Posts tagged UX

Disclaimer: Ben’s “It’s the Little Things” post earlier today inspired me to write this.

One thing that took a little getting used to in my BMW 328i (E36), is the way the volume control works.

In all of the previous cars I’ve owned (Nissan, Subaru, Toyota) with both OEM and aftermarket sound systems, when you turn the volume knob on the dash the volume level is shown on the stereo adjusting in real time.

What’s the REAL point of that? 

For people with mild OCD we’re always trying to make sure the volume level is set at an even number – say 14 or 28. Some people need it to feel even “more even” at 10 or 20.

Everyone (myself included) is always trying to find the “right” sound level, often multiple times throughout a drive. You have to change the volume when your windows are down, when they’re up, when you’re on the highway, if people are talking, etc.

But are we adjusting the volume based on sound, or are we first adjusting it based on an arbitrary number we see on a screen, that comes close to an appropriate sound level?

My BMW does not display a sound level.

At first it sort of bothered me – it felt like something was missing.

Now that I’ve gotten used to it, I love it. When I turn the volume knob I use my ears to determine when the sound is “right” – not my eyes.

There are a few counterpoints that can be made, for example “I set my volume to 32 to this CD because I know it’s right and I set it to 27 for the radio. That way I can quickly adjust the sound to the level I already know is right.”

I’m not sure if BMW is still doing this in their current models, as they seem to be conforming more to the masses (e.g. moving the window switches back to the doors instead of the center position near the gear shift).

But I think BMW had it right – even if only for a limited time.

I’m not sure it will, and if it does, not for some time, but if 500px ever replaces Flickr it may cause a few problems. For me at least.

I talked about how I use both 500px and Flickr, back in February:

The way I see (and use Flickr) currently, is essentially photo hosting and backup in the Cloud. My Contact list isn’t huge, and it’s mostly comprised of a few close friends that have an interest in photography outside Facebook (outside of event photos for memory/keepsake). I use it to share my “good” photography with my friends and family that share my interest.

500px is the place I spend my time when I’m looking to be inspired. It’s a great place for constructive feedback, education, and networking. The people there (I’m talking about the users and the people that built the service) are passionate about photography.

I upload my “great” photography here to share with the best of the best. The website is almost intimidating at times, as it can be hard to upload my “great” photos to a place where my “great” is the at the bottom of the food chain. But it keeps me motivated. It keeps me inspired to try harder next time.

Ben Brooks just wrote a short piece about 500px, in which he mentions:

Fast forward to last week, with the arrival of my daughter, I needed a place to share photos with my family. I decided that 500px would be that place, not Flickr.

Now a week into really using the site I can see that this is the site I will be using for my photos. 

So here’s the problem:

I started following Ben on 500px because:

a) he’s become a good friend
b) he had some interesting photography on his profile (I particularly like his shot “Seattle”)

But after Ben posted the intimate photos of his super-cute new daughter, they ended up populating an entire page or two of the feed of the people I follow.

I mean this in the most respectful way possible – but that’s not what I wanted to see when I went to check the feed of the extremely talented photographers I’ve chosen to follow.

On Flickr or even Facebook, I’ve come to expect this sort of thing in the “recent activity” section of my contacts – but not on 500px.

I don’t want to unfollow Ben as I am interested in his other types of photography, but at the same time I don’t really want to see his personal photos all the time. 

I think it’s possible for 500px and Flickr to co-exist. Flickr is the place for you to put the photos from your family vacation – or the cute photos you took of your new puppy. 500px is the place to put the best of these photos. That’s how I see it at least.

The problem with this (and what I’m sure Ben would bring up), is that 500px offers such a better experience to its users. I can’t even choose my own thumbnail for a photo or set of photos on Flickr. That’s nuts!

The great thing about 500px is that I can filter out the “good” photography from the “great” by viewing their Popular or Editors’ Choice feeds, so I’m not THAT bothered by all of this. What bothers me the most still is how lame Flickr is.

If you’re into photography, you can check out my stuff on 500px and on Flickr.

After seeing Jim’s post about Kicking LinkedIn to the curb, I figured I’d mention another shitty thing they do:

When viewing someone’s profile (perhaps after they’ve applied for a job you’re interviewing people for), if you click on the “Follow @twitterID” button:

…it takes you to directly to Twitter and actually FOLLOWS the person.*

This just happened to a colleague of mine that was looking over the résuméof a job applicant.

He had to then unfollow the person – but not before the other person received an email notification and started following him! How awkward.

*also note that the button itself isn’t aligned nicely with the “Twitter” text beside it

Earlier today a friend of mine tweeted about The Verge’s post “Watch all 84 iPhone commercials in one place”.

When I opened the article I was expecting to see 84 thumbnails for iPhone commercials – instead, all I found was a short paragraph and one embedded YouTube video.

I looked around for the rest of the commercials and couldn’t find them.

I checked the two links “Apple’s” and “iPhone” in the first sentence, but they just linked to posts with those categories or keywords within The Verge itself.

I can appreciate SEO optimization, but not just for shits. Also, you never have two words beside each other linking to separate URLs – especially when the two words are possessive nouns like “Apple’s iPhone”.

I tried the third and fourth links too, same thing.

I knew it had to be somewhere, and finally found it from their “Source: Adweek” button, but that wasn’t a great experience was it? An average reader may have difficulty finding that, no?

The Verge has provided some great content so far (especially their “5 Minutes on The Verge” series), and I’ll continue reading it. I just hope they improve the experience for readers, even if it’s at the expense of SEO and traffic.

Speaking of 500px, they rolled out a new version of their website today, and from what I’ve seen so far it’s great stuff!

I first learned of Flickr’s upcoming makeover from Shawn King’s post on The Loop.

Jim links to Betabeat’s article “Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover” which provides more detail about the upcoming changes:

The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr’s uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.

Great, not a bad thing. But I really hope they start fine tuning the smaller things.

One thing that’s always irked me is the inability to edit the thumbnail for a photograph. I’m not alone on that one either, something that’s been asked for since 2007.

I’ve never spent much time browsing through other people’s photos on Flickr as the experience is just so underwhelming (contrast this with how you discover photos on 500px to see what I mean).

The Home view is also quite un-interesting. Some recent activity is displayed, as well as a few recent photos from your Contacts, but it’s just not done in beautiful way. And these are photos we’re talking about! What’s with the miniature thumbnails?

Where’s Flickr for iPad?

The iPad is a great way to share and discover photos – so where’s the iPad app? Again, 500px, a much smaller and younger company, already has an iPad app.

Flickr for the iPhone (when it’s working), is passable at best.

Why can’t I zoom in on photos (like every other image viewing app)? I understand if this is disabled for protected photos, but it should definitely be an option, especially when viewing your own images. I often want to save an image to use as an iPhone wallpaper but I’m unable to do so (you can save an image, but it won’t be high res., and if it’s a landscape photo that you want to use as a portrait the image quality will be reduced even further).

I’ve referred several family members to Flickr over the past couple years and they have all had a hard time using it. I usually defend Flickr, mentioning that I don’t really know of anything I’d prefer to use, but never with a comment praising them for their great user experience.

The way I see (and use Flickr) currently, is essentially photo hosting and backup in the Cloud. My Contact list isn’t huge, and it’s mostly comprised of a few close friends that have an interest in photography outside Facebook (outside of event photos for memory/keepsake). I use it to share my “good” photography with my friends and family that share my interest.

500px is the place I spend my time when I’m looking to be inspired. It’s a great place for constructive feedback, education, and networking. The people there (I’m talking about the users and the people that built the service) are passionate about photography.

I upload my “great” photography here to share with the best of the best. The website is almost intimidating at times, as it can be hard to upload my “great” photos to a place where my “great” is the at the bottom of the food chain. But it keeps me motivated. It keeps me inspired to try harder next time.

I don’t know their web statistics but I bet they have an extremely long average time users spend on the website.

Interacting with other people’s photos is great. You can “Like” a photo, giving the photographer kudos that’s public but also and private (it’ll alert them via email). You can also mark a photo as a “Favourite”, so that when you want to find it again you can, easily (it has other benefits as well obviously). 

When I come across a great photo it’s easy to see what else they’ve shot, and what equipment they use. If I like what I see I can “Follow” them, much like I could on Twitter. You can do this on Flickr, but it’s referred to as “Adding a contact”, which doesn’t feel as right. The word “follow” implies that I want to be kept in the loop, not that I actually know them. It feels sort of creepy to add someone I don’t know on a personal level as a contact on Flickr.

The two company’s have a very different focus and audience, but I think Flickr could learn a lot from 500px’s UX.

Why are images saved from Mail and Safari (or screenshots taken on the device) placed into the Camera Roll in iOS?

The Camera Roll album in the Photos application should contain the photos of people, places, and things you’ve photographed – not images saved from within the device (especially the screenshots taken with it).

With iOS 5 you can create albums on the device for images you save, or screenshots you take, but they’ll still show up in the Camera Roll.

It’s a bit annoying that the screenshots I take for work purposes (often containing sensitive information) show up in the camera roll that I jump to when showing a friend a photo I’ve taken.

When I’m writing a post in Tumblr and it exceeds the length of the writing box, this happens:

I can’t extend the writing box, and am therefore crammed into this tiny space to write in. Forced to scroll up and down to refer to different parts of something I’m working on, I’m annoyed and unproductive.

If I’m writing the same post in WordPress and reach the end of the writing box:

I simply stretch it:

*edit* Daniel Wajda pointed out that when you’re in the HTML view, you can stretch the window to any size.

^ this is great, but users that want to do things the easiest way (which is probably why they’re using Tumblr in the first place), it’s not possible to do so. 

Most of the time I find myself writing in the “easy mode” as I don’t need the power or flexibility of the markdown editor.

iOS 5 brings us a number of welcomed new features, including Notification Center.

Notification Center puts all of your alerts in one place (new email, texts, friend requests, calendar reminders, etc.). It also allows you to view stock information and the weather forecast. 

At first I enjoyed this new area – it even allowed me to stop using my weather app (WeatherEye). Soon, however, I realized that the weather in Notification Center didn’t provide me with enough of the information I was used to having.

When you slide down the Notification Center, you’re presented with the current weather:

A sideways swipe will then reveal the weather for today, as well as the next five days:

Now this is great, but there’s definitely tons of room for improvement. 

Here are a few things I’d like to see:

• slide again to see the following 5 days (for a total of a 10-day trend)
• slide one more time for hourly weather (this is important for planning things like a trip to the beach)
• a toggle to switch the location of weather displayed* 
• perhaps some other information like P.O.P., humidity, wind speed, etc. (this might be overkill though)

I know this widget is meant as something to quickly glance at for some basic information – it’s not a full iOS app. However, if enough weather information can be displayed here it’d save most people (on most occasions) from launching a separate weather app. Eliminating the need to launch a separate app saves the user time, ultimately enhancing the user experience.

*Tip: Currently the weather displayed in Notification Center will reflect the location you have “active” in the default Weather app that comes with iOS. If you launch the app and swipe left or right to a new location and close it, the weather in Notification Center will reflect your new selection.

I was hoping for a revamp of Apple’s Clock app with iOS 5.

One thing that really irks me is that the volume of an alarm you set will adhere to your “Ringer and Alerts” volume setting.

What if I want my phone to ring loudly when someone calls, but don’t want my morning alarm to wakeup the neighbours?

Here’s what the alarm edit screen looks like now:

And here’s my proposed tweak:

Simple.

Now I realize there are tons of third party clock apps that offer this functionality and more, but that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t improve theirs.

Dear LinkedIn,

Stop sending me useless, annoying emails, such as:

• “Ryan, 11 connections changed jobs so far.”
• “Ryan, 5 people have looked at your profile”
• “Top Headlines in Computer Software”
• “Reminder about your invitation from <FULL NAME>”

Just shut up.