birdie&chick

iOS Product Strategies – an honest discussion

Like the “settling fat” concept.

Why WSJ Mobile App Gets ** Customer Reviews

A wealth of info, really interesting to hear confirmation of my hunch that users prefer to interact with the first “top” option on the screen.

More on the 90-9-1 rule for social design, which is relevant for anyone thinking about including a discussions or forum in a application.

Since I’m not in the cool kids club over at Dribbble, I thought I’d start posting snapshots every Tuesday of cool new design projects I’m excited about.

So without further ado, here’s a few peeks of the new internal analytics we’ve been hard at work building.

Without the constraints of worrying about what browsers users would be using, I really went all out here with CSS3, and I *love* the end result.

* and yes, all the data above is totally lorem ipsum.

A few weeks ago, I along with many other people noticed a bizarre experience change to Gmail’s default view.

So, I know iterative design is essential in modern companies.

And yes, I know that Google is infamous for testing “the hell” out of every proposed feature change.

But for the life of me, I just can’t wrap my head around why the Gmail team did what they did here.

Here’s a quick before and after if you didn’t notice the changes or don’t use Gmail.

The previous version looked like this:

And here’s the new version:

According to the Gmail Blog, these changes were implemented to improve the layout and make it easier to get to Contacts and Tasks. However, by putting these features in a sub-navigation (along with the now strangely double selected Inbox, (Inbox = Mail, no?) they actually made it more complicated for the user to visually locate action points, and it highlights the real problem hiding out in the left-hand column.

So what’s the real troublemaker here? It’s that sneaky Compose Mail button – most probably the most clicked on button / link on the whole page.

Let’s step back and think about email for a moment. It’s pretty basic right? What does a user need (or want to do) when they visit their Inbox? A high-level list of user actions would probably be ordered something like this:

#1 – Read
#2 = Write
#3 = Sorting (Priority, Labeling)
#4 = Search
#5 = Contact Management – Contacts
#6 = Task Management – Tasks, Calendar

This is probably a bit simplified, but honestly, that’s really all I want out of my email client.
Going back to the Gmail inbox, you can see how someone might have problems finding where to perform these basic functions. All actionable UI elements are either gray or shown in the same colour, and no element seems to have precedence or priority over others. It’s in short, a wash of options on the screen. Don’t get me wrong here, folks. Gmail is functional. And Gmail is popular with millions of people. But changes like these highlight the “Bob the Builder” mentality prevalent in engineering-heavy companies. Over time, interfaces can become crowded and noisy, leaving users fumbling over basic tasks.

How could Google make this a bit better without changing everything?
Here’s where I’d start. First, let’s nest Sent, Drafts, and Spam under Inbox and add + to the left of the Inbox label that would allow you to hide those three views. Next, let’s REMOVE that extra Mail at the top and place Contacts and Tasks under our new compact Inbox. Phew! Already feels like you can breathe!*

Finally, I’d take our often used but hard to see Compose Mail button, and place it on the right-hand side of the inbox area next to the page count. I’d even suggest (gasp! horror!) making the button a real button with some colour and heft, to make it stand out properly on the screen.

I know these changes will never happen, but a girl can pretend, right? (especially after I accidentally hit that “Compose mail” button a few more times)

* You could even take this a step farther, and try nesting the labels under the Inbox, and fix the misaligned View More (33 more, etc.) toggle.

I’m working on a redesign of B&C, so please be patient with me while I push the pixels from A to B.

I just wish a bike like this could make it up the hills in SF!

Posted via email from Julie’s posterous

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

via thevaderproject.com

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

The Tangerine POP Browser Circa 2000:

It’s a tough argument, because I know that most users (including my current ones on the site that I work for) absolutely love having themes, and want every rope and pulley be available to customize. The problem is, once you open that door, it’s all downstream from there (at least as far as I can tell).

So – how can you possibly retain design control of your product or site when your users have customized and themed it beyond the point of no return? Should we offer themes or the ability to design your own theme at all?

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

After getting yet another reminder from Microsoft how they’ve “listened to your feedback” and “improved your Hotmail experience”, I was inspired to do the following 10 second Photoshop hack.

Before

After

I seriously can’t believe how Microsoft has managed to take a user experience that was already years behind most web based email clients, and somehow make it worse.

Last week, I was sorting through the increasing amount of random friend requests on Facebook, and I started thinking about how adoption rates seem to be changing.

Overall, it really does appear that the types of people who joined Facebook earlier versus the types of people who adopted MySpace or even Friendster are quite different. This may have something to do with how Facebook was originally marketed, but I’m not sure. For example, someone from my high school was on Facebook quite early on, but was never on Friendster or MySpace.

Conversely, a good chunk of the (forgive me) scenester/elitist/early adopter crowd I know from either my Boston or NYC networks have not joined yet. Network fatigue? Perhaps. But perhaps not, and I have a hunch.

For awhile, I wondered where the hubs would float to, given Gen X / Gen Y ’s high aversion to blatant advertising and the continuing aesthetic (and functional) decline of MySpace into AdSpace. I thought Virb was a clear winner, at least for the music sub-culture types, but it failed to stick.
And now, there are thousands of social networks (if not millions) but few grabbed the core hubs of early adopters in the way that a few message boards and Friendster did a few years ago.
So where are we going next? Nowhere, actually. The past year has seen the rise of “micro-blogging” and the birth of the personal feed, like Twitter, FriendFeed, and even the site I work for, Widgetbox, which lets people create content or take a part of the web and place it anywhere they want. The New York Times Magazine wrote an article this past Sunday which introduced the term “ambient intimacy” to describe this constant stream of personal data that we now absorb on a daily basis. (Indeed, we refer to our users’ experience on Widgetbox as “ambient findability”) It’s a great article, but it mostly follows the rise of Facebook’s Newsfeed from a teen’s perspective, and doesn’t offer much in the way of predictions, except a somewhat hokey quote about kindergartners being on social networks someday soon and how scary it was that they might stay connected digitally to everyone they meet in their lifetime.

So what’s happening now is that we (the web enabled) are in the process of defining our personal data streams. That, combined with microformats like XFN will change the way we interact with larger networks. No longer will you sign up to a site and create a profile, you will instead simply link your feed to that community, and interact with it in a much more targeted manner. It will become harder and harder to be “anyone you want” on the internet, as your feed will need to be your true identity as compared to what others may create regarding you. And as Veronica Belmont and others have pointed out, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain “long-format” blogging. And in time, I imagine these feeds will start to have hubs, based on core groups of five or six people, and in some cases, one very highly linked person. How these hubs will be displayed visually is yet to be determined – it may build off our existing blogging platforms, or it may become something totally different. We’re not quite there yet, (give it another year) but my hope is that the web stays a beautiful place to be.