Archives for posts with tag: web
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eBay: Transaction Status Icons

May 21, 09 //
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An icon without a label is inexcusable. I can hardly believe this one, it’s such a blatantly awful mistake, and such an easy one to fix. See these icons?

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They’re lovely images, actually, but I have no idea what they mean because they lack tooltips on hover. So, cart. Someone’s going to buy it? Someone’s already bought it? What? I never quite figured that one out. Dollar sign is easy enough: Money has been exchanged. The box? Shipped? Received? Nope: it means “Shipping label printed.” Star with a pencil? Write something? Written something? At least the next one, the star with an envelope gives some clue. They’re “Feedback left” and “Feedback received.”

Why did I have to think about that? It’s not the user’s job to figure out your iconography, certainly on a web page, where fixing the problem involves nothing more than adding title="This picture means this thing" to the link tag. Epic fail.

Quickie: Unintentionally awesome CAPTCHA

April 19, 09 //
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Survey: Name the Broken Picture Telephone fail image

March 30, 09 //
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Twitter’s got the Fail Whale; There’s the Sad Mac. What clever name should this thing get? Leave your suggestion in the comments, and we’ll have a poll with ‘em in a couple days.

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Twitter: Silly error message

March 30, 09 //
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When does friendly become patronizing? One of the better innovations of the Web 2.0 movement has been to bring a friendlier, more conversational tone to instruction and error message copy. I agree with 37Signals, who make the point in Defensive Design for the Web (which should be mandatory reading for anyone in web UX, btw) that sometimes this colloquial style is inappropriate, and backfires by being patronizing instead of friendly. Here’s a good example I came across the other day:

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First, Twitter is “stressing out” all the fucking time lately, so while I’m not surprised by this message, I’m irritated by this vague sentiment, which immediately brings to mind some old shitty clip-art of a guy sitting at a desk, chewing a pencil, with a three-foot-tall “In” box (go on, you know the one I mean). Suddenly, I’ve gone from sympathetic to pissy, since the only reason I’m given is a human emotional state applied to a machine.

Better: Be informative, be specific, be honest. How about “Sorry! In order to improve overall performance, we’ve temporarily disabled this feature. Contact support if it’s an emergency.” See? Still friendly, but useful and (most importantly) apologetic.

Save the charming, whimsical tone for the sign up process, when you’re trying to win my business. Fail!

MacHeist: Atrocious, extraneous visuals

March 30, 09 //
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Apparently, MacHeist is from a planet where they don’t have the phrase “tone it down.” Just look at this:

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Are your eyes bleeding yet? Mine are. Now, I really like MacHeist; it’s a fun idea, and I’ve bought their bundles (and will probably buy this one). But this design is just so, so terrible I couldn’t help but rag on it. Now, it’s certainly not ugly, but is so overdone, with every possible Mac cliché and whiz-bang useless feature they could cram in. The icons zoom on hover (like a Dock, or something, I guess). The next/back buttons show big icons (since, I guess, the huge grid of icons dominating the page isn’t enough). Elements use shadows and border radii (that, of course, are only coded for WebKit). Everything has a single URL, since the main content area slides in. There’s more, but I can’t stand interacting with the site any more.

The worst part, though? The page comes in at an astounding 2.2 megabytes. I shudder to think what their bandwidth bill is.

Next time around, let’s hope they take the most important OS X UX lesson to heart: less is more. For now, Fail!

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