jducoeur: (Default)

Fascinating article here about Priority Guides, a UX design tool that they are presenting as an alternative to wireframes. The core notion is to focus on the content of a page, using a discipline that specifically discourages you from worrying about the visual layout in this stage.

Very neat food for thought, especially for Querki. It would probably be easy enough to build a lightweight Priority Guide Designer in Querki, to use for future design of the system, and I suspect it would help prod things in more usable directions. Indeed, if it works I might make it into an app/mixin for others to use...

jducoeur: (Default)

Do not make it too easy to send out a marketing email.

This lesson brought to you by today's advertising email from Audible (which I use avidly, and don't mind the ads). The entire content of the ad is, literally, "TBD".

jducoeur: (Default)

Sometimes you learn best from lessons of what not to do. In that spirit I forward on The Worst Volume Sliders Possible, a collective tour de force in Bad UX...

jducoeur: (Default)

(Rant mode on)

Seriously -- WTF, Google? Google Contacts is perhaps the most unusable piece of software I am forced to use, and it exemplifies everything that's wrong with Google as a company. They forced me into this idiotic "Contacts Preview" UI, and years later it still fails to fulfill the most basic functions of a contact list.

(Yes, I could abandon Google Contacts -- all I have to do is abandon Gmail. Suffice it to say, that's a tall order at this point, although I may eventually be pushed into it.)

The one that always burns my butt (which I just hit again, which inspired this particular rant) is the fact that there is no way to say which email address to use for someone in a group. Google loves nothing more than to combine your contacts, so that instead of having four contacts for four email addresses, you have one contact with four email addresses. But you don't put an email address into a group, you put a contact into a group, and AFAICT there is absolutely no way to say which email address you want for this particular group.

My impression is that it simply always uses the first-listed email address for that contact. But AFAICT there is no way to re-order the email addresses, short of erasing and retyping them! (And of course, in typical Google fashion, they completely ignore the fact that different groups might be different contexts, and call for different email addresses.)

About every six months, some recruiter from Google tries to lure me in. I try to be polite, but this sort of crass incompetence keeps leaving me feeling like I would never want to work for a company that would put up with nonsense like this. They're the anti-Apple: as far as I can tell, they simply don't care about the user experience enough to put the slightest damned effort into it. As far as I can tell, I would find working there to be incredibly demoralizing.

(Or, I suspect more precisely: they don't care enough unless their corporate case of ADD has latched onto this topic right now. In which case it gets huge attention until the company gets bored, and wanders off to pay attention to the latest shiny, dropping all effort to make the existing software function right.)

Folks constantly ask me whether they can trust Querki, which after all is a much smaller company than Google. This is my heartfelt rebuttal: while my resources may be slim, I care passionately about making Querki as good as it can be, and supporting the users. I don't think you can say that about Google for any products except search and advertising. Everything else is just another Technology Preview, to be pushed for a little while and then abandoned.

(Rant mode off)

As to the question at hand, I eventually found this article. The secret turns out to be contained in the comments down there: if you scroll the left-hand bar way down, and open "More", you can abandon the goddamn Google Contacts "Preview" (never mind that it's been the status quo for years), and go back to the old, ugly but actually functional Gmail-style Contacts. That UI actually works -- there is a way (easy to use, although with crappy affordances) to say which email address to use for a given group for a given Contact.

Which I guess just underscores the point. Google got distracted by a New! Shiny! UI!, pushed everyone into it, and then lost interest and never actually finished it. So the old UI is still hanging around, for those of us who care more about a product that works than one that follows the latest visual-design guidelines...

jducoeur: (device)
Anyone interested in the design of software (or anything, really, but particularly software) really should take a read through this short but correct article.

Its point is simple: software is often designed for (in the telling of the famous physics joke) perfect spherical users, who are all cooperative and well-intentioned towards each other. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that -- there *are* assholes out there. Not a gigantic number, but it doesn't *take* a gigantic number to mess everything up: the old adage "It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch" is nowhere truer than in the online experience. The proof is all over the Web.

I suspect Querki is going to get some pushback for some of its baked-in decisions, such as the fact that there is not, and probably never will be, a way to enable anonymous, unmoderated commentary. This article is a good outline of why: my consistent assumption is that a small but non-trivial number of the users are going to be bad actors, who are attempting to harm others or the service itself, or are simply assholes; the whole system is designed around that assumption. Dealing with that, and taming the resulting complexities, is one of its biggest ongoing design challenges...

Profile

jducoeur: (Default)
jducoeur

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12 34567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags