThingy.
But I don’t really agree with the placement of the action buttons in its “Pending Friends” page.
As you see, the buttons are blaced on the top right of the requests boxes. Which is fine when there is only one request, but if the requests pile up, they get seriously mixed with the next request and you may actually find yourself approving a request you didn’t intend to. I did.
A traditional placement on the left, right after the request info, would be more straightforward in my humble opinion. Plus, to better distinguish between the two actions, I’ve left the “Approve” button and converted “Ignore” to a link, like this:
After all, you’ll probably end up approving the request, eventually.
The vertical space required gets bigger with this, but I think it’s a good trade between usability and beauty. To reduce this vertical height, I’d remove the three lines of explanatory text next to “Trust this friend” – this is the kind of help that can be easily wrapped up in a tooltip.
Just some subtle changes that have a nice impact on usability.
one comment on this post
Dmitry #1
22.Oct.08
Very nice redesign. The logic of putting the buttons on the right was probably to make them stand out from the rest of the content — so if you wanted to quickly approve friends you can easily locate all the buttons because they’re away from content like that. Your design is definitely more logical though and flows nicer.
I like the idea of differentiating approve and ignore. What you could also do is make them both anchors and use custom button graphics or just a padded link background with two different background colors — green for approve and red for ignore. That would make it even clearer.. though it’s probably an overkill.