sugarenia.com

…because in the end of the day, people you love come through your door and you know, you just know, that you’re really not the stuck up ambitious bitch you think you are, you don’t have to anyway, you’re just a girl who likes to dance and is still scared of lightning and would give it all up anytime for a small house with a big garden in the countryside.

I’m the worst freelancer in the world.

I wish I was one of those industrious web designers that can work for a focused 4 hours and produce small miracles, but alas, I am not. I never was. As I’ve already explained in My (totally) Paranoid Way of Working, design is such a heart-wrenching procedure for me, I sometimes wonder why I chose to do this for life.

For over a year, I’ve been going around claiming to be a freelance web designer and I had no real portfolio to show. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I worked my derrière off in numerous projects throughout 2010 and I had nowhere to showcase them. On a whim, I created a Behance.net profile and started populating it with my work, but it never felt right.

During all this time, I kept working on it, on and off, based on an elusive idea I had in early 2010, an idea that said I should divide my work into two separate fields: design & content. I liked that idea a lot, however, I never found enough time to really put my soul in it and I kept pushing this particular to-do list to the bottom of my favourite GTD app.

So my portfolio design lagged. And lagged. And lagged some more. Pressing deadlines and client projects always got in the way. My own perfectionism, always a huge problem, whispered in my ear all the time that if you gonna do it girl, you must do it well.

All in all, it got me over a year to put together something that could be done in a week or less.

But I don’t really regret it. Working on this thing for so long has given me the luxury of sweating over small details that I wouldn’t normally sweat over (for example, how to create miniature Safari, Coda and Mail.app windows for the different kinds of work I’ve done).

I can now safely say that a huge burden is off my shoulders. I have a place I can call home, where I can properly showcase the projects I work on.

In that sense, Sugarenia.com was so worth the wait.

Thanks all known (and unknown) suspects for keeping up with my whining and nagging me to finish this thing.

Hat tip to all of you for the warm welcome. Now, if you want to hire me, you know where to find me.

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.